Autechre, Artist in Residence
Thoroughly enjoyed an absorbing Radio 6 mix by Autechre (the first of four!) which was almost all new to me and has provided a wealth of music and musicians to follow up – particularly the startling hip hop tracks. The show is described as: Step into the genre-bending world of Autechre, the legendary duo whose
Weeknotes wb 2nd December 2024
Top of the news this week: Storm Darragh blew down our fence overnight. (The fence was old when we moved in 12 years ago and we’re lucky it’s survived this long but it’s a shock seeing it flattened into our garden.) It didn’t help that the the landlord of house next door – which is
Weeknotes wb 25 November 2024
A week of two halves. It started very productively and then on Wednesday I was knocked flat with some sort of illness which took about three days to get over (including one sleeping most of the day on Thursday). I find the hardest aspect of being unwell is the inability to do anything at all
Unwelcome Website Woes
THINGS haven’t been great with my blog over the last week or so. That’s an understatement. I’ve spent a great deal of time working out how to save all the content I’ve put up here for the last five years. I’ve maintained blogs of some sort or another since the late 1990s and more consistently
Weeknotes wb 28 October 2024
Blimey! It’s over a month since I made any attempt to put together a “weeknotes”. Perhaps “month notes” would be more appropriate. It’s been a week of looking after my youngest as his primary school has different half-term holiday than other schools where we live. Clocks went back and the weather’s become gloomier. Our plans
Thomas Covenant, The Unbeliever
Another charity shop find! A mere £1 for the trilogy of Stephen Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenent, The Unbeliever. It’s a fantasy series started in the mid-1970s in that early wave of post-Toklien novels and I read the first volume way-way-back when I was in my middle-teens (recomended by the owner of Stargate One
Book Evocation
A discussion about the merits of reading a physical book rather than a digital copy led to considerations about the way that books – like songs – are associated with a particular moment in time in memory. There’s some truth to this. I often recall the first copy of a selection of Thomas Hardy’s poetry
The Book of Alien, 1979
Another find at our local Oxfam bookshop, The Book of Alien. Published in 1979 to accompany the release of the movie, it’s a behind-the-scenes account of the production with lots of art (mainly by Ron Cobb but also by Moebius and Chris Foss) and photos. There are sections on spaceship design, sets and spacesuits, the
Another Thrilling Star Wars Adventure!
Love these (fake) book covers for the first three Star Wars movies in the style of sixties pulp paperbacks. Illustrator Russell Walks is amazing!
The Dead of Night
Bought for £1 at the local hospital’s League of Friends bookshop. Onions is one of the great twentieth-century ghost story writers. This volume does include The Beckoning Fair One which Robert Aickmam described as “one of the (possibly) six great masterpieces in the field”. There’s an intense, manic quality to Onions’ writing that is incredibly
-2,147,483,648 Hours and 24 Minutes
Decided to reinstall OSX on the macbook air that I mostly use at home. I bought it in 2012 and, other than upgrading it to Catalina (which is as new as OSX will go without using OCLP) it’s always worked great. Over the years I’ve installed a lot of apps, fiddled with the settings and
Weeknotes wb 16 September 2024
I have to admit that I’m struggling to maintain these weekly notes (though I will endeavour to do so). Mainly it’s that I’m over-thinking the detail and it’s taking me far too long to put the notes together. So here’s something shorter… The “Season of mists” is most definitely upon us and I’m waking to
Radio Times Lord of the Rings Cover
Lovely piece from 2021 by Brian Sibley about the cover to the 7th March 1981 issue of Radio Times. Sibley writes about the illustration, Eric Fraser, and his acquistion of the original artwork. Much like Jimmy Coulty’s stunning 1976 poster illustration for the novel, Sibley’s BBC dramatisation which was originally aired between March and August
Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches
I’ve just backed Andrew MacLean’s Kickstarter project, Agatha: A Tale of Three Witches. It’s a prequel to MacLean’s fantastic quarterly series, Head Lopper, a comic I’ve bought from its first issue. (The last issue, #16, was released in 2021.) Anything Head Lopper gets an automatic “must buy” from me. There are a range of “rewards”
Hüsker Dü Live
Spent a couple of hours today listening to some of the live recordings of Hüsker Dü that can be found on the Internet Archive. It’s a mixed bag: some pretty good ones that sound as if recorded at the mixing desk, while others are just muffled noise with the occasionally recognisable vocal. I can understand
Love in Constant Spectacle, Jane Weaver
Have been listening to Jane Weaver’s Love in Constant Spectacle for a couple of weeks now. Such a carefully constructed, intimate and gentle album which builds a fragile melancholic voice over dreamy motorik beats. Weaver’s gentle psychedelic pastoralism (which is the best way I think I can describe it) is something I find incredibly appealing
Bob Mould, Hüsker Dü, Sugar
It must be the general mood I’m in at the moment but among the albums I’ve been sorting through in my never-ending organisation of my music library have been (last week) Hüsker Dü and (today) Bob Mould and Sugar. I originally got into Hüsker Dü back in in my teens in the 1980s when I
Rock Bottom, Robert Wyatt
My attention in music recently has shifted again towards the early 1970s to the post-psychedelic stuff produced by musicians loosely grouped as the Canterbury Scene. My tastes in pyschedelia have always been in the slightly-folksy English pastoral strain which has brought me via Soft Machine and Matching Mole to Robert Wyatt’s stunning 1974 album, Rock
Who and Hobbit
In other news, I went looking in local charity shops for a copy of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell, a novel I’ve read twice but don’t have a physical copy. No luck on that front but I did find a delightful hardback of The Hobbit (I have the paperback version so this is
Dual-booting Noble Numbat
Installed the 24.04 LTS release of Ubuntu, Noble Numbat, on Macbook so it dual boots with Sonoma (itś actually a 10 year-old Macbook Pro using OCLP to enable latest version of OSX to run). The only part of getting Ubuntu to dual boot was the actual dual booting itself. All the resizing of partitions and
English: “ill-thought-through changes”
Brief – but valid – Guardian editorial calling for changes to English teaching. “Too much of what is valuable about studying English was lost in the educational reforms of the past 14 years,” the paper says and that “ill-thought-through changes, which imposed a model more suited to science and maths learning on to the quite
Tom Tom Club, 1981
I’ve been listening to a LOT of Talking Heads lately and – while I was listening to Genius of Love performed on the live album of Stop Making Sense – realised that I’ve never really listened to the Chis Frantz and Tina Weymouth side-project, Tom Tom Club. Got to say that the first eponymously-titled first
Brink Book 6, 2000AD prog 2379
Very pleased to see the return of Brink by Dan Abnett and INJ Culbard to 2000AD. I hadn’t read last week’s prog and, when I saw Culbard’s unmistakable cover for prog 2379, I had to dash out to WH Smiths and pick it up. Unbelievably, it’s Book Six. Brink is a future detective noir –
