January 2011
46 posts
Today sees the release of Formed For Fantasy,...
The Wasteland — performed here by T.S. Eliot...
RAT-TAT-TAT! It’s a drum fill much-heard in New Wave rock records between 1977 and 1980. An evenly-spaced triple fill stretching across the last beat of the bar, with a sharp timbre and a semi-military feel. Here it is, for instance, in The Man Who Dies Every Day by Ultravox (1977):
The triple fill sounded “moderne” at the time, but has since dropped out of rock’s...
On the Uji Bridge connecting pilgrims to the Inner Shrine at Ise, temple to Amaterasu Omikami. Sometimes, just for fun, I like to imagine that the sun goddess is worshipped somewhere in Perthshire, and that these pine trees, wooden bridges and secret, sacred treasures are in Auchterarder.
Someone called Colin MacFarlane remembers the...
Since I last showed the hand-painted posters at the Kokusai Cinema back in December there’ve been at least four new porn films, for which the anonymous (and apparently somewhat mazakon) hand-painter has executed four new posters of breasty nuns (and other types of breasty women) in action. Here they are.
WatchFolktronic came out ten years ago. Here it is as a handy YouTube playlist. The Heliogabalus of Orchard Street tells you how I reassessed the album when I listened to it again a year or so back.
Etta James Something’s Got A Hold On Me 1962...
Following the artistic triumph last year at...
An 18-minute podcast in which Momus explores...
“FOREVER JUST KEEPS ON GETTING SHORTER.”
Thomas Jerome Newton’s Japanese-style house in The Man Who Fell To Earth, filmed in 1975 at Fenton Lake in New Mexico. The film must’ve blown my mind when I saw it in the back room of Edinburgh’s Filmhouse in 1976. The scenes shot in and around the house would have been the first time I saw Western people living in Japanese style, and considered it as a possible way to live...
Lunch.
Why not stream the new album from Wire, Red Barked Tree, here while reading the three group members’ observations on each track here and recalling, if you’re me, the exact moment at which (in Drummond Place, Edinburgh, in 1978, craned over a JVC radio cassette machine playing the John Peel programme) you first noticed this group had it: “Up in my bedroom I’ve got Sarah...
December 2010
32 posts
When I remade Vampire Weekend’s...