reading matters: bloggige roundup

Matthew Ingram has been on a bit of a tear of blogging recently at his several active blogs. 

At Woebot, there's been thoughts about Eno's own thoughts on technology and politics, and about music and AI, and a sweet photo blog about a trip to Margate by bicycle.  Oh and I almost forgot: a cool post about Mike Oldfield and Virgin Records, triggered by an old (well 2014) Mike O doc on YouTube that Matt recommends.

At Sick Veg, he enthuses about a particularly nutritious grain and flour. 

And best of all at Hollow Earth - which I didn't even know was a blog - Matt has a lovely recollection of favorite animation from his childhood. This is prefaced by a run-through of some of his own work as animator (most of which I was completely unaware of, with the major exception of his Vitamin C film).  

Fascinating stuff about the raw techniques used by Bob Godfrey for Roobarb and Custard. 

Surprised by his abreactive feelings about Bagpuss: Smallfilms's Firmin and Postgate are celebrated instead for Ivor the Engine. 

Because of our age difference, I only have vague recollections of some of the other cartoons-for-kids that Matt rates, such as Paddington. 

Matt closes with some good thoughts about how this relatively crude analogue-era animation lead to  outcomes far more magical than the slick seamlessness afforded by digital technology: 

"What unites all the British animation of this period and my own scruffy work could be summarised as: everyday settings, whole films made by a few people (in my case one person), handmade models or hand-drawn imagery, animation breathing life into the inanimate, and fundamentally a demand being placed on the viewer's imagination."

The old skool animators understood "the gratification of labouring on something, and through that labour literally bringing things to life."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

And here's some more notable bits of recent reading:

Michaelangelo Matos at Beat Connection has a cool post on the New Romantics (which I blog about here)

Mark Richardson at Beauty Blew A Fuse has some sweet thoughts about Erik Satie, Harold Budd and Aphex Twin. 

Geeta Dayal gives the Adele Bertei book No New York an interesting mixed review at 4Columns. 

Doubling back to animation, John Coulthart at { feuilleton } has a nice post about an animator I love, Piotr Kamler 

Me own flesh-and-blood, Kieran Press-Reynolds the Remorseless Writin' Machine has written about  twenty things since I last posted about their output.... But their most recent effort is this Rabbit Holed column on a genre that rejoices in the name Hardtekk and is all bound up with looksmaxxing and edits on TikTok etc. 

Over at The Quietus, Tim Burrows has a nice piece about the film he and Simon Poulter have made about Mark Fisher, titled We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (in which I appear briefly as a disembodied voice) 

Torpedo the Ark's Stephen Alexander has a post amusingly titled You Are Reading a Post About Making A Film About Mark Fisher - although at the time of writing he had yet to see the film, it's triggered by an article on Fisher and the doc at The Guardian. 

Promising new blogger Mister Magpie with a bunch of essays worth checking out, especially the one on Grouper. 

Neat post by musicologist Ethan Hein on The Band's "The Weight" - a song I loved as a child, oh-so-precociously recognised as different in atmosphere and gait from everything else on the radio (it was a medium-sized hit single in the UK, would you believe!). 

Talking about Canadians... as already noted at the Retromania blog, Split Infinities has a very interesting and evocative piece about Boards of Canada - written and posted shortly before, but now uncannily in synch with, the "are they returning or not" hoo-ha of recent days...  which deploys concepts like "Corduroy Psychedelia" and "PBS unconscious".

Great mix by DJ Food aka Kevin Foakes weaving together BoC and their source material + lodestar coordinates 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Good lord, talking about nostalgia, as BoC inevitably involves...  this post is itself some kind of flashback to the olden golden days of blogging, when people linked each other and commented and kept the whole collective enterprise bubbling onwards in synergistic-symbiotic incestuous group-mind fashion... 

Well, not quite: I haven't coughed up much in the way of substantive commentary on most of these blogposts, but.... it's the thought that counts, eh? 

Reading Matters

A couple of things to read:

Kieran spends a "messy evening" with Bassvictim, whose music is one of the rare things he's alerted me to that I actively enjoy, but who sound rather alarming as an interview experience. 

And then this mega-post from Matthew Ingram at Sick Veg which is not just something else worth reading but a gateway to an enormous number of other things worth reading. 

In the tradition of his 100 Best Records and similar epic sweeping-survey bloggerations at Woebot and its precursor blogs, this is an inventory of non-fiction books that Matt read while researching his trilogy of linked books:  Retreat, The 'S' Word and The Garden.  Organized into categories such as Psychoanalysis, Eastern Philosophy, Self-Sufficiency, Acid, Anti-Psychiatry, Beat, Agriculture, Communes, Permaculture, Anthropology, Tibet....

Actually, inventory is the wrong word: the Sick Veg 100 is the distillate of, or extremely selective selection from, the two thousand  books he read -  the nutter that he is! An obsessive after my own heart, Matt, but with a capacity for research and filtration that far exceeds my own. 

This is one of the handful books on the List that I own - and, naturally, I haven't read it.  

(Theodore Roszak's work is so important to Matt that he actually has his own category in the List.)

My rate of reading has slowed down grievously. I must have at least 400 never-even-opened or started-but-got-only-a-little-way in tomes lying around the house in neglected piles. (And many, many more in naughty PDF or epub form).

Supposedly having lots of unread books is the mark of the true bibliophile (was it Benjamin who said that, or Eco?).  But this seems like an odd way of loving books - not reading them. 

Not counting all the text I consume on the internet, reading seems to occupy a smaller and smaller portion of my waking hours. Which is sad to consider, given that, outside of spending time with beloved people, reading is probably my greatest pleasure - perhaps even more so than listening to music. 

As a child, I could read several books a week. I would burn through the stuff. Such that rereading was a big feature of my life. Certain books, or book series, would get read three or four times. 

What is to blame for the eroded capacity? 

The obvious things: the computer, the phone, the immense amount and range of television and film available in the domestic space nowadays, YouTube...  The kind of everyday places and phases of down time that would once involve reading a book or at least magazine - commuting, using public transport, waiting in a queue or for an appointment - you will now reflexively fill up with phone scrollige. 

The desire to read is there.... but things seem to get in the way.  I'll have four or five books on the go at once, but make tortuous headway with all of them. 

I finished the Gormenghast trilogy - but it took me over a year.

And there's a sense of time running out. 

Which then creates an almost voluptuous feeling of sin when you succumb to the temptation to reread a favorite, knowing all the while that there are thousands and thousands of books out there you should be reading.... hundreds in the house alone, already paid for or otherwise acquired... 

Rereading is never a completely empty, reiterative act of nostalgia - so much that's contained in the beloved book you will have completely forgotten. New details in the text will be noticed for the first time...  fresh perspectives emerge through accumulated life experience or different knowledge... 

Still, it feels deliciously indulgent, a dereliction of duty. 

For instance, I quite fancy picking up Titus Groan again... 

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

This is quite a long-running series, now! 

Not talking about the When Mates Make Books posts, of which there are countless, but specifically When Matts Make Books. 

Matthew Ingram has done a bunch, the prolific bugger that he is: the two blog compendiums The Big Book of Woe and  The Bumper  Book of Woe; the 1970s Lost Rock Albums monograph; his first print book Retreat: How The Counterculture Invented Wellness; and then The "S" Word,  a collection of writings about spirituality in alternative music. Not forgetting the graphic novel TPM.

And now here's the sequel-not-sequel to Retreat  -  a book about  the nexus of counterculture and horticulture - that comes out in the first week of April:

The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture

The Garden explores the transformative journey of the 1970s countercultural farmers and growers whose radical practices redefined how we grow and eat today.

Countercultural Roots: Chronicles how a generation influenced by psychedelics, Eastern philosophy, and reactions to Vietnam, the Oil Shocks, and DDT sparked a deep interest in sustainable farming.

In-depth Exploration of Influences: Covers movements like the organic food revolution, Permaculture, back-to-the-land initiatives, radical ecology, and the impact of thinkers like Rudolph Steiner on 1970s communities.

Impact on Today’s Agriculture: Through interviews with key figures, The Garden reveals how these visionary growers, often without farming backgrounds, pioneered alternative agriculture and influenced modern sustainable practices. 

A Legacy for the 2020s: Highlights the enduring impact of these farmers, providing inspiration for today’s efforts to reconnect with nature and rethink sustainable living.

Perfect for readers interested in organic farming, environmental history, or the cultural legacy of the 1970s, The Garden tells the untold story of how counterculture reimagined food and our relationship to the earth.

Endorsements:

"I admired Retreat. Fluid and intelligent and... I could go on! The new Matt Ingram is even better... With The Garden, Ingram recuperates an even more transgressive gesture: the counterculture's attempted rethinking of our first culture, agriculture." - Jay Stevens, author of Storming Heaven

"The idea of gardening and farming as acts of revolution and dissent may be unfamiliar to many of us, so it’s great to have Matthew Ingram’s brilliantly readable book celebrating the unexpected ways that individuals, communities, and movements have, simply by growing their own food, found green-fingered ways to stick it to the man.” - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, River Cottage

"Matthew Ingram has not only investigated a huge amount of material and talked to many people, he also has an ability to bring it all together in a way that makes sense and is fun to read." - Charles Dowding, No Dig

“Matthew Ingram has done all of us who care about ecological growing and a better world a big favour in this compendious but highly readable history of the gardening counterculture and its personalities. His in-depth, warts-and-all account of these past efforts will be endlessly informative for new generations wrestling with the demons of agricultural change, cultural change and climate change in our present, sobering times.” - Chris Smaje, author of A Small Farm Future

"A fascinating and detailed account of the extraordinary people prepared to counter the march of depletive systems. Matthew Ingram beautifully describes the alarm bell ringing for hippies and far-sighted visionaries prepared to stand up for soils and sustainable practices. The Garden sheds light on the characters and events that have shaped the use of our land. For those of us searching for sustainable solutions to complex and overlapping problems, this book provides forgotten information and lessons from the past for the dilemmas of the present and the future." - Ian Wilkinson, FarmEd

"Matthew Ingram has preserved and enlarged a corner of history which few have visited or are even aware of. He narrates, with the page-turning excitement of a mystery novel and the first-hand accounts of those who witnessed it, a pivot point that had enormous implications. If we get through the converging crises of this decade, our future will be profoundly better as a result of the shift he describes." - Albert Bates, The Farm

Buy it here

There's a book launch  - open to the public, just register at the link - taking place at the Onion Garden in SW1 on Tuesday April 8 6.30pm

I've not had a chance to give it a proper peruse yet but I do know that Matt's gone at the subject with his usual deep-diving passion. 

Here’s a piece in tandem with the book that Matt wrote for The Quietus in the subject of compost https://thequietus.com/interviews/things-i-have-learned/great-compost-tips/

And another on getting back to the land

Here's a mix Matt made of thematically attuned music and here are liner notes for the mix at Sick Veg. As he notes: 

Both “Retreat” and “The Garden” have large discographies in the back. This forms part of my mission to reconnect people’s interest in this music with the ideas to which it was originally conjoined. These ideas were what gave it its power.

Sick Veg is a think tank and grow lab that he's started, whose areas of investigation include  Agriculture, Community, Ecology, Food, Growing, Health, Nutrition, Organic, Practice, Regenerative, Soil, Spirituality, Therapy, the Urban, and Wilderness.

It's also a blog. And crikey, he's been posting there for a while now - images, videos and micro-essays. I had no idea. 

Here's a nice one on the gardens of his childhood. 

There's a YouTube channel as well! Flashback to the days of woebot.tv

As of now there's just the one video up there, about Stewart Home's book Fascist Yoga. 

And here's a new one, "Imaginary Landscapes", on the paintings of Charles Pryor

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

 

It's out! Matthew Ingram's new book The "S" Word: spirituality in alternative music, is ready to order. 

Self-deprecatingly, Matt describes the tome as "very geeky" and "for music geeks only". But in fact anyone who is interested in music's capacity to engender higher states of consciousness and its  association with the devotional, the transcendent, the sacred, enlightenment, mysticism, magic, trance, etc, will find this a fascinating read. 

I was pleased to offer up this morsel of endorsement:  

“Intensely researched, latticed with surprising connections and correspondences, these essays expand and deepen our awareness of the links between music and the numinous. The "S" Word is an illuminating book about illumination.” 

Contents-wise, there's several epic essays already aired on Matt's blog but now only to be found within these covers (meditations on Eastern Philosophy and The Cosmic Sound, Psychic Pop Relics, Dub... paeans to Neil Young and Mark E. Smith) plus a previously published profile of Chris Blackwell. But more than half the book consists of new writing: a staggering 18,000-word exploration of New Age music (very expansively understood here), a paean to Prince, a whole chapter dedicated to Roedelius of Cluster / Harmonia renown, and a treatise on Tibetan recordings.  

The "S" Word is available universally as an eBook but residents of the United Kingdom can also purchase it in the gorgeous solid form of a 255-page book copiously illustrated with colour photographs.  Terms, conditions, and prices are be found here at the Woebot site long with more information about the contents.  

WHEN MATES MAKE COMIC BOOKS

 

On a bit of a creative tear at the moment, Matthew Ingram has just published a new tome - a graphic novel / comic book entitled TPM. 

It's funny and eerie. Subtly unsettling. And beautifully drawn - the body postures and expressions of the characters, the composition of scenes, the interior and exterior backdrops, bear the distinctive Ingram line. 

Without wishing to give away too much of the plot, it involves a company whose specialty is psychic marketing a.k.a transpersonal marketing (the TPM of the title).

Without wishing to pin it down too much, TPM feels like it belongs to a mini-genre of "uncanny workplace" dramas. (Severance would be a recent example).  

Someone really should take TPM and turn it into a TV series or a long-form animation. 

You can read more about the genesis and inspiration of this latest Woebot masterpiece at Matt's blog - it's fascinating stuff, emerging as you might expect from the research into the nexus of spirituality, health, and the counterculture that led to Retreat, and to Matt's imminent publication The S Word that combines his recent blog epics with new essays.

You can buy a  hard copy of TPM direct from Matthew by sending money to Paypal address alias@hollowearth.org. Prices for one copy as follows: 

UK Standard: £13.61 Tracked: £18.79

EU Standard: £16.30 Tracked: £21.17

USA Standard: £19.46 Tracked: £23.91

It can also be bought via Amazon, where this is also a digital Kindle version on offer 

WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS

A couple of goodies here: a very old and very good mate with a new collection of his own writing, a more recent and very good mate with a collection he's conceived and corralled of other's writing. 

                   

Matthew Ingram has a new book out soon that pulls together his recent spate of extended essays exploring the connections between music, spirituality, health and the counterculture, and adds some all-new long pieces on New Age and Prince, plus a profile of Roedelius. Keep your third eye trained on the Woebot blog for news of  The "S" Word's materialisation on this plane. 

Asif Siddiqi has written a bunch of tomes on the space race and matters cosmonautical, but out in just a few days is his first foray into music books: One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song. Edited by Asif and published by Routledge it's a collection of 16 essays corralled around a focus on a single song, track, piece, or unit of recorded sound. Artists include Le Grand Kallé and African Jazz, Moby Grape, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, X-Ray Spex, Prince, Neil Young, The Replacements, NWA, Salt-N-Pepa, Hanson, LCD Soundsystem and MIA; contributors include Oliver Wang, Esther Liberman Cuenca, Helen Reddington, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Gina Arnold, Amy Coddington, Susan Schmidt Horning, George Plasketes, Gabrielle Cornish and Asif himself. And I'm in there with a piece on Donna Summer's "I Feel Love". 

Release rationale: 

The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces—cultural, aesthetic, and technical—the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience....  Arranged chronologically in order of release of the tracks, and spanning nearly five decades, these essays zigzag across the cultural landscape to present one possible history of pop music. There are detours through psychedelic rock, Afro-pop, Latin pop, glam rock, heavy metal, punk, postpunk, adult contemporary rock, techno, hip-hop, and electro-pop here. More than just deep histories of individual songs, these essays all expand far beyond the track itself to offer exciting and often counterintuitive histories of transformative moments in popular culture. Collectively, they show the undiminished power of the individual pop song, both as distillations of important flashpoints and, in their afterlives, as ghostly echoes that persist undiminished but transform for succeeding generations.... 

put a finger on the weird

Epic essay-post about Mark E. Smith from Matthew Ingram at Woebot. 

It's titled Hip Priest and is tied into Matt's ongoing research into spirituality and the counterculture, with prisms such as psychedelics, mental illness, the paranormal, and mysticism applied to the work. A mighty meaty read. 

Funnily enough I was toying with writing something about The Fall, but from a completely other angle. 

bloggige

Underway at Aloysius, a thoughtful series of posts exploring the sorts of spaces and ^scape routes that electronic music opens up (electronic music taken as everything from Luc Ferrari and Francois Bayle to Aphex Twin and Psyche). The series starts with Creative Mode On,  establishes Music As Diegesis,  enters Zones Without People,  gets Super Hostile vs Super Docile , traces Palimpsestscapes, and today contemplates Vanishing Visions and Unknown Memories.  (And here, already is another episode: Transfigured States).

Opening statement lays out the terrain -  "the internet makes a sort of engagement with music possible that’s incredibly expansive in its reach yet utterly introverted in its nature" - and subsequent posts unravel the implications of this tendency toward sonic solipsism combined with infinite extension of the listening self, examining different modes of listener projection (embodied performance versus nonhuman expanses) and so on. As well as analysis and speculation, there's also some terrific synesthetic evocations, e.g.

"Right out the gate you’re assailed by an industrial-machine drone of suffocating pressure. Layers constantly fade in and out, but through these changes in color and intensity this force never dissipates; at times it disconcertingly resembles the human voice. At intervals it lets up for just long enough to allow various species of feral mechanical creatures to burst in, snapping and barking in their own dialects. You soon find that these chrome and gunmetal hell-creatures are capable of accelerating into near-unfollowable flashes of violent, unpredictable movement.... Through all the fluctuations that follow, you never get more than a few seconds to relax; even at its most subdued the piece bristles with tension and inhuman malevolence. On three occasions, descending swarms of nanobots envelope you then evaporate into trails of steam." 

More tasty bloggige - Woebot with an appreciation of Neil Young that takes issue with the widespread viewpoint that "his bruising, ragged, noisy rock music" in the Crazy Horse mode is the good stuff and the more tender, plaintive side is sappy and commercially pandering. There's fascinating stuff about Young's medical history and psychology I didn't know... as you'd expect Matt folds ol' Neil into his ongoing preoccupations with health, spirituality and the counterculture, acclaiming him as "the pre-eminent psychic and spiritual musician of our times". 

Because he's been in the news as a culture-warrior of late, I recently found myself playing Young for the first time in.... quite possibly a couple of decades actually. And I think I largely agree with Matt's take. The full-blast Neil w/ Crazy Horse live experience was one of the most purely powerful rock shows I've ever experienced. But I've never once returned to Arc-Weld after the first and only play. While excited to pick up Live Rust on vinyl cheapish back in the '90s, it never became a regular listen like Rust Never Sleeps itself. That said, probably my faves, the songs I would go back to over and over, combine the pained plaintiveness and the ragged rawness: "Powderfinger", "Cortez the Killer", "Southern Man". 

chasing the virus / chasing the divine

Over at No Bells blog, here's a piece in which genre epidemiologist Kieran Press-Reynolds tracks and traces the mutation and proliferation of new audio variants - nanogenres with names like sigilkore, slung, dariacore, murder metal, maplekore, hyperplugg. Even someone like myself - triple vaxxed with scepticism, ears shielded with N95-like taste-filters - finds his diagnosis compelling. 

In the '90s, folks liked to talk about the dub virus. Which never made sense to me - why compare something sacred and healing to little bitty entities that wreck your computer or make you feel like shit? Dub and roots makes you breathe better, it rebalances your system. Here's a luminous-numinous piece by Matthew Ingram about his lifelong love of dub and the music's connections to his latterday concerns with health and spirituality. There is also a Woebot in Dub mix, #3 of a series (here's 1 and 2).

One my favorites (a Woebot turn-on, in fact) and as a good a reason to believe in God as any I can think of. 

New Forms

                         

                                Check out Matthew Ingram's cool new street art project.

                                 A short film about it entitled Forms can be watched here. 

Christmas bloggage treats

 Unexpected after-Xmas treats from blogger-authors!

Blogger-author Matthew Ingram a.k.a. Woebot reappears with an extensive, rich, attractively illustrated post about recordings that relate to the spiritual concerns of his 2020 book Retreat:  How the Counterculture Invented Wellness. Many surprising inclusions (e.g. Wire's Pink Flag as Zen Album).

Blogger-author Phil Knight returns, after a long silence, with The Interregnum Navigation Bureau, a new blog. It's a space for exploring Phil's declinist view of history and assessing the epistemic / epistemological traumas of this Age of Disintegration - "the stresses and strains that are presently distorting and corroding what was until fairly recently a broad consensus of reality" - the endeavor no doubt feeding into his current work-in-progress. (Or should that be work-in-regress?)

WHEN MATTS MAKE BOOKS

                                     


In a couple of weeks, an old and very good mate is publishing a book that has been a passion project for the last several years, involving an astonishing amount of research and trips to far corners of the world. 

That mate is Matthew Ingram, a.k.a Woebot - and although he's put out a pair of compendiums of brilliant bloggage, and a tasty monograph, it would be fair to describe Retreat: How the Counterculture Invented Wellness as Matt's first book proper. Published by Repeater on July 14, the debut does not disappoint. Here is my blurb: 

“This richly researched archaeology of the counterculture places health at its core, showing how ideas of healing and therapy were inextricably bound up with the era’s spiritual longings and erotic politics. Each chapter scintillates with surprising revelations, unexpected connections and startling insights”

More info about Retreat and further endorsements can be found at the Repeater website. 

As part of the build-up to publication, Matt has broken out of blog retirement to post a long and probing essay on Woebot, not so much a preview of the book as a side-bar to it - on the relationship between music, Eastern philosophy, spiritual equilibrium, cosmic vibrations, "bliss consciousness" etc. 

Read it here while also listening to this fabulous 2-hour mix of astral sounds Matt has especially prepared for your elevation. Tracklist here. 

Lots of revelations in the mix, here's a couple of that particularly glisked my third eye: 





Not on the mix, but the tune-writer's own version:




Met Mr. Budd a year or two ago, on the streets of South Pasadena (Geeta knows everybody)


                                         

                                                                   The author holds forth...

Woebot calls it a day / Ekoplekz keeps on keeping on

 Woebot winds it up with a compact final statement: the Woebiotic EP.  

 

With this vinyl 4-tracker, Woebot completes a circle, or a near-circle. No guitar; barely any voice (it appears on one track, heavily masked by vocoder, such that it's barely detectable as voice). No songs or lyrics. Instead, four electronic instrumentals, mostly made using analogue synth. 

But it's not a complete return to Automat and East Central One, because there's little in the way of  "appropriative collage" going on here (if there are any samples here, they don't announce themselves as samples).  Woebiotic is basically an IDM record. This is the Woebot who's the world's #1 Black Dog fanatic. This is the Matthew Ingram who penned a surprising appreciation of Autechre in a recent issue of The Wire.   

The first side, featuring "Nothing Is Happening" and "Blogger," faintly recalls early Mike Paradinas or the Analord series (it's a very un-digital record, in fact). But it also vaguely brings to mind BEF's Music for Stowaways and the early Human League (those hissing hi-hat sounds, like sculpted bursts of pink noise).  Better still is the second side, containing "Rain" (which could be a great lost track by LFO or  XON) and "Tolls", with its etched-out-of-ice bell-tones and piercing threnodic tingles.

As the titles indicate, the mood overall is pensive and somewhat glum. Appropriate for a valedictory release, maybe, but probably there's more going on that. On the EP's paper insert, the song titles come with explanatory / evocative descriptions:  "Nothing is Happening" ("deflated rave opus"), "Blogger" ("diaristic alpine dirge"), "Rain" ("english monsoon season") and "Tolls" ("for thee").  This is electronic music for withdrawn inward contemplation, not gregarious getting-down. 

Matt himself says the EP is based around the notion of  "the electronic home studio as a kind of neural network...  McLuhan-ish ideas about how nerve signals are electronic... I'm fascinated with the way in which analog synthesis works by mimicking the way that the vocal folds work."

The e-communique announcing Woebiotic a few week ago closed with the open-ended "what's next? not nothing", while the EP insert's own farewell line is "Onwards into the music!", hinting that while there will be no more releases he might may well be making things not for public consumption.  I half-hope Matt "does a Woebot", i.e. goes back on his own vow and restarts the project, like he did several times with all those blogs of his. But maybe it really is time to move on.

(You can buy Woebiotic here.) 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

It's strange when blogger pals end up joining the company of your favourite musicians. I mean, just because they know a lot about music and have strong opinions about it, it doesn't mean they're capable of generating stuff that's any cop. 

Been thinking about this recently not just because of Woebot's end-of-the-journey EP but because of Nick Edwards (formerly known as the blogger Gutterbreakz, now increasingly well-known as the musician Ekoplekz) and who shows absolutely no sign at all of stopping. Over the last two or three years he's churned out a torrent of music, pretty much all of it really superb.

Just readily to hand I've got something like 11 separate works by Nick - LPs, EPs, collaborative albums--plus a bunch of guest mixes done for sites like Pontone (mostly featuring his own music). Somewhere tucked away amongst all my stuff there's an early CD-R and a cassette (attic tapes, really, rather than the Oeuvre Proper).  But there's a heap more limited-edition tape things he's done for micro-labels that I've not got, plus composite identity projects like Ekoclef.  (Go on, have a boggle at his discography). And there's more coming, constantly -- a new record from his Ensemble Skalectrik identity, Trainwrekz, is due out via Editions Mego at the end of April.   

Compared with the shifts and leaps Woebot went through, what's striking about Nick's work is how fixated it is -- it's one big, heaving, writhing, gnarly body of "changing same". Yet I don't get tired of it. I've actually tried to listen all the stuff I had in one go, made a folder of it and clicked "play all". I ran out of day before I finished it. But I never got bored with it. It's more-ish, this sound.

Also striking is the recognisability of the musical voice: this is his sound, the furrow that he ploughs obsessively. His private zone is a triangular hinterland at the borders of which lie genres that exert a gravitational pull on him but together serve to cancel each other, so that he stays within a sort of no man's land. Which is actually One Man's Land. 

     One side of the triangle is, loosely, industrial (although actually it's quite specific: early Cabaret Voltaire)  (I say "loosely industrial" because I never really thought of the Cabs as "industrial").   

  

      

Another side: the outer fringe of hauntology (hence the alliance, or rather merger, with Mordant Music as eMMplekz for the awesome IZOD Days) . Although really any affinity with H-ology is mostly through  shared love of Radiophonia and obscure DIY Anglotronica (see "Dick Mills Blues"). 

And then the third side: dubstep's own moody-atmospheric fringe, Shackleton and so forth.

(I suppose there might also be a third-and-a-half side to this triangle: enough pure hard techno in his DNA to converge with Perc Trax)

Yet another characteristic of Nick's thing is that unlike so much of the stuff coming out of the Zones these days, it doesn't really require conceptual propping up.  It bypasses intellectualisation, works on a basic visceral level of "this shit sounds great". In that sense--as the flexing, extension, and perpetuation of a musical voice, it's as pure and direct as a group like AC/DC.  You listen and you can hear the satisfaction it's giving him to make these sounds, which appear to involve the physical manipulation of favorite machines much more than the digital moving-around of sound objects on a screen. 

 

Nick also, it must be noted, finally, has a great way with a title e.g. Mildew Riddims, "Working Men's Dub", "Terror / Danger"