"a Simon Reynolds level culture blog" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"my brain thinks bloglike"
Nearly two months since publication date, Still is still going strongBut please buy it from anywhere else but the Evil Empire - ideally from a bookshop if you can!!! NEW !!Great chat with James Marples for The Readings Podcast, in Melbourne. Also at Apple and Spotify.REACTIONS FROM READERS WHO DIDN'T GET SENT IT FOR FREE"Surprised even myself by how much I enjoyed and
REACTIONS FROM READERS WHO DIDN'T GET SENT IT FOR FREE"Surprised even myself by how much I enjoyed and devoured this book. Just loved it.... What I really appreciate about Simon’s writing is his capacity to trace the lineage of sounds and influences, his thoughtful capacity to put words to ineffable qualities of music.... but perhaps moreso, his ability to see into the ethos of the time,
Check out my Instagram Instagram.com/simonreynoldswriter/ for the latest news about Still In A DreamNEW Baker's Dozen on reinvention of the guitar at The QuietusSTILL IN A DREAM UK TOUR JUNE 15-20Monday 15 - London - Rough Trade East Location: Old Truman Brewery 91, Brick Ln, London E1 6QL Time: doors open 7pm, event starts 8pm on dotConversation with Miki Berenyi (
Goodness, but it's been glorious out there in the parish lately.The combination of all that heavy rain earlier in the year - and the spell of cloudless skies and midsummer heat in late April - resulted in a virulent verdancy I've never seen before.What did the poet say? The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foilDancersend
Our Kid with a Rabbit Holed about the wacky world of the Young Wikipedians who are frenziedly writing the second draft of music history. (The first draft being the journalism that these shadowy aliased individuals cite and source). Kieran's piece takes you inside the sausage-making process of how decisions get made on what is "real" and who deserves an entry.....This
Matthew Ingram has been on a bit of a tear of blogging recently at his several active blogs. At Woebot, there's been thoughts about Eno's own thoughts on technology and politics, and about music and AI, and a sweet photo blog about a trip to Margate by bicycle. Oh and I almost forgot: a cool post about Mike Oldfield and Virgin Records, triggered by an old (well 2014) Mike O doc on
Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any music book this year that isn't called Still In A Dream.... But I concede that there are some other interesting music books out there. A couple of which I have blurbed. There's ex-Contortion Adele Bertei's No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene. About which I offered: "Adele Bertei rips up the
"Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music - it's a great book full stop, Reynolds' best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis of edgelordism, from the
Stephen Alexander, at his always interesting and insanely prolific blog Torpedo the Ark, brightens my day, at this ever more darkening time, with a post about three Simons of roughly the same age and with certain affinities: Armitage, Critchley, Reynolds. As I note in his comments section, it was a ridiculously common name for boys born from the late '50s to early '70s, such
Really happy to have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite albums of the 21st Century so far: Suburban Tours by Rangers. For Pitchfork's Sunday Review series. It was also an opportunity to get started - possibly jumping a gun a bit, since it's only 16 years since, but why not? - on feeling nostalgic about chillwave a/k/a hypnagogic pop. The Rangers review is also a kind of
Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling distinctly one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.The anniversary celebration came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel Pone earlier this year but
Son vaults ahead of father by joining the select grouping of music critics who have had diss songs aimed at them by aggrieved musicians. In this case, the wounded ones rather disingenuously claim that "this song is about the modern American music critic, not about one single person, and any resemblance between the characters in this video and any persons, living or dead, is their
Had a fun chat with Lawrence of Mozart Estate / Go-Kart Mozart / Denim / Felt legend, condensed into this pithy Pitchfork Q+A Kieran on Kirkslop (it's what you think it is) for GQDid a bunch of interviews while in Argentina - this one by Romina Zanellato for Cenital is a good read (and can be easily flipped into English). Another one worth a look is Carlos Priego's for Le Tempestad 
A couple of things to read:Kieran spends a "messy evening" with Bassvictim, whose music is one of the rare things he's alerted me to that I actively enjoy, but who sound rather alarming as an interview experience. And then this mega-post from Matthew Ingram at Sick Veg which is not just something else worth reading but a gateway to an enormous number of other things worth reading. In
Me and Kieran are going to Argentina this week for the 20th anniversary celebrations of Caja Negra, the Buenos Aires publisher who have put out nearly all of the books of mine that have been translated into Spanish. Actually it takes four to tango because the panel event we are doing on Saturday November 15 at 7pm at the Deseo Club is a quadraphonic colloquy with Argentinian writers Pablo
A couple of related pieces from Kieran Press-Reynolds:1/ A sharply observed portrait for GQ of the trio behind the popular left-wing podcast TrueAnon. The show started out with deep descents into the foulness pit of Epstein-Maxwell, but quickly diversified, becoming "an oracle of our hysterical times," K writes. "In an online slopscape dominated by far-right furor and mercenary
Here's a funny and sharply observed report by Kieran Press-Reynolds on a "no phones" event called OFFLINE, the brainchild of ex-politician / President-wannabe Andrew Yang. People pay through the nose to reconnect briefly with undistracted living-in-the-here-the-now. Cool animated graphic by the team at Rabbit Holed / Pitchfork depicts Kieran and Yang both fondling some Astro-turf.
Poptimism - the debate that refuses to go away, yet never goes anywhere. Deadlocked, yet churning. The recent rechurn stirred up memories of the fierce arguments of the early 2000s - 20-plus years ago! Supposedly, during these initially amiable, soon adversarial blog back-and-forths, it was me that came up with the term "poptimist". Probably not true, in fact - but certainly
Fun piece by Kieran Press-Reynolds looking at oblique strategies for digging up weird music, with a hierarchy of engagements mode from basic to ultra-obscurantist.I had to look up the word "ran-through"
My friends Oliver Wang and Sharon Mizota are conducting a survey of music critics who currently work in America. Please participate if you fit the description and can spare a few minutes to leave some completely anonymized data. Message from Wang / Mizota below:Calling all pop music critics! Please take the Critical Minded Pop Music Critic Survey. This survey is open to pop music critics
Writer-photographer Pat Blashill is a very old mate. We've been friends since 1989, after working together on some stories in New York for Melody Maker - he did the artist portraits and I wrote up the interviews. One of them was Sun Ra, would you believe!Before he moved to New York, Pat was involved in Austin's punk-and-after scene, documenting the mayhem in real-time with his camera. That
Hasten to read - while the paywall is relaxed for 24 hours - this fascinating conversation between Kieran Press-Reynolds and Shawn Reynaldo (no relation) for the latter's substack First Floor. Kieran talks about being a Gen Z writer about music + memes + internet subcultures - or as Reynaldo puts it, "mapping the brainrot continuum". There's also some glimpses into Press-Reynolds family life
RIP Keith Dobson of World Domination Enterprises, possibly the most exciting live band I have ever seen still to this day, and creators of the immortal "Asbestos Lead Asbestos".Lovely bloke and he had the gift of the gab so fun to interview.Keith - who once went as Kif Kif le Batteur - had a long history with countercultural music going back to the ebb days of the actual counterculture - he
"Actively passive, losing-itself-in-the-noise" - new column by Kieran Press-Reynolds steps out of his lane to explore the "dreamy malaise" of "hazy new-gen alt-rock": bar italia, untitled halo, deer park et al.Slackerdelia part 3, only this time they don't even have the energy to capitalize their names... Slackerdelia part 3? Well obviously part 1 is Mercury Rev, Pavement etc.&
We took in three No Kings protests across Los Angeles on Saturday - West Hollywood, Los Feliz, and Pasadena. Here, for Vanity Fair, are Joy Press's snapshot impressions of the joyous day and the way it ran counter to the "maddeningly out-of-whack" version of life-in-LA-right-now circulated by the national and international media. The Los Feliz was insane - a nonstop honkathonic carnival on