What I listened to at the record store. It's been three weeks since I started this Wednesday morning ritual.* Last week I got lazy and wasn't sure if I wanted to make it a weekly topic, but since I'm doing Blaugust, this will 100% be a weekly thing, at least for this month. * I wrote an introduction about it here. Last Wednesday ⇣Mitski, Chinese American Bear Today ⇣MF Doom Last Wednesday Outfit of the day Part of the ritual is getting dressed up and feeling like the main character in a graphic…

Oh, right, it’s Wednesday again. Time for the weekly “Boston area shows” post. Imminent gigs and recent announcements. Yeah. But I’m just sitting over here bumming out about the apparent death of long-running, highly-esteemed music blog BrooklynVegan. One of the few remaining outlets for quality independent music coverage. I was naively unaware of the site’s […]

The Proms, the series of concerts that run in London from the middle of July to early September, calls itself “the world’s greatest festival of classical music.” Whether it is or not, the festival run by the BBC has the economic power to assemble some of the world’s best orchestras and performers. The prices are not high, and almost every night more than 5000 people assemble in the Albert Hall to listen to the music. The best thing is that you can turn up on the day and get in to stand for £8.…

Yes, it's Mr. Cutler - fixture of the Underground, a regular on Peel, friend to the hippies and the rockers - despite being a member of the Noise Abatement Society and a foe of amplification. So someone at Melody Maker in 1971 thought it would be funny to get him to review the singles - or rather a select (and rather interesting) handful. Actually looking closer, it's not actually singles - it's tracks from albums (as if Nico would have a single off of Desertshore!). So it's more like The…

St✮Johnny - I Hate Rock and Roll [1994]90s 90s 90s! That grunge-gaze sound.A lot of people missed St✮Johnny at the time. I mean you'd already Dinosaur Jr for ten years plus Swervedriver, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Pavement, Polvo et al. for a while so by the time these guys got signed to Geffen they got overlooked. However Bill Whitten had a way with downbeat melodies and in conjunction with guitarist Tom Leonard they stacked together cool sometimes surreal layers of sound. The noisey pop…

Women of MusicVolume 11Meg Myles on cover Beverly White - Cling to Me, Baby Bunny Paul - Baby Sitter's Blues Donna Loren - Shakin' All Over Donna Pope - Your Love Is An Everyday Thing Eileen Scott - Teen Age Prayer Flavia Couri with the Courettes - Hop The Twig Flosia Lee - Part Time Lover Jeanie Lee - Tic-Toc-A-Boogie Jeannie Barnes - Can't Get You Off Of My Mind Joan Gardner - Learning To Rock Mae West - Twist and Shout Meg Myles - Thirteen Men Nancy Ford - Johnny's Yo Yo Nancy Sit - Hanky…

Nico & Kevin Ayers - Arènes d'Arles, Arles, France, August 6, 1975We mentioned that forthcoming Can live release a couple weeks back — and we noted that the lineup for that 1975 night in Arles also featured everyone’s favorite former Velvet Underground chanteuse Nico! Is there a tape of Nico’s set? Oh yeah, there is. And it even features a special guest appearance from her old ACNE pal Kevin Ayers. Like so many others before him, Ayers had been bewitched by Nico, writing his classic tune…

Following on from my recent post about the BlackPlastic hosted club on Sound Club, I wanted to share the write-up that accompanies the current album I'm featuring there. That album is the Juan Maclean's Less Than Human. Check out my write-up below, and head over to Sound Club to listen to the album and join in any discussion. Coming out relatively early on in a run of what was arguably a golden era for DFA Records, John Maclean’s The Juan Maclean project saw him team up with LCD Soundsystem’s…

A playlist for all seasons, just for kicks. 🌱☀️🍂❄️ feat. Cassius, Bebu Silvetti, Phoenix, The Blue Nile, Cocteau Twins, XTC, The Style Council, Chicane feat. Justine Suissa, Tears For Fears, Lifeformed, Josh Rouse, Guillemots, Prince, and Merz. Playlists Apple Music Spotify

I’m sitting U Smrťaka quite near my current home in Nusle. I have a pivo. It is a Radegast. I greatly prefer it to Pilsner. The music listening adventure begins. Let’s see what each song brings. Of course, Pete Townshend had to appear first floating in my ears. Stardom in Action. In fact, this song doesn’t bring anything specific to my mind. The album itself resonates on many levels, however. Levels, do you say? Why use such a word when one could easily say wireframes instead? The album in…

Cashbox April 15, 1954 Mary Jane Johnson starred in the early fifties with Bob Atcher in the Faultless Starch Show, a radio program diffused on NBC.In 1954, along with Elaine Rodgers, the Meadowlarks and the Villagers, she was on the Bill Bailey's TV Show "Town and Country Sound Parade" In 1955, she was on WLWT-TV Cincinnati, soon succeeded in March by Mimi Roman. She then moved to West Coast to engage in radio-tv activities. You have to wait about ten years before seeing again her name on a…

Dust in the Sun by Jon Loomes is presented as a ‘lost’ English folk album, recorded in the long hot summer of 1976. According to the press blurb: “A troubled artist made a remarkable folk album whose creation was beset by difficulties. Almost immediately, the label collapsed into insolvency. A pressing plant fire destroyed almost the entire original run, after which the album slipped into rumour and half-memory, after which the album slipped into rumour and half memory. Dust in the Sun was long…

I’ll take this at mine as well please. Thank you.

I don’t usually blog all my comments other places, but while drafting a completely different blog post I came across this great post, Michel Valdrighi: The Coder Whose Code Never Went Silent. I had to leave a comment, because Michel’s story is not well-known. Michel Valdrighi is the GOAT. His elegant code and impeccable aesthetic paved the path for WordPress to follow, and he did it with a prescient belief in Open Source. It seems obvious now, but in 2001, software that wasn’t just free but…

Attempting to recreate the golden yesterdays of Jose Padilla’s White Isle sunsets with the tunes of today… Jun Arasaki & Nine Sheep / Kajyadhi-Fu Bushi / EM Records “Kajyadhi-Fu Bushi” is a traditional Okinawan song, passed down from generation to generation. However, in 1970, jazz musician Jun Arasaki produced a radical arrangement of the number for his band, Nine Sheep, to perform on live TV. It’s still a slow, stately, sentimental ceremony, that conjures images of the players in ritual…

This 2014 Musica Jazz sampler approaches the art of compilation as a meta-statement rather than an inventory, offering four paired selections from albums by the Gary Burton Quartet, Ralph Towner and John Abercrombie, Sam Rivers, and the Miroslav Vitous Group. Keith Jarrett’s “Runes,” from Arbour Zena (ECM 1070), occupies the center as a ritual hinge. Burton opens the first chamber; Towner and Abercrombie narrow the light; Jarrett inhabits the interior court; Rivers fractures the floor plan;…

Cassette Tapes Will Outlive Us All If you’ve been reading this blog series, I think I might have confused you with some things I mentioned in the last one. Blank tapes? Recording experiments? Didn’t I say the Fiio wasn’t capable of recording? So Uncle #1 used to be super into audio equipment. He traded amplifiers, receivers, players, and speakers back when he was in college. Life happened, and he sold away his entire collection over time. But some years ago, he and my mom bought this micro…

I think I’ve got my arithmetic right now. So LA DOLCE VITA covers eight days and nine nights? That’s that settled. A bell rings and we see the night’s revellers walking off into another grey dawn, past a limbless sculpted minotaur. Various bits of dialogue, some in English, but a girl who clearly doesn’t speak […]

I've played the second volume here before, but I actually haven't owned the first until now. I stumbled across this in a very cute bookstore in Squamish this weekend; nice to have the chance to hear the companion volume. Like the other one, this is very much in the 80s pop/rock vein of fusion jazz, and it's a very fun listen. (Youtube note: as before, Youtube doesn't indicate it anymore, but this is a full album playlist and will play through to the next tracks if you let it!)

Richard Hell & the Voidoids + The Feelies - CBGB, New York City, July 1 / July 2, 1978We’ve been hanging out a lot at CBGB this summer — and why not? It’s a cool place to hang out. Today, we’ve got audience tapes recorded during a thrilling double bill in the summer of ‘78: Richard Hell & the Voidoids and the Feelies! It doesn’t get much better than that. Hell’s old buds Television had just broken up over at the Bottom Line a few days prior to this. But Richard was powering through at the club…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Sam Farhi’s novel The Sapsuckers is an impressive debut, a book as inventive as it is moving and intense. Laura Sims wrote of the book: “Intense, raw, and haunting, The Sapsuckers takes on a…

It's 1998 and Doogie0, the guy across the hall in our student accommodation, will not stop playing The Boy With The Arab Strap. Eventually I crack and ask him who the band are. He infodumps on me with all the authority of an 18 year our music snob about this cool new Scottish band called Belle & Sebastian. I slip him a tenner, a couple of Smirnoff Ice, and the promise of my help on the next assignment we have - in return he pops into town and grabs me If You’re Feeling Sinister. Despite my…

"Radar Love" by Golden Earring Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. What song makes you want to take a midnight drive? - Radar Love by Golden Earring This has got to be the classic answer for a reason: the bassline mimics tires eating up highway miles, and the lyrics are literally about driving through the night to a lover, View Lou Plummer's Crucial Tracks profile

Trust Me #121Primitive Painters by FeltPrimitive Painters by Felt is six minutes of pure, shimmering perfection. Released in August 1985, it is completely timeless. This is a song that always stops my in my tracks. The first few seconds are immediately hypnotic, then interlocking guitars kick in, underpinned by Martin Duffy's Hammond organ, then the beats come in. This is a dreamy and hazy intro, 75-seconds to get lost in. Lawrence comes in, his vocals sound a little muffled and (deliberately)…

New Orleans-based R&B singer and guitarist Alvin Robinson first toured Britain in spring 1966 after he was brought over by promoter Roy Tempest for a nationwide tour with fellow New Orleans stars, female vocal trio, The Dixie Cups. It isn’t clear who the backing band was on this tour so we’d welcome further information from readers in the comments section at the end. This isn’t a complete gig list for this tour Tour dates: 23 April 1966 – New All-Star Club, Artillery Passage, Bishopsgate, east…

How listening to and collecting vinyl records helped me reconnect with music. At the start of July, I decided I wanted to collect records again.* This happened after we visited our neighborhood comic book store and realized there was a whole-ass record store with graffiti supplies upstairs. We'd just never bothered to check it out. * Before I left the US in 2012 I started to build a record collection. I think I had 5 albums. The only one I remember is Flight of the Conchord's "I Told You I Was…

[1974]This ain't no glitter litter despite how clichéd it may seem initially, they absolutely nail the genre in an undeniable manner for one of the great hard rockin glam non hits of the 70s.It's a teenage rebellion stomper.These guys were called Iron Virgin so... after two singles Scotland's very own answer to The Sweet vanished into obscurity. Yet since 2003 they keep turning up on glam "nuggets" type compilations on a regular basis. The junkshop glam aficionados consider this one of the…

Perhaps there are two types of sadness.Sadness that you soak in.And sadness that you drown in. Here are some examples of the first type: Faded plastic flowers on a grave. Old rock stars. Roadkill. Hearing your first ‘our song’ unexpectedly. Standing in the supermarket isle trying to figure out which brand of eggs inflicts the least suffering on the hens. Boredom on a cold rainy day. Loss. Overtly struggling small country towns. Solitary poker machine regulars. Old family photos in second hand…

New artist I’m obsessed with: Gabriel Dawe. I love the colors and craft, very Mesh. If his site were on WordPress, we’d definitely commission some pieces. Hat tip: Jason Nichols.

“Are you wearing the—” Mirage is the name of the dress, Dior Haute Couture F/W 26-27 via Yahoo “The airbrushed T-shirt version of the 1974 artwork Lynda Benglis ran as a two-page advertisement in Artforum that sparked an editorial protest and eventually led to the founding of October Magazine, printed as an almost unrecognizably ethereal palimpsest on a sheer, beaded, short-sleeved dress in Jonathan Anderson’s Benglis-inspired Dior Haute Couture Fall/Winter 2026-27 collection? Yeah, yeah I am.”…