ALEX REECE – Pulp Fiction 2000
It starts with bass. The deepest, warmest bass you’ve ever heard, like swimming in amniotic fluid while outside the womb earthquakes level the city. The crowd cheer instantly, despite the lack of real change[…]

Josh gives me a telling-off for calling Frank Zappa “the Bloodhound Gang with a PhD”, and I plead guilty as charged. To be honest, I’d hardly know – every bit of Zappa I’ve heard, from his groundbreaking work with the Mo[…]

Just look at that sound: It’s David Toop, and he’s got an art installation. Russolo, laptops, Ryoji Ikeda, and so on.[…]

Robert Moog: it’s a bumper day for Salon articles. Profile/primer on the synthesiser inventor.[…]

Hail, Metallica!: “For over half a century rock ‘n’ roll music has acted as a kind of umbrella under which the noblest elements of society have gathered. Today, the very word “rock” is a synonym for everything that&#8217[…]

XTC – “Playground”
THE WEDDING PRESENT – “Sports Car (Acoustic)” (From the Cooking Vinyl compilation ‘Delicatessen Two’)
I bought the Delicatessen Two compilation because it had a new XTC track on it, t[…]

AUTECHRE – Drane (from the Peel Session disc, recorded 13 Oct 95)
The track itself is a 10+ minute expanse of typical twittering Autechre percussion and childlike melody, progressively more and more overcome by a slightly watery, buzzing drone.[…]

End of the special relationship: Barney Hoskyns on why British music doesn’t sell in America right now. Takes several paragraphs to reach the inevitable conclusion, “because it’s rubbish”. And why are Radiohead such an excepti[…]

Black Box Recorder – there’s a new pair of articles up about them on the main site: a live review from David S and a thing by me which is actually nothing much to do with the band at all.[…]

My first encounter with the exotic was on the Magic Mill at Thorpe Park, a South-East England theme park which from appearances had originally been based around a cramped zoo or city-farm set-up. At some point in the late 70s it had seemingly panicke[…]