On first listen I liked Syd’s Fin mainly for its Spartan vibe: low-key, late-night R&B synths. Moody and pleasant. My second listen was like my eyes were adjusting to a dark room – songs emerged as ultraviolet blooms. The one that jumped out[…]

Not the last Finnophone musician I’ll be writing about, Mara Balls is the rock-name of musician and artist Maria Mattila, who’s done stints in a few Finnish hard rock bands and also ran the Yellow House, an underground venue and cultural space in[…]

Uyai by Ibibio Sound Machine
There seems to be a lot of music around at the moment involving a fusion of more acoustic – I don’t want to say ‘traditional’ – African musics, or African vocal pop traditions, and electronic production. Of […]

One of the great dangers of listening to music from around the world – as you’ll see, it’s a danger I fall foul of a LOT – is a kind of geographical determinism, At home I’m a tourist, projecting my misty sense of a place I’ve never been […]

(Warning: SPOILERS.)
First: I shd note immediately that I’ve read no Stephen King and only fully watched a few of the films (Carrie of course and lol The Shining; several more half-watched at best). My perhaps ill-informed nugget of knowledge is th[…]

(This article was transcribed by me, Drake’s Dad, over a series of Sunday conversations. We counted evolutionary lines as a single Pokemon for space and patience reasons.)

151. MR. MIME (Mr. Mime)
CREEEEEEEEEEEP.
(more…)[…]

Walter Becker of Steely Dan died the week before last, and so I spent last week listening to each of their seven LPs, one a day. “The rim of salt around the cocktail of my taste”, I called them on Facebook: this last week I’ve been […]

Repurposed and edited Goodreads reviews of the Love And Rockets Library (by Los Bros Hernandez; published by Fantagraphics).
Heartbreak Soup (Gilbert Hernandez)
This is my third or fourth time reading these stories, but the first for a decade or so. […]

so a friend and i went to see the john scheinfeld coltrane doc at the the ica a couple of weeks back: that’s one JC-stan and one JC-sceptic…
… and we both agreed it’s bad and here’s why
it does the usual documentary thing, of hunting o[…]

Spooky happenings over on Silent London this week, where the Sound Barrier Podcast dabbles in the supernatural, otherworldly and ectoplasmic. Or rather, a pair of meditative films which use death, and the afterlife, to dwell on the nature of existenc[…]