"there are immaturities, but there are immensities" - Bright Star (dir. Jane Campion)>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "the fear of being wrong can keep you from being anything at all" - Nayland Blake >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> "It may be foolish to be foolish, but, somehow, even more so, to not be" - Airport Through The Trees
The Face is no more - again . Which is sad. But they've also taken down their website, leaving no trace of pieces written in its second incarnation. I think I only did the one - but it was one I thought was one of my best in recent years. So here it is below: a piece about trap and its internationalization. They didn't use the "Trap Internationale" headline, which is understandable but I did mourn…
The Caretaker Everywhere at the End of Time 2019 History Always Favours The Winners (part of Resident Advisor 's 2000-2025 Best Albums) Memories are ghosts inside your mind; samples are ghosts extracted from records and trapped in forever loops. Starting from these premises, The Caretaker takes snippets of maudlin balladry from pre-World War II crooners like Al Bowlly and subjects them to…
A tribute to Robert Wyatt, written and recorded for remote participation in a 2025 birthday celebration for the Great Man, organized by Sukhdev Sandhu at NYU Another great Englishman Mark E. Smith once said “I hated The Soft Machine and that kind of thing. Rock was ruined when the students took it over”. Having been a student once, and middle class through and through, it falls to me to mount a…
(a talk I gave at Harvard in 2012 at a conference on Art + Rock) “When 'art' walks through the door, it's got 15 suitcases full of very smelly washing (ideas of 'geniuses', 'creativity', 'individualism', and the rest of it)...which as far as we're concerned is the kind of crap that just clutters up your back garden, and gets in the way when you want to go out…. There is an art-based conversation…
In honour of the new RHCP doc, which is focused on Hillel Slovak, their tragically-died-young guitarist, and in further honour of Flea's jazz album, here are some writhings about the band. Whose second album Freaky Styley I bought with faint hope after reading about them (slim pickings that year) only to be insufficiently whelmed. They were apparently huge postpunk fans (something shown by the…
THE RESIDENTS RETRO-ACTIVE Melody Maker, 1989? 1990? by Simon Reynolds From the start, The Residents had a parasitical relation to the pop culture that surrounded them. The sleevenotes to "Meet The Residents", their 1973 debut, describes how they spent the Sixties scavenging together a collection of sonic detritus: "cassettes of soldiers in Vietnam singing songs with impromptu instrumentation...…
f rom the 2017 Pitchfork greatest-IDM-list (that ruffled a few feathers , that did , it was like negative catnip for nerds! I had nothing to do with the selection, honest, apart from being one of many who sent their ballot in) Isolée: Rest (2000) There was a moment, around the turn of the millennium, when IDM-aligned figures like Matthew Herbert started to embrace the slinky sensuality of the…
One intriguing counterfactual in rock history is what would have happened if drummer Kenny Morris and guitarist John McKay had not quit Siouxsie and the Banshees at the start of a major tour - after an altercation at an LP signing session in an Aberdeen record shop... McKay & Morris broke their silence about their seemingly impulsive decision to leave a few months later, in December '79 In the…
Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase. Here is Matt's lovely tribute to the Black Dog from a few years ago Here's my own writing about the group: THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma emusic, 2007 A legend in techno circles, The Black Dog’s music is like the missing link between Coil’s eldritch electronica…
Sleeve notes for In A Moment... (Ghost Box compilation , 2015) Tell me what you see vanishing and I Will tell you who you are W.S. Merwin, " For Now " It’s a moment that a music journalist dreads – when an acquaintance or recently acquired friend shyly pipes up, “Actually, I’ve been making some music myself... would really like to know what you think of it....” When it happens, it always feels…
director's cut of piece in the The Guardian, roughly a year ago - with the follow-up blog pieces below I started blogging in 2002. Prior to that I’d operated a website for around six years, but what grabbed me about blogging was the speed and the responsiveness – the way blogs picked up on what other blogs posted and responded almost in real time. I wanted to jump right into the midst of this…
Danny Thompson worked with a host of people, including a stint in Pentangle, but for many of us he is inseparable from the name John Martyn - and revered as the co-author of "Go Down Easy", "I'd Rather Be The Devil", "Solid Air", "Couldn't Love You More", "Glistening Glyndebourne".... Here by way of indirect tribute are three pieces about Martyn in which Thompson flits into view here and there.…
Oneohtrix Point Never Village Voice , July 6, 2010 by Simon Reynolds Daniel Lopatin, the young man behind the spacey and spacious mindscapes of Oneohtrix Point Never, operates out of a cramped bedroom in Bushwick. Most of it is taken up by vintage Eighties synthesizers, rhythm boxes, and assorted sound-processing gizmos, plus a gigantic computer monitor. Every inch of surface area is covered with…
Pete Shelley tribute Pitchfork, December 8 2028 by Simon Reynolds The first and only time I saw Buzzcocks play live was in 2012, at the Incubate festival in Holland. They seemed an incongruous choice for a festival otherwise dedicated to experimentalism and dark cutting-edge fare. Although I love the band’s late-1970s output, I never would have actively sought out their live incarnation as a…
A Split Second / A Taste of Sugar / Erotic Dissidents Sin, London Melody Maker , January 21 1989 by Simon Reynolds
Melody Maker , November 18, 1989 April 15th 1989 - a swipe in a Melody Maker singles page BLACK SABBATH The Complete 70's Replica CD Collection 1970-78 (Sanctuary Records) Uncut, 2001 by Simon Reynolds The mystery of the riff--so crucial to rock, so oddly neglected by critics. Or perhaps not so strangely, given that riffs are almost impossible to write about: just try explaining why one…
When I wrote this snide review of the dirty old man's memoir I'd clean forgotten that if nothing else he had made the best Stone-involved record of the last - well now it would 3 and a half decades - but in 1990 just a decade. This and "Start Me Up", the last great actual Rolling Stones record, were released the same year.
Belated RIP... there's been a lot going on... You have to wonder about these two great Californians, Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, dying the week that troops are sent into LA. " I've seen enough... I'm outta here ". Today, it's the government that's rioting... At the bottom you will find my circa 1990 review of the first-time-on-CD reissue of There's A Riot Goin' On, rather in the shadow of the…
LCD Soundsystem, live, a week ago, Bowery Ballroom… … was more exciting than I’d thought. Came with minimal expectations really (a guy and a synth and a drum machine?) and was ambushed by the physical full-band force of it. The sheer rockfunk. Shades at times of the Contortions, Happy Mondays, even a hint of Stooges attack. An American Lo-Fidelity Allstars? As well as a fine flesh-and-blood…
Melody Maker , June 18 1986 David Thomas at the first Carrot Festival, Warsaw, Poland - Melody Maker April 18 1987 Pere Ubu at the second Carrot festival in Budapest, Hungary Melody Maker , April 2 1988 Melody Maker , June 24 1989 Finally, in 2002, I got to meet the great man. I was in the U.K. for the summer to research Rip It Up and Start Again - after various unsuccessful efforts, I got a call…
The Feelies / Died Pretty ULU, London Melody Maker , November 29 1986 The Feelies The Good Earth Melody Maker , September 27 1986 And the answer is.... no. Until today, in fact. Crazy Rhythms , I like rather more. But it's a pretty pared-down pleasure. The self-effacing austerity of this kind of thing - its un-Iggyness - is why I never really got with the college rock program. Songs from Crazy…
Well, if the last few weeks in LA have not been traumatizing enough - and then we've had the hideousness of the inauguration and unfolding horror of the first few days of Trump: The Return... on top of all that, there's also been a flurry of sad-making deaths. Saddest for me was learning that the writer Geoff Nicholson had gone. I didn't know Geoff well - but he was a fellow Brit expat in Los…
THE CURE Pulse , June 1992 by Simon Reynolds Robert Smith sits alone at the office of Fiction, the U.K. label of the Cure, the band he formed at age 17 and has led for a decade and a half since. It's a rare opportunity to meet one-on-one with the group's vocalist, songwriter and sometimes-guitarist; determined to promote the idea that "The Cure Is A Band," all of Smith 's recent encounters have…
A 2018 piece for Stanford Live on Bowie's death and the art of the eulogy. The night that the news went out that David Bowie had died, I was just finishing a book in which he was the central figure. On January 10 th 2016, I was literally on the last pages of my glam rock history Shock and Awe when Twitter told me that this towering pop figure had fallen. A mixture of emotions muddied my mind.…
A little souvenir of a terrible year... something I wrote about doomscrolling for Sasha Frere-Jones's end-of-year writer-buddies round-up , looking back over 2023 and looking ahead to 2024, which has been even more "how can this be reality?!?" than I could have imagined. Hoping for some hopescrolling come Tuesday night.... update: 4 more years of doomscrolling is it then.... at a bare minimum…