No, you’ve not missed any matches. We’re putting this year’s games up as we get the entries in, and so it’s a big thankyou to the prompt Group E gaffers of Serbia, Brazil, Switzerland and Morocco. It’s a group of veteran[…]

It’s here! The opening game of the Pop World Cup finds the four teams of Group A raising the curtain on the tournament. Pop football veterans Russia and Uruguay meet two Arab states – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – with less of a record a[…]

This year’s POP WORLD CUP is almost here! I appreciate the Pop Football governing bodies have been quiet about the tournament since the initial announcement, but behind the scenes, we’ve been busy constructing stadiums finalising squad de[…]

My NME was rubbish. I wasn’t there for the underground press invation, or for the Titanic sailing, or the Kinderbunker. I missed the post-structuralist years. I never read about Youth Suicide. I was even too late for C86

NEW MUSIC

Day 52: FISCHERSPOONER – Sir: Compelling, in a glum sort of way – meandering, thoughtful synth-pop outlining the late-night territories where desire, and weariness, and resentment of desire, and resentment of weariness, all run togethe[…]

This is late, and brief, as I’ve been in France helping my parents as my Dad’s been ill.
NEW MUSIC

Day 43: TAL NATIONAL – Tantabara: Pell-mell afro/jazz/rock from Niger, teetering on the line between exciting and exhausting. Everything sounds […]

NEW MUSIC

Day 36: ???? – Sekundenschlaf: Philip Sherburne’s Pitchfork review goes in deep on the enjoyably ridiculous backstory of this dude, how these are supposedly found tracks from the hard drive of a PC from the Chernobyl isolation zone or […]

NEW MUSIC

Day 29: JOHN SURMAN – Invisible Threads: Pastoral, ruminative jazz from an English composer and saxophonist. Very much a set of mood pieces, it seems to me, whose folky calm is upended at one point by a much brisker cover version. Chosen[…]

Datura, or a Delusion We All See by Leena Krohn
(Read as part of the Book Riot Readharder challenge 2018. Category: A single-sitting book.)
An anonymous woman in an anonymous (though clearly Nordic) city receives a flower for her birthday. She begins[…]

Hortus Vitae: Essays On The Gardening Of Life by Vernon Lee
(Read as part of the 2018 Read Harder challenge. Category: A book of essays.)
Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget, was an essayist, story writer, and aesthete active in the late 19th and e[…]