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Unreleased in any format until now, 40 years since it was recorded by a gaggle of Glaswegian teenagers, Visions of Ra by the band Next. I know Sun Ra is a big deal here at N&G and he was for us too. The other big influence was Ian Carr's Nucleus. The video recording is new but there's a band...

I've been double fisting Ben Watson's book about Derek Bailey and Derek Bailey's book about improvisation after watching Derek Bailey's TV doco series called One The Edge: Improvisation in Music. They are all very good. Watson can get a bit tiresome sometimes but mostly he has a good pace and...

Steve Tibbetts - Northern Song

I have a confession regarding The Blue Nile's first album, A Walk Across the Rooftops, published by Linn, the celebrated maker of expensive turntables, in their opening move as a record label. It is superbly crafted and has a coherent aesthetic that stands out from, while belonging to, the new...

I heard on the news that at the all-hands staff meeting at Twitter where management explained that investors had sold to Musk, the biggest question the staff had was if they will continue to work from home. I got a chuckle out of that but it makes sense. Musk's preferences are known and people...

April 18: Angela Carter, Wolf-Alice "She grew up with wild beasts. If you could transport her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, picking the lice from one another’s pelts, then she might prove to be the...

April 14: Nicola Barker, G-String Who is Mr. Kip?

Black Sky Thinking Addicted To Plastic? Eco-Vinyl And The Impact Of Our Listening Habits The Quietus , April 11th, 2022 10:51 As vinyl is now set to outsell CDs in the UK serious questions have been asked about the sustainability of this environment destroying format. However, says Jono...

April 13: Chinua Achebe, The Sacrificial Egg “Julius was worried because it was almost a week since he had seen Janet, the girl he was going to marry. Ma had explained to him very gently that he should no longer come to see them "until this thing is over by the power of Jehovah." Ma was a very...

April 12: Huzama Habayeb, A (Somewhat) Realistic Dream “How I hate these early mornings! Cursed are those who indulge in idealizing the moment when the sun lights up the horizon! They give it the exaggerated burden of grandeur, majesty, and fancy. This was a scathing birth for which I...

April 10: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited “He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate...

Idk. I play them. I don't count them.

I don't know the lit you're referring to but what you wrote here makes me think of Shirley Jackson.

That cover reminds me of the strange art of Google Earth's melting bridges. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=The+Strange+Art+Of+The+Melting+Bridges+Of+Google+Earth+...&iax=images&ia=images https://www.pcworld.com/article/495835/fifteen_surreal_bridges_melting_on_google_earth.html

April 9: Roberto Bolaño, Gómez Palacio "On the horizon I could see the highway disappearing into the hills. Night was beginning to approach from the east. Days before, at the motel, I had asked myself, What color is the desert at night? A stupid question, yet somehow I felt it held the key to...

April 8: Kanai Mieko, Rabbits By simple word association I thought of White Lilly from Laurie Anderson's 1986 album Home of the Brave. It's a song about a scene from the 1980 Fassbinder movie Berlin Alexanderplatz. Mieko's text describes someone thinking back to the moment when her life...

Node was a kinda supergroup of hyper-producers in the mid 90s doing what sounds like their version of 70s Tangerine Dream using vintage synths. They made this live EP Terminus recorded in Paddington Station and a studio album called Node and then nothing for another 19 years. The more recent...

Who among you has read or plans to read Dave Chisholm's Chasin' the Bird? It's a comic book about Charlie Parker's time in California. Gav and I reviewed it for the new Gas Giants and we both felt it is pretty good. We thought it accomplishes something that would be hard to do in any other format.

It just so happens that this morning I was re-reading the beginning of chapter 8 of Formalized Music by Iannis Xenakis. (You can oogle up a PDF of it if you like.) I love how it explains that Pythagorean thinking (that things are numbers, or that things re furnished with numbers, or that things...

Oh, wow. Ballsy move. When I was 19 I took a cute French chic who was spending a summer in the home counties to a Prom. Top of the bill was Harrison Birtwistle's Earth Dances (BBS SO under Eötvös). It was an unforgettable experience. All I can remember of my companion was that she was cute...