An interesting approach to album recording and release by hitherto unsigned band, Morton Valence, circumventing the usual record label route.
Here’s the track listing to my annual compilation, this year cleverly titled as ‘The Best Songs I Bought In 2007 Ever’. It was a good year, but somehow slightly underwhelming.
The final day. We only managed to squeeze in two-and-a-bit bands today, following a 40 minute queue to get into the Honey Club.
Day two, and following the CSS failure yesterday I thought we’d camp out in the Corn Exchange all evening to ensure we saw Art Brut.
The Great Escape has begun. The second year of ‘Europe’s leading new music festival’ has come to Brighton again, with even more bands and venues.
Here’s the track listing to my annual compilation, this year cleverly titled as ‘The Best Songs I Bought In 2006 Ever’. It was another good year.
Like many other Apple-loving tech companies yesterday, Clearleft were huddled around MacRumours following its coverage of Steve Jobs’s keynote. And Gruff Rhys.
Last night I went to see J.Spaceman on his Acoustic Mainlines tour, at Brighton’s newly refurbished Komedia. These are my thoughts on the evening.
Underworld recently put out some 12” singles and I’m loving the type-based artwork.
There’s a really interesting post on Creating Passionate Users right now: it explains how seeing Radiohead play live – for one fan – changed how she listens to, and hears the album Kid A. I had a similar experience.
British Sea Power gave an awesome peformance which was a fitting finale to a fantastic three nights.
Wow, what an evening. I spent the whole evening in the Hanbury Ballroom – a great little venue two streets away from my house. I was really looking forward to this night and I wasn’t disappointed.
The Great Escape festival is the UK’s fledgling answer to SxSW Music. It’s a 3 day event featuring 180 bands in 10 venues across Brighton with talks from industry luminaries during the day. I got a 3-day gig pass, the first evening didn’t disappoint.
Thought I’d better sneak this one in before the end of January. Here’s the track listing to my annual compilation, this year cleverly titled as ‘The Best Songs I Bought In 2005 Ever’. Turns out it was a surprisingly good year.
Found in the hyper-cool Fourier Transform records notebook/sketchpad, there’s definitely some truth in this.
It is exactly one year since John Peel died. This time last year I put together a compilation to celebrate what he had done for my music listening. At the time it was very much a personal thing but time marches on so here’s what I came up with.
Hot on the heels of Colly’s review of Super Furry Animals in Nottingham, I once more had the pleasure of seeing SFA at London’s Brixton Academy. It certainly wasn’t the mellow gig that Colly saw; this was SFA rocking away in big style.
A teasingly brief piece in Wired wherein Thurston Moore waxes lyrical about mix tapes and their progeny.
I’ve been passed a musical baton. If it’s good enough for Stuart, it’s good enough for me, so here goes: Total volume of music files on my computer: 14.9 Gb. The last CD I bought was: The last actual CD I bought was British Sea Power’s It Ended…
Super Furry Animals, the best band in Britain, have released the three track Slow Life EP as a free download.
Better late than never, here’s the track listing to my annual compilation. If you’d like a copy of the CD all you need to do is send me a CD comprising the best songs you bought last year.
The most fabulous and surreal thing happened to me last night.
A recent British Sea Power newsletter made me chuckle.
John Peel has died. This brings me great sadness. A legend if ever there was one, Peel’s gentle patter and eclectic (and loud) music kept me company through many a long drive and Winter evening. The whole point of John Peel’s radio shows were freedom – freedom…
It is with great pleasure I introduce the new website for Far Heath Studios.
As yet, I haven’t bought anything from the iTunes Music Store. The reasons for my ambivalence to iTMS are threefold: value, tangibility and information. Let me explain…
So after much anticipation, the iTunes Music Store finally launched here in the UK. But don’t get your hopes up for finding anything you actually want to buy.
It was hot, it was sweaty and it absolutely bloody rocked. Jeremy, Jessica and I were privileged to be among the 150 folks squeezed into Brighton’s Freebutt to see British Sea Power perform one of their famous intimate gigs.
This morning, I received a link-swapping email from someone called Dom. I don’t do link swaps – I get plenty of traffic as it is – and if I like your site I’ll link to it anyway. Fortunately for Dom I do like his site, or more particularly I like his…
I’ve recently been enjoying Asterisk’s Song of the Week feature, so much so that I may ‘borrow’ the idea. In the meantime, here’s the some personal recommendations by way of the track listing to my compilation ‘The Best Songs I Bought In 2003…
So I’ve just downloaded iTunes for Windows and it’s lovely. Straight away, here’s three things it’s got over Windows Media player: Music sharing with your local network. Quick browsing – play an individual album in your library with one click.
Last night, Her Indoors took me to see Duran Duran at the Kentish Town Forum. Not my usual taste in music, but…
Until today, the listening right now bit and the last 50 listens page were generated with the help of BlogAmp, a neat little plug-in for WinAmp 2. The trouble was it only worked through JavaScript document.write statements; not exactly best practice. So I figured there…
The country music legend died in Nashville, Tennessee, aged 71. I started listening to Johnny Cash only very recently, having heard his wonderful covers of non-country songs such has Depeche Mode’s Personal Jesus. The Guardian has a feature entitled Five extraordinary…
Why I haven’t been blogging much recently and what I’ve missed over the past few weeks. Highlights include Todd Dominey’s PGA Open Championship and Phantom Power, the new album from Super Furry Animals. Also a brief critique of the new Pixelsurgeon site.
This Easter weekend I managed to spend some quality time alone with my hi-fi and some choice vinyl. At the time I put together a list of stuff to buy – help me choose.
The real reason the West Pier collapsed. Nice one Bricey. More on the Glasshaus collapse. It seems that Wrox’s parent company, Peer Information, is the one to be liquidated, along with all its assets. Many ex-employees have posted their details on Graphic Design…
The discovery of X-Ray magazine was one of life’s little synchronies. I was moaning with Marcus about how there doesn’t seem to be a music magazine that quite fits our need. NME always seemed too puerile, even when we were young enough to buy it; Q is fine, but…
It makes for really dull conversation when everyone agrees, but right now a number of people are talking sense and I feel better for it….
Beth Gibbons, of Portishead fame, has teamed up with Rustin’ Man (Talk Talk) to create a gorgeous sounding album, out today. The album is called Out of Season and has a great website which makes good use of frames† to keep a Flash 6 jukebox ever present and looping…
Bownie and Chris will be showing off their music software, Rosegarden, at the Linux Expo in Olympia, London on the 9th-10th October. Registration is free on the website and on the door.
The new Sea of Wires site has just this second been launched. It was rebuilt and redesigned to promote their rather lovely new EP, Leaving The Electric Circus.
Multimap is hiring. If you fancy working in London for a small, friendly company and are skilled in Perl, Unix/Linux, Oracle/MySQL, XML, OOP/OOD and maybe a bit of GIS then please send us your CV or resumé. Stereolab have a really original way of presenting their…
Fabulous quote from Iggy Pop.
BlogAmp is a free Winamp plugin that allows you to publish details of songs being played. I will be playing with it soon. This week Jakob tells us how to become Usability professionals, just like him. Experience is the key, my friend. Nick Usborne writes copy for web sites;…
Prior to the new album, some groovy new tunes have arrived at Sea of Wires. Go download ‘Self Talk and Comfort Zones’.
Just found Anton Corbijn’s portfolio site. (Corbijn is responsible for just about every U2 album cover, as well as numerous others including Depeche Mode & Tricky.) There are lots of examples of past work and fascinating insights into his more famous photos.
Gaz Combes, he of Supergrass fame, lives just around the corner from me. So when, the other Sunday, we both turned up at my local, it was not really a surprise. But what is the etiquette in this situation? Here he is: a neighbour, but also the lead singer of a rock band. One…
