worm

shite, i've ordered way too many books now. it started with a discussion with max over the Pirate's Dilema, which led to me borrowing Heath and Potter's 'The Rebel Sell', Iain Sinclair's 'Disappearing London' and Thorstein Veblen's "The Theory Of The Leisure Class". The latter especially fitted into a couple of books i'd got from the library, histories of victorian london, a theme i'd begun to dug into. I'd also ordered Peter Ackroyd's 'London: A Biography'. So far, i've gotten through 'The Rebel Sell' and 'The Theory Of The Leisure Class', a quarter of 'London: A Biography', and a history of the London Underground which a guy at work lent to me. Then with Ruaridh's upcoming psychogeography themed peformance for the gig this sunday, it seemed to be the underlying meme to much of my recent reading material, so i just finished another book i had got, Merlin Coverley's 'Psychogeography' which provided a good overview of all the overlapping themes and ideas which fall under the umbrella name, plus a short bio/description of most of the notable names associated with the practise. From that I've ended up on an Amazon spending spree and now have before me a selection of books thats gonna take me weeks to get through:
Peter Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor' (which i just realised is where Warren Ellis must take inspiration for his Jack Hawksmoor character in The Authority).
Robert Louis Stephenson 'Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde' (only 88 pages - surely thats not correct??)
Daniel Defoe's 'Moll Flanders'
I'm sure there is some Stewart Home and JG Ballard on they're way too. oh, and a copy of Bill Drummond's '17'!

I was gonna write some music reviews but i think i should stop procrastinating and get some reading done. Just a quick note then of three things i've been quite into recently - Growing's 'All The Way' album is pretty strange and noisey for a drone album, going pretty organic techno at points; The Ragga Twin's retrospective on Soul Jazz 'Ragga Twins Step Out' is fucking awesome, and today i picked up Madlib's new 'Beat Konducta Vol. 5 Dil Cosby Suite' which is sounding pretty good too.

Labels: books, psychogeography, reviews

pre-Singularity...

hey! dang, long weeekends are excellent! been catching up on loads of reading and listening over the past few days, very relaxin'!

Been working heftily on the gig for this coming sunday - it's always stressful putting on a show, trying to get everything arranged in time, and most importantly trying to get people to come out for it, but hopefully, fingers crossed, this seems to all be going well. Even Warren Ellis might be coming!
The main thing is that the music is going to fucking amazing tho, so should all be good! We have Chris Dooks doing Bovine Life Support System to provide background music at the start of the evening, and i believe he's also gonna be doing his compere between acts too, so should be quite an extravagant art night i think! To tie in with Ruaridh and Bryan's psychogeography theme, i've ordered Patrick Keiller's 'London' and 'Robinson In Space' to use as visuals during some of the other acts too. I haven't yet watched 'London' but if its half as good as Robinson In Space, it should be amazing too.

It's going to be tight for getting the new Erstlaub release done in time as we still haven't quite completed the artwork for it, however i have the mastered audio disc, all the materials and the stamp is ordered, so i'm sure we'll be able to get a couple of copies together in time for the show. I've been listening through it quite intently today and it's excellent - a well worthy successor to "Becoming An Island".

Also - i just updated the rss feeds on the site here, to use Feedburner, so i can try to get some stats back from the feeds. You can keep using the current links as they won't go away, but if you'd like to be counted, you can switch to the new feedburners ones simply by resubscribing on the site with the new links (they look the same as the old one, but point to feedburner rather than just the local atom.xml files). If that doesn't make any sense, just ignore it! :)

thanks!
thor

Labels: gigs, psychogeography, upcoming releases