Thursday, July 28, 2011

This Sunday July 31st I'll be discussing/reading from/Q&A-ing/signing Retromania at Skylight Books in Los Feliz, LA

Time: 5 PM

Location: Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027

(it's actually in the Music + Film + etc store a few yards down the road -- yes Skylight has a separate store dedicated to music/performing arts, indeed it's one of the best stocked i've ever seen)

Friday, July 22, 2011

another guest-music-blog at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond -- this one on the highly active afterlife of the widely-deemed-dead (and "officially" never-existent) genre known as Hauntology





Rother a lot of Kraut in Crow, motorik vibes here and there and a faint but distinct scent of Cluster-circa-Zuckerzeit... a pleasant surprise... and a stretch for Mr Brooks

Tuesday, July 19, 2011



christ on a bike

further details of infamy here

Sunday, July 17, 2011

another guest-music-blog at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond @ Wired Magazine, this one cueing off yesterday's New York Times piece and investigating further into Pop Atemporality Mystery #1, i.e. why does everything on the radio sound like Jam & Spoon circa 1993?!?!

my piece on "searching for the sound of now" and pop in the age of atemporality is in today's issue of The New York Times

and here's an adapted extract from Retromania as featured in the Los Angeles Times last week

the book is published in America on Tuesday

Friday, July 15, 2011

"not blasting but blissing" - my next guest-music-blogpost at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond blog is on "alternablasts" versus "echo jams"

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

This Saturday I'll be participating in the panel discussion around Loud Flash: British Punk on Paper, an exhibition of punk-related artwork and memorabilia which opens at the Honor Fraser gallery in Culver City, Los Angeles on 16th July and runs until August 27th.

Preceding the exhibition's opening (which start at 6PM on the 16th) the panel runs from 4PM onwards and the other participants are Vivien Goldman, Loud Flash curator Toby Mott, and Gardar Eide Einaarsson.

Panel and exhibition are both free, so brave "Carmageddon" and come to:

Honor Fraser
2622 La Cienega Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90034

More information at http://www.honorfraser.com/

Saturday, July 09, 2011

and another guest-musicblog at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond - this one on NuNewAge



(When i stumbled a few years ago on this advert in the back of an old issue of Audion, the cosmic rock zine, i was struck by the fact that this festival of Spacy Trippy Electronic Music was going on in London at exactly the same time as Spectrum and the other big acid house parties.... that it had some of the same features (hypnotic synths,spectacular lights 'n' lasers) but rather than groovy young things freaky-dancing in garish 'n' baggy clothes, the audience for "Electronica '88" would doubtless have been sitting in the pews, drably attired, with thinning hair etc... And probably the drugs would have been different too.)

Saturday, July 02, 2011



real classic tune this by Hawke aka one of the Hardkiss brothers, this record was always in my "box" back in the day

don't remember this next mix of it (much less cheezy and more psychedelic than the above)



on balance i prefer the cheezier one

^^^^^^^^^^^

okay let's have some fun

let's put two "identical copies" of "3 Nudes" on "the decks"





(it might work better to open blissblog in two different windows)

adjust the volume so that one is slightly lower than the other

cue them both simultaneously, then drag the cursor on the second one back about four to six seconds

mess around with the timelag between the tracks, adjust volume levels (make the second, behind version quite a bit louder than the ahead one)

do it with three or more copies

Friday, July 01, 2011

my next guest-blog at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond--this one on No.1 Astronaut's Instant Digest (side project of Bob Bhamra of Data 70/West Norwood Cassette Library)