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The Totality Of Now? Beth Gibbons’ Floating On A Moment

Sometimes a song can catch you in a moment, striking a deep chord, as if speaking to you from the most profound truth or reality that you could encounter in that moment. So it has been for me recently with this stunning composition from Beth Gibbons (Floating On A Moment – below) which was released […]

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Audience Of The Unreal – Slint (w/ Carax’s Holy Motors)

Recently came across this excellent recording from 2005 of Slint playing their song Don, Aman live (video below). I’ve written before about Slint and the 2014 documentary Breadcrumb Trail by Lance Bangs that charts their formation and the production of their stunning 1991 album Spiderland, following which they (mostly) disbanded. After finishing that piece I […]

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Quick Focus: Gibbons / Gorecki

Whilst writing a piece about Beth Gibbons’ stunning 2024 song Floating On A Moment, this excellent concert video came my way (below). I was told about The 3rd Symphony by Henryck Gorecki (1933-2010) in the early 2000’s and was immediately spell bound. An astonishing modern classical piece composed in 1976 whose defining rendition has been […]

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Through The Lens Here – Paint Outside

When I saw this piece recently, on a wall by a canal near Victoria Park in East London, it certainly stood out. Nestled among the usual pile up of signatures and tags, the wood for the trees of graffiti – it stood out immediately. So striking with it’s three colours and the beautifully striated striping […]

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‘Eternity is in love…’ (Blake, Sparklehorse, The Verve)

London The Song, London The Poem I ended up getting more than bargained for recently while revisiting this special song ‘London’ (Above) by Sparklehorse. Introduced to me in 1995 by a friend at University when it was released as a b-side. I’ve kind of orbited Sparklehorse in the intervening years, hearing some delights but for whatever […]

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Return of Fisher/Barton’s londonunderlondon after 20 years

The impact of the collaborative work between Mark Fisher and Justin Barton, specifically their audio essay ‘On Vanishing Land’ (released on Hyperdub imprint Flatlines in 2019) has been a slow but powerful permeation (more of which below) – which has led to a renewed focus and interest in their first work of this kind, londonunderlondon […]

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Through the Lens Here – People/Tableau

This young man was in Kennington Park in south London while I was taking a lunch break there and I enjoyed this shot as it came through, the moment in which he is facing in one direction while looking in another, as if a momentary consideration of different directions. Nicely framed by the large tree […]

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Excursive Fragments – Beach House, Tortoise

The Walls of Perception While recently taking in the lovely 2012 song ‘Lazuli‘ (above) from dreamy Baltimore-sprung synth-pop artists Beach House (Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally) I began to think more about the video directed by Allen Cordell. Along with the song’s beautiful, cascading background-sadness affect, the video quickly establishes itself as being of both […]

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Unyielding Freedom – Parkour (w/ Team Storror)

Most of us come across the odd meme or video of an extraordinary feat culled from Parkour. Adrift in the seas of algorithmic imagery, it has become an accepted cultural wallpaper of the sublime. Feats of quasi-sorceric accomplishment on the part of human bodies, invested mostly among the unyielding vertiges of the modern conurbation. Looping among […]

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Intensive Navigations in The Expanse (2015-2022)

Having recently re-watched the deep evolution of story in the Expanse over its six seasons it is hard not to feel that there was (and is) something special at work in this adaptation. Initially cancelled by Syfy channel after three gradually ramped up seasons – it was rescued by Amazon for three more before its […]

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Fiction Teaches Us Our Dreams (AI in Stories 1968-)

There are many reasons to have real reservations and concerns as human beings rush headlong and with maximum speed, the creation and ongoing development of AI, while integrating them more quickly and thoroughly into every aspect of our lives. It is a development that promises more in the direction of its already hugely divisive and controversial […]

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Artwork collaboration – colour stages

As a birthday present towards the end of last year Folders Arrangements drew this image for me with ink on card, he indicated it had been inspired from drawings I had done previously. It was true that I felt a kindship with the drawing immediately. It was interesting to get back something that I felt I […]

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Through the lens here – the Line of Difference

Looking through some photo’s recently and it occurred to me that some of them could be defined in terms of the idea of the line, incurring transformation in the frame, or otherwise differentiating a space, relationships, forms. The photo below is what crystalised this idea. I was walking during a lunch break and couldn’t believe […]

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Grunge Vortex – Pumpkins, Nirvana and Posies

I recently found myself going back to songs from the second album by Smashing Pumpkins, 1993’s Siamese Dream and two songs in particular, Hummer (live – above) and Mayonaise (below). Over the last few years I’ve returned to a lot of the music I listened to in the 90’s as I moved through the experiences […]

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Explorations in Video – Solar Violet (& Mark Fisher)

As I noted here, it took an improbable 8 years for me to record and finish the album ‘Blade of Earth‘ which was posted to Bandcamp in 2021. As my love of music has been influenced by so many incredible artists and styles of song (and sound), the album needed to reflect that variety and […]