What’re You Listening For? asks Tangents, with an article drawing the confounding and intriguing link between Broadcast and Pentangle – not something that occurred to me when I walked bored out of a Broadcast performance last year, but th[…]

Threatster: hooray! Thanks Chris & Ned.[…]

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[…]

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[…]