Well, yeah. There were some great tapes as well. Even Select had some good ones.

Two ‘free’ 7” compilations given away with Sounds, featuring Celtic Frost, Motörhead, Jesus and Mary Chain, Head of David, Stupids etc - they are titled Sounds Wave 1 & 2

I know there are complex geopolitical & economic machinations, global environmental disaster, the veer towards fascism & the threat of AI but couldn’t SOME of this be sorted by a return to a universe where music weeklies gave out free 7”s every now and then?

Under very weird conditions - rare tropical fever, almost died - at 5ish years old, I saw Barbarella; specifically the bit with Duran Duran & the ‘Excessive Machine’. Formative.

You can see a dozen or so CDs: several Fabric CDs, Booka Shade, several Four Tet, Underworld, Death in Vegas, Rough Trade compilations

Rarely get any good charity shop finds these days but got all of these from one shop today…

What? Can’t believe the Lithuanian sperm farmers release is out & I didn’t know. Must be all this payola shit about Boards of Canada & Geese clogging my timeline…

Oh wow. I read the book years ago & knew about this movie but never realised they were linked.

This is lovely

Exactly.

Zero interest in Geese but seems weird to single them out as the result of industry-led PR / marketing / payola or whatever - do you REALLY think your favourite festival regular DJ / band just turned out that way because they were IRRESISTABLY GOOD? Was it REALLY word-of-mouth that got them there?

Think I have to stop reading Houellebecq. I don’t think reading Houellebecq is making me happy.

I feel like if we all stopped believing in Alamy it would eventually disappear.

Submission by Michel Houellebecq - the sleeve is a night shot of a dark Paris with the Eiffel Tower illuminated, possibly ironically.

Only about half way through but depressing that Houellebecq feels more like realism as every year passes. Very much ‘not for everyone’ but also grimly fascinating.

We see Hitler & Chamberlain at a meeting. A flash of a Nazi armband

Holiday reading is this short, devastating, fictionalisation of various meetings between the Nazis & foreign dignitaries in the lead up to WW2. Eric Vuillard’s Prix Goncourt wining The Order of the Day. It’s probably all true.

Listening to Boards of Canada. In the universe where all the guys who got REALLY into BoC instead got into Coil… things might have got interesting.

A dark haired woman in a dive bar, looking up contemptuously at some poor sap of a guy while smoking & wearing a white shirt under a white jacket.

Rewatching The Last Seduction (1994) for the first time since it was at the cinema. Perhaps one of the most 90s movies ever but still holds up and Linda Fiorentino is perhaps the hottest anyone has ever been. Also: I need a cigarette.

Always thought William Burroughs was camping it up about Venusian word viruses or whatever but the AI bros seem to be evidence that the Venusians are getting the upper hand…

Talking about a collapse of the music economy as though that wasn't something that happened already in the distant past.

"what if we stopped buying music" bitter lol

Yeah, me too…

Yeah, that’s one of my favourite Iggy collaborations (and there’s a LOT of Iggy collaborations)

This project was amazing; some of the stuff they were trying put them streets ahead of other similar-level ‘big’ artists…

The note on a post-it reads: introspective self-analysis, first person selective narrative, credible insight and ????? (Help me out here), Pretty depressing!

Love finding notes in second-hand books. This one was in The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.

Don’t normally like Hip Hop skits but here they integrate them into a very trippy collage that makes perfect sense alongside the beats and the rapping / poetry

The Birdcatcher's Return

Now playing Circle, the album by Boom Bip & Doseone. Leaf were putting out some great stuff around this time & I loved the whole Anticon crew. This somehow sounds even better than it did at the time. m.youtube.com/watch?v=eyAo...

An amazing b&w swirling poster with a giant unblinking eye and a broken woman kneeling in desperation.

Watched The Exterminating Angel last night. Wow. I love all of Bunuel’s films but I hadn’t seen this one & now I think it might be my favourite. Can’t think of a director that skewers class so effectively

The cover says, amongst other marketing quotes, “international bestseller”, which seems plausible. It’s mostly the same colour pink as my old hallway & there’s a fish shaped soy sauce sachet thing.

Just finished Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata & was reminded of a time long ago when all I seemed to read was lightly strange, short #books about nothing & maybe everything. Still like this kind of thing.

Another clip from the Centrala gig.

I think a lot of things ARE like that but there’s lots in Bristol that are fairly old school in their intent… and phones are starting to be semi-banned as well which is a nice development

Oh absolutely… “hair metal in rave form” sounds good though 😂

I have to confess I went to a Dutch psytrance thing one New Years Eve (this is 15+ years ago) & it was great - they do it quite well, I think

😂 we’ve all been traumatised by a psytrance thing