Neil, continued

Tributes keep coming... 

Here's one you should really read - a loving portrait from his close friend Simon Price, full of details and stories I never knew. For The Quietus.

Update February 1st: lovely extended meditation by Cam Scott on Neil and specifically his book Eastern Spring: a 2nd Gen Memoir . Here's a mix Neil made to go along with Eastern Spring. 

David Stubbs directs Kulkarni fans to a classic installment of the Chart Music podcast, in which Neil rails against the turn-to-shite of Melody Maker in the final years of the '90s, late period Britpop, the infamous "Craig David" cover, etc. From about 35 mins in...  

David's Gofundme for Neil's daughters has just topped 40K - an amazing testament to the love and respect he inspired. Contribute if you can.

Neil's colleagues at The Wire have assembled a medley of his pieces for the magazine across 20 years of being a contributor.  They have also published what may well one of Neil's last bits of writing - they invited him to pick - and comment on - his own favorite pieces written by other people from The Wire's vast archives.

Apparently there are plans afoot for a Neil Kulkarni anthology. Below are a few links to classic pieces that are already online - some of them rant-mode and some just passionately perceptive about music he loved. 

Neil lays into the Ten Most Overrated Albums in Pop History - guaranteed to be something here that'll get your hackles rising. 

Neil in dialogue with Rudy Tambala of  A.R. Kane around the time of the One Little Indian singles anthology (which reminds me that I've still not read his sleevenotes to last year's Kane box A.R.Kive - can anybody help me out here?)

Neil's series  A New Nineties, about the groups that have come to be known as The Lost Generation - i.e. first-wave UK post-rock. For The Quietus:

introduction / Main

Disco Inferno

Insides

Pram

epilogue / other unmissable albums / rant about bands making music that is "unforgivably British"

He also did a follow-up Quietus series about the US end of the "New Nineties", worth looking for although some of the groups, the appeal always eluded me I must say. 

Here's a couple of pieces Neil did on Marc Bolan and T.Rex 

A piece around a Pulp reunion tour, celebrating the band and what it represented

Neil with Sleeper (and all indie) and Kula Shaker in his sights. And damning Ride with faint abuse.

Via Nick S in comments, a clip of Neil blasting Oasis on the Chart Music podcast

Neil as Coventry native remembering local boy Terry Hall.

Neil on Auto-Tune-glitzed 'n' spritzed dancehall

Finally, a bit of Kulkarni meta-talk... Neil was fierily eloquent about music journalism as a vocation, the point and purpose of criticism, how to do it right.... often this would come out by implication, a sort of photographic negative, in his tirades about the shite that the latterday NME was trying to foist on the world, famous feats of fight-picking that riled up the guilty parties no end. But here at Drowned In Sound, is one of his positive articulations of How to Do It and Why To Do It. 

from rapture to rupt: the journey of Seefeel

It was a really really nice to chat with Seefeel's Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock - for the first time in, fuck me, decades - about the just-out-now reissues of their Warp era music: Starethrough, Succour, and the (okay technically on Rephlex, same difference!) maxi-EP / mini-LP Ch-Vox, which are available separately as vinyl but handsomely conjoined as the 4-CD Rupt & Flex, and in all formats come bulging with unreleased or barely-released goodies. 

 Here at the Warp site is my Q + A with Mark & Sarah covering the whole history of Seefeel from the Too Pure phase through Warp to the dispersal. 

Some of the absolute greatest music of the 1990s, but u kno dat. 

Strangely although the group featured in two of my back-in-the-day pieces (Ambient as 1993 Buzzword, and the first post-rock feature, in '94), this is the first really in-depth interview with Seefeel I've done - and I learned a lot.