January 2012
1 post
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December 2011
13 posts
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1/11: I Know I'm Biased, But It IS Really Good...
Look: if you thought I was going to end on anything other than a bit of shameless self promotion then you’re even madder than you look. But this was always supposed to be a vague list defined solely by things I love: and I really love Visions.
<a href=”http://playingincircles.bandcamp.com/album/visions”...
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2/11: Plate. The. Fuck. Up.
Luke Haines, whose cohesively sprawling, ambitious, rather moving and proper fucking clever album, 9 ½ Psychedelic Meditations On British Wrestling In the 1970s & Early ’80s, spins such a disjointed web of musical and nostalgic themes before performing the near impossible by tying everything together, that it would have been a very strong contender for album of the year had this been a...
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3/11: 6 Years Ago, The World Ended
For 144 weeks (plus the occasional skip) Fridays meant Freakangels. A post-apocolyptic webcomic about a society trying to survive comfortably, starring a strange family and featuring some of the most evocative depictions of psychic abilities in a medium obsessed with superpeople.
Filled to the brim with the level of brilliant dialogue, interesting ideas and compelling twists I expect from Warren...
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4/11: Live Long And Prosper
Cat Vincent has done a lot of writing about hyperreal religions, creating your own mythology and the life altering impact of fiction. He’s been detailing his personal philosophy in the Guttershaman series, begun the Mason Lang Film Club and recently had a piece on the (rather creepy) Slenderman published in Darklore magazine. All fascinating, and well worth a look, but one essay on a...
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5/11: Just when you thought it was safe to go back...
Space Shark by Chris G has its own twist on single page webcomics, spinning an epic sci-fi adventure by isolating the most potent moments of the narrative to form a slightly disjointed but rich and rewarding world. Also, it is set in space and the “hero” is a shark.
This year saw fantastic use of colour pushed further on already eye-popping visual style, with lots of texture and splatter. Each...
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6/11: Phew! That Was A Busy Twenty Minutes.
Jamie Smart’s longform webcomic Corporate Skull kicked off in high style: with cavemen, shit suicides and the splatteriest photocopier incident of the year. It’s been getting progressively more mental and looks like it’s going to get even better. I’ve been enjoying it so much I felt compelled to draw my first bit of fanart for absolutely ages.
The screen is a less than...
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6.5/11: Merry Christmas!
Christmas day means repeats, right? Good thing too, because some brilliant stuff is always going to be left off a list like this. Fortunately, I can sneak in a list I wrote in July, which (still won’t make the list complete, but) does cover a couple of serious omissions, and everybody will forgive this blatant piece of cheating because it’s Christmas! Proper choice tomorrow…
For...
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7/11: Negative Space
None For The Crow by Dustmotes is a gorgeous ep: a spacious layering of lovely sounds at the incredibly organic end of electronic music.
What especially gripped me was the wonderful use of negative space.
Drilling a beat through to a listeners core is usually desirable, the simplest way to add emphasis being to just turn up the volume. What Dustmotes does is far subtler, having impact not by...
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8/11: “Fuck you! These are our salad days!”
It’s always a good idea to remember the important things in life: friendship, adventure, science, crime, chess and growing up never growing up. We Are Become Pals, written by Joey Comeau and illustrated by Jess Fink, captures it all in an incredibly sweet, funny, invigorating way.
I love Helen and Jane so much. They’re the best kind of troublemakers: smart, curious, loyal and with no...
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9/11:...
Some things are more revealing than others, but every action is, to some extent, influenced by our past, by our thoughts and feelings. One of the key functions of creativity is to find a better way of expressing those thoughts and feelings. Not necessarily deep thoughts or especially personal feelings, but “what looks good” or “what makes a good story” are personal nonetheless. How effectively...
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10/11: Where's That Leather Jacket?
All criticism is personal. Duh. Even the aspects which seem suitable for objective discussion are of subjective importance.
So I could discuss Ida Maria’s Cherry Red in a vaguely objective tone: cocksure bass hook, insistent drive, milk bottles, continental interlude and all; and it would be a reflection of my personal response to it. I could step deeper into my relationship with music, the...
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11/11: I Love With Love From The Men's Room
Kristin Hersh is one of my idols. As I expect is fairly well known by now. Brilliant, prolific, multi-talented and with a range that stretches from sweet folk renditions to, well, 50FOOTWAVE. There are times when the only music I actually want to hear is a blast of take-no-prisoners rock-n-roll, With Love From The Men’s Room scratches that itch. Hard.
It opens with Radiant Addict, a...
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November 2011
2 posts
3 tags
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October 2011
3 posts
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Crossroads and Illusions 08-10-11
Rough as hell...
September 2011
6 posts
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The One I Love - written by R.E.M. and recorded by...
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Plan B Lovin’.
A Musical Sketch.
(Several...
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She stands on the platform carrying an elegantly plain ukulele. She also has beautiful and distracted elfin features, dark cherry red fingernails and hair to match, a rather stylish coat and skin so exquisitely pale I initially assumed her long bare legs were sheathed in alabaster tights. But mainly the uke.
August 2011
5 posts
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This weird little noise is the scurrying of a load...
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Today’s events are spectacularly fucked up...
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Having just finished rereading Bend Sinister and reading Nabokov’s foreword (online, because my edition is quite an old second hand one with no foreword and a rich odour) it seems I cannot escape the conlusion: as much as I admire Nabokov as a writer, I somewhat dislike him as a human being.
While slightly annoying, it’s not that he wrote a novel only he could fully comprehend (making...
July 2011
3 posts
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The photography lab next to the studio I was...
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Him: Playing keys is easy if you're a guitarist, it's laid out for you and your fingers have already got the speed and flexibility. The piano is the fundamentals, if you know music you can play the piano.
Me: It's not quite that simple, I'm used to the relationships between notes being based on the physical properties of vibrating strings, rather than even intervals that are more dependent on music theory. Even just getting used to which combination of black and white keys I need takes me a while to get the hang of...
Him: Nah, that's easy, isn't it, you just use the white keys for the held notes and the black keys for the accents.
Me: o_O
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Certain styles of music lie slightly outside my comfort zone for dissection*, approaching it with less developed cognitive tools [critical vocabulary] has a tendency to leave me with comments ranging from “that sounds cool” to “that’s dancey and I don’t feel like dancing”. Lame. So, on the basis of the internet showering me with free music, and it sounding good,...
June 2011
5 posts
It’s rainy around here.
(With less faffing...
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“The future’s not like it was in the old days.” Well, clearly, no. No, it isn’t. Whatever made you think it would be? When has it ever been? It seems ridiculous to hear, often otherwise bright, people demanding to know where the “next punk” is coming from, usually accompanied by a series of jabs at “the modern world” and more often than not the...
“Of course the function of a taboo is not merely to indicate that there are...”
– “Dirty Wordies, or, The Fiendish Thingie”: an uncollected speech by Joanna Russ
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the...”
– THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK
Appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
May 2011
4 posts
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“I’ve just been on your Playing In Circles site listening to “Fifth...”
– Colin Smith being very nice about Playing In Circles
April 2011
3 posts
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March 2011
1 post
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The 8th Construct
a now-with-added-synths As...
February 2011
5 posts
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All Musicians Should Experiment/Nobody Should...
Genuine experimental music would have to be a methodical investigation manipulating one variable with the end result remaining unknown until the experiment is complete. Experimentation is a process, not a result. An album of experimental music would not be a bunch of tracks with odd noises or unusual time signatures - it would be one track played at a range of time signatures (some of which would...
“This suggests that the memories we think of the most may actually be our least...”
– Enthusiasms: Week 7
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