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    • Play For Today: special summer bonanza edition Part One
    • Play For Today – Current Playlist 26th June 2017
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  • A Cure for Culture: Die Brücke at Moritzburg
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  • Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside) – “shoegaze” 1988 – 1993
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  • The Lucky Ones Were The First To Die! The 1980s post-Mad Max Apocalypse
  • For Whom The Cowbell Tolls…
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  • (Don’t) Lower Your Expectations; the evolution of Oblivionized
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A Motley Miscellany of Oddities, Buffoonery, Criticism & c.

news & views on music, art, literature, film, graphic design and what-have-you

My Heart Will Go On

Symphonies of Sadness, Dirges of Disgust, Noxious Noise: Musical Masochism

  Any kind of masochism is (to non-masochists/collaborators) peculiar and difficult to understand; no less so when it is related to music; but I’m going to try to understand it anyway. I have isolated three main areas which can be loosely classified under the ‘masochistic’…

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  • You Shouldn’t Always Get What You Want; cautionary tales of the 80s by Stephen King & Ramsey Campbell
  • Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere; notes on the margins of everywhere
  • a true state – cut and paste and the art of collage (Edinburgh, summer 2019)
  • Play For Today: special summer bonanza edition Part One

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RSS A Motley Miscellany of Oddities, Buffoonery, Criticism & c.

  • messages from the past for the future December 7, 2019
      Sitting down to write this, a month after breaking my leg and having to grapple with hitherto-unconsidered questions like ‘how do I usually sit on a toilet’? and one week before a General Election where my preferred of the apparently plausible outcomes is an unsatisfactory coalition government, it feels strange and maybe wrong to […]
  • You Shouldn’t Always Get What You Want; cautionary tales of the 80s by Stephen King & Ramsey Campbell November 8, 2019
    The 1980s is a decade most often defined in western countries by some of its most visible features; greed and consumerism, wealth-as-glamour, blockbuster entertainment (and not just in Hollywood; what could be more 80s than the novels of Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer?)  Even charity – one would think the polar opposite of everything the […]
  • Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere; notes on the margins of everywhere November 3, 2019
    This piece of writing was originally supposed to be posted in September, then at Halloween, but now that it’s finally finished maybe November is the right time after all. It’s about those nameless places that are nowhere, or even the ‘middle of nowhere’, and maybe places feel most like nowhere – or, nowhere feels most […]
  • a true state – cut and paste and the art of collage (Edinburgh, summer 2019) September 15, 2019
    2019 has, in many ways, not been a good year so far. But this summer, the National Galleries of Scotland had (well, has; they are still on) three particularly outstanding exhibitions that brought a bit of light and intelligence to a period of more-than-usual stupidity. At the National Gallery itself, there was the excellent, eye […]
  • Play For Today: special summer bonanza edition Part One August 3, 2019
      It’s been ages since I’ve posted a playlist, so I thought I’d change the format slightly. Background: I write about music a lot for various publications, but as a music journalist I also receive hundreds of promo type emails every week and, when something looks interesting I download it and save the release in […]
  • A Conflict of Ghosts July 4, 2019
      2019 is (to me at least) one of those times when the zeitgeist feels like an actual entity, less the ‘spirit of the age’ and more an actual ‘time ghost’, a baleful Lovecraftian presence whose unseen influence poisons the atmosphere of the era, insidiously affecting the minds of influential people. A silly conceit perhaps […]

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