46 is far too young. Thank you for the music, Romanthony.
Keep the faith
I just realised that the concert I can hear from my studio flat in Sofia right now is Bon Jovi. For the last couple of hours I’d thought it was some old country rock band. It wasn’t until “Keep The Faith” that it clicked. The guitar lines are pretty epic. It’s weird, not only because it feels like I’ve slipped back to the 90s, but because today people were protesting over the Bulgarian election results. I could hear them through my window too. Faith is a stretch when it feels like nothing ever changes.
Jane Chandler: Print Artist
If you are in London and you like beautiful prints and it is still May if/when you happen to see this, then you should pop along to Jane Chandler‘s Prints exhibition. She is a dear friend and dearly talented. Details on the flyer above.
благодаря
This ridiculously Getty-ish image is the real-life view that greeted me at 6.30am yesterday morning. That’s Batak Lake in the Rhodope Mountains, to the south of Bulgaria. It’s just as pretty in person.
By this lake I finished Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, a wonderfully witty, insightful and moving dissection of Celine Dion’s divisive superstardom and how privilege, prejudice and our own personal stories lurk beneath ideas of taste. Many of Wilson’s lines thrilled me but this one near finished me off: ”Just as churches say God saves every miserable sinner, the secular lesson is that time doesn’t leave anybody out either: no matter how stuck you feel, you still get to go to the future.” [Thanks, Caspar.]
I ran from Wilson’s arms right into Janet Frame’s. The third volume of her autobiography, in fact; a going away gift from Zillakiller. Frame strips bare to the bones in the telling of her story, inviting us into a world strung together with taut red ligaments. So much stung but especially this serendipitous line: “a life supervised, blessed and made lonely by the sky”.
Come on in, the water’s lovely
Boiler Room tonight was the epitome of why I love London’s music scene: a bunch of people huddled in a little room, leaning into the music, thrilled by the closeness and ready to be surprised. It’s those little conversations, those little smiles, those little nods: they are the layers on layers that bind and remind me why I hold it dear. Damn – and who was that girl singing over Micachu’s scruffy funk beats? She was something else.
Then I sit in a cab on the drive back to Brixton and I know I’m done. I see the place I told my old boss in another life that I wasn’t long for that job, I pass the record shop that is no longer a record shop, and I trace my old bike ride home when I was first learning this new life route. All these memories in all these streets, concrete drenched in days gone by. And Pure X are in my ears, singing ” all of the future, all of the past” and I feel what they mean more than ever.
Off the grid
I am going away on a sort-of sabbatical. I’ve pulled the plug on Twitter for a bit and will be off email.
If you want to speak to someone at Dummy, head over to the contact page.
See you on the other side.
Edifeye meets Dummy
Hoxton FM’s Edifeye Radio show invited me along to their last show to have a chat about Dummy and the role of music journalism today. I also played a few tunes by artists I’ve been writing about on Dummy since the beginning. Listen back via the link below.
DUMMY MAGAZINE x EDIFEYE RADIO 14/04/2013 by Edifeye Radio on Mixcloud
Sounds Of…Solitude
This is my last Sounds Of… show on NTS for a couple of months. Ele will be talking the reins for May and June so stay tuned. We’ll be back together in July. The theme of this month was Sounds Of…Solitude. The recording is a little crappy for some reason but hopefully it’s still sort-of listenable. Tracklist below.
Tracklist
Ryuichi Sakamoto – Solitude
Lukid – Lonely At The Top
Wiley – Us Against The World
Majical Cloudz – Childhood’s End
Joy Division – Atmosphere
Samoyed – Minnow
Actress – Raven
Yellow Swans – Isolation Tank
The Knife – Ready To Lose
Bullion – The Age Of Self
Mount Kimbie – Made To Stray
Lone – Petrcane Beach
Bjork – Hyperballad
Sunless 97 – Aurora I
Phoenix – Entertainment (Blood Orange remix)
New Order – Dream Never End
Suzanne Vega – Luka
James Blake – I Am Sold
Tweet – Smoking Cigarettes
Janet Jackson – I Get Lonely
King Krule – Portrait In Black & Blue
Lonely Galaxy – Heavy
Laurel Halo – Speed Of Rain
Physical Therapy – Do It Alone
SSION – My Love Grows In The Dark (Physical Therapy remix)
Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy
The things we say
I took part in London artist Margot Bowman‘s 15 Folds project last month. It’s a bit like Chinese whispers, she told me: one person makes a gif and then the next person responds to it in gif form, and so on. I’d never made a gif before. This is how it turned out.
Jam City interview in Tank
Read the Jam City interview in Tank [Spring 2012 issue]
Photograph by Ed Fenwick.
