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Steve Hillage has had a long and interesting musical life- part of the Canterbury scene in the early 70s, solo and with Kevin Ayres and Soft Machine, then Gong with Daevid Allen (and where he met his partner Miquette Giraudy, his and Miquette's 1979 solo ambient opus Rainbow Dome Musick, production work with Simple Minds in the early 80s and The Charlatans a decade later and from 1989 his and Miquette's ambient/ dance outfit System 7 with The Orb and Youth and he played a key role in establishing the dance tent at Glastonbury.

Steve and Miquette are not standing still. System 7 are back with a new album, Flower Of Life, out later this month. A single came out ahead of it at the end of March, I Want More...

Coldcut's Matt Black is present on I Want More, which starts out with Can inspired bass and then mutates into pulsing synthlines, Matt's demo the launchpad for a soaring, insistent, four- four track that began as a discussion about Miquette's early 70s film soundtrack work, specifically a French underground film from 1969 about heroin addiction in Ibiza called More (to which Pink Floyd contributed the soundtrack). This short clip provides a flavour of the film...

This is Pink Floyd's Main Theme from the soundtrack, a very late 1960s Floyd track- cymbal splashes, wheezy organ, skittery drumming and throbbing bass. The sound of what they called a Happening. 

Main Theme

System 7's album follows in couple of weeks, ten tracks with early 90s ambient/ progressive house grooves and synth sounds. The title track pulses with positivity. On Beulah Alex Paterson from The Orb shows up, crunchy drums, synth squiggles, a Mae West vocal sample and visions of fields filled with dancers. There are faster and thumpier tracks, full on banging psy- trance on Atmosphere and an Eat Static collaboration Transceptor. Penultimate track Bonjour takes us down, three minutes of comedown with a slightly paranoid edge that eventually evens out. Flower Of Life finishes with a System 7 remix of Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society, Dubby Chain Signal is an extended downtempo/ ambient, chill out room delight that could be twice its seven minute length and not outstay its welcome. 

Better Days Are Coming

Nightmares On Wax released In A Space Outta Sound in 2006, the fifth album by George Evelyn. The sound was a trippy blend of soul, reggae and electronics, a late night album for heads, lots of detail in the sounds. Flip Ya Lid has some cheerful whistling and a clanking machine rhythm and then a lovely warm reggae bassline. 

Flip Ya Lid

Soul Purpose is electronic soul, lo fi and scratchy like an old 7" playing with a new vocal sung alongside it. It's entrancing and not a little beautiful. 

Soul Purpose

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of In A Space Outta Sound Warp have released a box set which includes a set of  Adrian Sherwood versions, eight new dubbed out remixes that make a companion version, another side of the album. Sherwood's reconstructions head into dub space, that particular place and channel he operates in. He's been on a roll in recent years with solo releases, compilations and Dub Syndicate reissues. His album The Collapse Of Everything was a 2025 highlight. His work on In A Space Outta Dub is more of the same, the usual brilliance with Doug Wimbish playing new bass. 

On You Bliss Sherwood blurs horns, guitar lines and bass, all surrounded by echo and space. On Purpose starts out spindly and brittle but then the vocal kicks in, 'better days are coming you see', and we're into dub/ Lover's Rock territory. Flippin 'Eck has Flip Ya Lid's whistling and an entirely new rhythm, a Space Invaders sound. Final track, Nyabinghi Dub, is seriously good, a filmic piece of music with a 50s feel. You can listen to the whole album below or go to Bandcamp and get it there.

Out To Lunch

Glen Matlock's documentary I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol was on TV last week. It came out last year, based on Matlock's book of the same name and is very much the Glen Matlock side of the SexPistols story. Glen seems like a nice person, reflective and a music lover, fired up by an introduction to the bass guitar and a love The Faces in the mid- 70s. Various people pop up to support Glen- Clem Burke, Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Billy Idol, Cheetah Chrome and Wayne Kramer all make frequent appearances. The film traces the formation and rise of the Pistols, from Glen getting a job at Malcolm and Vivienne's shop Sex on the King's Road and meeting Steve and Paul through the shop, forming the band (originally with Wally Nightingale, who was later dropped in favour of John Lydon/ Johnny Rotten) and learning to play and write together. Things change when John Lydon joins and the story, which as Steve Jones says at the start of the film 'has been told a million fuckin' times', takes a familiar run through punk, bans, the jubilee, the scandal, the filth and the fury, Bill Grundy, EMI, A&M, cancelled gigs and all that.

Glen talks about his role in writing the songs that became the band's repertoire. He describes sitting in a pub and taking a melody line from an ABBA song playing on the pub's jukebox and writing Pretty Vacant from it. Jones wrote some words, later adapted by Lydon who took great glee in pronouncing vacant as two words, 'va- cunt'.  

Pretty Vacant

Glen also tells how he wrote the main riff for Anarchy In The UK on the bass guitar and took it in to Jones and Cook, and that Lydon then added the words, everything falling into place. As you'd expect the details of Glen's sacking from the band are central to the film. Paul Cook admits that he and Steve Jones could have stood up for Glen and didn't. Lydon was threatened by the make up of the band- he always felt a step removed from the other three. Cook and Jones were long term friends and a tight unit. Lydon needed an ally in the band and Sid Vicious was maneuvered in to do be that person- Glen had to go. Glen was supposedly sacked for liking The Beatles, a line McLaren came up with but in reality it was Lydon's paranoia and band politics. Jones and Cook knew that there wouldn't be a band without Lydon. 

Lydon is absent from the documentary apart from in archive footage- there's no new interview material from him and he's very much split from the Matlock, Jones, Cook version of the Sex Pistols currently playing with Frank Turner on vocals. Lydon's appearance and performance, his stare and stance, his vocal delivery and lyrics, made the Pistols into something else entirely but in no way does John look like he was ever an easy person to be in a band with. The lifespan of the Sex Pistols was always going to be short and when Lydon got Sid in on bass it was the beginning of the end- Sid's lack of ability, his heroin addiction and the US tour proved too much for all of them. Lydon, or Rotten, inadvertently destroyed the band from within. 

Glen talks very openly and a little ruefully about it all and says he made friends with Sid, offered to teach him the basslines and made a big point of showing Lydon that he bore no ill will about his sacking. The end section of the film has him looking round the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas (yes, such a thing exists and yes in such a place) and noting that they don't have a photo of the band with him in it on display. He clearly still feels a bit written out of the story. The film shows some post- Pistols Glen, The Rich Kids and other ventures, but weirdly doesn't really mention the 1996 re- union or subsequent ones at all, where Glen was reintroduced into the band and to his rightful place as co- songwriter and bass player with the Sex Pistols. 

Few, if any, bands have had such an impact on popular culture and with just one single album, a mere twelve songs. The world of 1977, the jubilee and swearing on television, councils cancelling gigs by a group who said 'shit' and 'fucking rotter' on early evening TV, seems so far away in some ways- a world where swearing on TV was actually shocking and had real life repercussions. The violence they faced was extreme and the relationship with Malcolm an obvious source of tension. Malcolm and Lydon presented their versions of events in the years after- now Matlock (and Jones) have given theirs. An entire punk scene spun off from the Pistols, in the UK and the US, thousands of bands forming over the ensuing years directly inspired by the Sex Pistols, by their sound, their image, their attitude, and that slim catalogue of songs. 

I went back to listen to Never Mind The Bollocks, to see what if any power it still holds. Hearing it again was a thrill- the sheer attack and energy of the songs, the power of Steve Jones' Les Paul, a wall of guitars, firing away is undeniable. Lydon is a one off, a complete presence, sneering and speak- singing his way across the album, from album opener Holidays In The Sun to E.M.I forty minutes later.

Matlock was actually asked to return to the studio to record the basslines for Bollocks when it became apparent Sid wasn't up to the task. He wanted payment in advance and when it didn't appear, he didn't go. The only song on Never Mind The Bollocks to include Glen playing on it is Anarchy In The UK. The rest of the bass parts were done by Jones. Bodies and Holidays In The Sun were written after Glen had left. Of all the songs on the album, Bodies is perhaps the most extreme, Lydon's lyrics about abortion and mental health issues and his anguished howl of the chorus, 'Bodies/ I'm not an animal', and the verse 'Fuck this and fuck that/ Fuck it all the fuck out/ She don't want a baby that looks like that/ I don't want a baby that looks like that', still shocking. Away from the pantomime, the who did what and why, the safety pins and the monarchy, Bodies is a visceral, uncompromising portrayal of Pauline, a Sex Pistols fan, 'who lived in a tree'. Meanwhile Steve Jones sounds like an explosion in a buzzsaw factory. 

Bodies 

Where's North From Here?

We had a really good weekend in London. The Flightpath Estate were part of the line up at the Acid House Chancers event at The Social on Saturday night, on this occasion me and Baz third on the bill in the downstairs room with Mark representing upstairs in his Rude Audio guise. It was a fantastic night, the reaction of the crowd to the music was off the scale and I will at some point recreate the set and share it here. We got loads of good feedback and my pre- set nerves at taking over from Jenny Leamon, who already had a room of people dancing, were settled fairly quickly but the fear of clearing the floor and playing to an empty room is real. 

While we were in London on Saturday we popped into Tate Modern. I wanted to see Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals (again). On turning into one of the galleries we were met straight away by Andy Warhol's Marilyn diptych, a piece of art so famous it's almost meaningless, just pop culture wallpaper. Seeing it close up and in full wall sized glory was an experience, fifty slightly different Marilyns fading from day glo colour to black and white. 

Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals take up an entire room, a series of very large, wall sized rectangles in deep reds, maroons and black. They become the room, swallowing you inside them. I can see why some people find them quite oppressive and they certainly suggest something about Rothko's state of mind when he painted them (for a restaurant originally). When I first saw them in Liverpool in 1988, an eighteen year old just arriving at university, they had an impact on me and going back to see them in London periodically over the years since, they still do. I like big art, art you can get lost in.

On Sunday morning we went out for breakfast in Soho, looking for a morning after cure and still on a high after DJing at The Social. Just round the corner from our hotel was It's Bagels, a New York style bagel shop offering breakfast bagels, the walls decorated with pictures of Bob Dylan and De La Soul. The people sitting in the window looked like they were enjoying their bagels so we went inside. The in- shop stereo was loud, playing a weirdly hallucinatory late 70s/ early 80s soundtrack, trippy yacht rock and stoned singer songwriters. Without warning Mark E. Smith suddenly boomed out, 'where's north from here?', beamed in from his guest appearance with Gorillaz in 2010. I actually laughed out loud in the queue. The expected Gorillaz electronic glam stomp never came- the syrupy yacht rock came back in, Mark E Smith's line isolated from its source and re- appropriated in a new soundtrack. 

Glitter Freeze

The bagels were very good. Not cheap but very good. 

Monday's Long Song

Sunn O))) are back with a new album, titled Sunn O))) and clad in a sleeve with two Mark Rothko paintings. Sunn O))) don't really deal in songs or melodies. They detune their guitars and play slow and sludgy drones, feedback as standard and amplifiers overloaded to the point of exhaustion. The sound and timbre are the thing, an utterly focused and single minded approach to music. For the new one there are some synths and field recordings but essentially they remain unchanged- the sound of continents colliding or ice ages passing. This is Glory Black... 

Two Hours Of Music's Not For Everyone At Terraforma

In June 2017 Andrew Weatherall played an afternoon DJ set at Terraforma, a festival near Milan, Italy. It was billed as a Music's Not For Everyone set, Weatherall's banner for an eclectic mix of music- rockabilly, dub, krautrock and cosmische, post- punk, weird indie, leftfield electronic/ Balearic, music from the fringes and the margins. The set he played at Terraforma is one piece of evidence to show what a master of the art of DJing he was, a two hour selection of songs that are perfectly selected and sequenced and that get a young and beautiful Italian crowd dancing despite the heat. 

The full two hour long genre and decades spanning set can be found at Soundcloud and there's an almost complete tracklist too. Anyone that lines up Fujiya & Miyagi's Extended Dance Mix, The Dream Syndicates' John Coltrane Stereo Blues, Moon Duo's Sevens and AMOR's Paradise in the same section of a DJ set is touched with genius.

• Karl Hector & The Malcouns: Kingdom Of D'mt
• M'Bamina: Kilowi-Kilowi
• Aşık Emrah: Bu Ellerden Göçüp 
• The Orielles: Sugar Tastes Like Salt (Andrew Weatherall Tastes Like Dub Mix Pt.1 (Live Bass)) 
• Gerry & The Holograms: Increased Resistance
• Fujiya & Miragi: Extended Dance Mix
• The Dream Syndicate: John Coltrane Stereo Blues
• Poncho Brothers: Danza Oscuro
• ?: ?
• Moon Duo: Sevens
• AMOR: Paradise
• Scientist: Step It Up (Black Star Liner RMX)
• Iries In Roots: Dub Signs 
• Winston Edwards & Blackbeard : Airport Smuggling
• Mugwump: At The Dub Front (Mugwump Extended Dub Version) 
• La Logia Sarabando: Todos O Ninguno 
• ?:?
• Klaus Dinger & Japandorf: Udon 
• Andrew Weatherall: Evidence The Enemy

Even better, if you go here you can watch the man at work for a section that starts with his remix of The Orielles, CDs in a plastic bag on the desk, sunglasses, workshirt and braces and jeans with big turnups, shimmying in the afternoon sunshine and air guitaring when he spins The Dream Syndicate.

John Coltrane Stereo Blues

Short of gorging oneself on chocolate I can't think of a better way to spend Easter Sunday. Happy Easter!

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy card said Abandon normal instruments.

I conjured up Einsturzende Neubauten, Sabres Of Paradise, The Beatnigs and Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy and Tom Waits, a variety of power tools, car bonnets, chains, grinders and bits of metal being used in place of or alongside normal instruments. The Bagging Area community offered a slew of suggestions- Split Lip Rayfield, Nana Benz du Togo, Kraftwerk, Shane Parrish, Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Split Enz, Gruff Rhys and Tony da Gattora, Gasper Nali, Tools You Can Trust and Matthew Herbert. This is Gasper Nali playing on the shores of Lake Malawi. Thanks to Chris, anonymous, Swanditch, Al G, C, Rol, Weareliz, Ernie and Charity Chic for their  contributions. 

This week's Oblique Strategy is this- Do nothing for as long as possible

And part of me did wonder about just leaving the post there and doing nothing further. 

But while that seemed conceptually correct it didn't bring any music into play. I can imagine in the studio musicians turning that card over and it becoming a Mexican standoff. Who breaks first? The drummer? The guitarist? I think bass players could stay out of things for a while, their patience levels are quite high. How long could you keep a track/ song going without doing anything?

The Specials released Do Nothing as a single in 1980, a slightly downtempo song for the band, a Lynval Golding and Jerry Dammers co- write about stasis, nothing ever changing, a life without meaning, police harassment- 'I walk and walk and do nothing' 

Do Nothing

It also gave us the only acceptable appearance of Christmas jumpers. The Specials were not a Do nothing for as long as possible type of band- everyone was very active all the time, all playing at the same time. 

There are quite a lot of songs where the band pause, the silence and a tease, a doing nothing, a moment of tension, before they crash back in. I'm not sure what the longest one is- mostly they aren't able to do nothing for as long as possible for very long. The pause in the extended freak out at the end of I Am The Resurrection is a good example...

I Am The Resurrection

The song started as a joke, Mani playing the bass riff to taxman backwards. Eventually Reni suggested working it up into a song. Ian and John found lyrical inspiration on a church noticeboard in Chorlton and when they got the song figured out Ian suggested the other three should keep playing, a funky/ Hendrix outro that could keep going and going. The do nothing for as long as possible part comes at 5.21 and lasts four seconds. Maybe that was as long as John, Mani and Reni could manage.

It's a good song for tomorrow too- Easter Sunday and resurrections are famously linked. 

Underworld's Second Hand is a ten minute ride, the synths set up and playing and repeating for nine minutes- once those loops are in motion there isn't much to do, the odd tweak here and there for Rick Smith and Darren Emerson, occasionally bring an element in or out, higher or lower in the mix. Karl Hyde is very much not doing very much at all, just the odd delay FXed guitar part. One of my favourite Underworld tracks, an absolute joy.

There a loads of songs about nothing or with nothing in the title. In 1992 Sandals, a London beat poetry/ dub/ progressive house/ acid jazz four piece put out Nothing (with Leftfield assisting on programming, keys and production), a funky, laid back, stoned groove with state of the world lyrics- worth remembering when one turns on the news at the moment, we were despairing about war and US foreign policy in the early 90s as well as in 2026 (and in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 00s...)

Nothing (Extended Version)

'Old man what have you done?' a voice asks over and over. The reply, 'Nothing'. 

Feel free to drop your do nothing for as long as possible suggestions in the comment box. I'm sure you can come up with more apt ones than I have. 

Acid House Chancers

Tomorrow at The Social, Little Portland Street, London, an Acid House Chancers night and a Salute to Andrew Weatherall on the weekend of what would have been his 63rd birthday (6th April). It's a venue that Andrew actually played the opening night of, his association with Heavenly going back to the late 80s. 

There's a stellar line up of DJs including at the top of the bill Alex Knight (Sabresonic and Fat Cat Records) and Johnny Aux of Paranoid London plus Rude Audio (often found at this parish) and lower down proceedings, in the downstairs bar/ space from 6.30pm your friendly neighbourhood Flightpath Estate DJs. Me, Baz and Mark on this occasion, a London debut for me. It's a tickets only affair, all proceeds to charity, a handful of tickets can found here priced just £15.

Back in 2010 LCDMF (Le Corps De Mince Francoise), a Finnish duo released a single on Heavenly, Gandhi. It came with two Andrew Weatherall remixes. This is the first...

Gandhi (Andrew Weatherall Remix I)

At this point Andrew had been feeling his way back into music, releasing a 12" under his own name for the first time and beginning to develop and refine a new remix sound. In 2008 he'd remixed Doves (also on Heavenly, the long standing Andrew Weatherall- Jeff Barratt friendship a part of much of what he was doing), throwing dub space, a cosmische feel and extended running time into the pot. Remixes of Grinderman, The Horrors, Toddla T, Wooden Shjips, Cut Copy and Primal Scream all fell into place, all benefiting from his new partnership with Timothy J. Fairplay. Andrew's slow and spacey sound aligned with the early days of his travelling discotheque A Love From Outer Space. The pair of LCMDF remixes are part of this, squiggles and arpeggios, synths and bass over chuggy beats. 

Cycle Whim

A pair of unrelated but spring- like new recent releases for early April. First is a single from Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor's new solo album with Green Gartside on backing vocals (and when Green joins in on the chorus he soars). On A Whim is from Paris In The Spring and is sumptuous, buttery electro- pop packed with hooks and melodies and going straight to the heart. Guaranteed to make you smile. 

Out last week on the spring equinox and from an album that will be released on the summer equinox comes Cycle, the first offering from the latest Pye Corner Audio album and with Ride/ GLOK's Andy Bell on guitars and PCA's Martyn Jenkins singing for the first time. The pair collaborated previously on 2022's Let's Emerge, a post- lockdown response to the early 2020s world. Cycle is from More Songs About The Sun, a glorious synthpop/ cosmische song welcoming the coming of springtime and full of the promise of summer.  

Fools

Some fools for April Fool's Day. All Fool's Day is a tradition in many countries but there doesn't seem to be any real agreement about where it originates from- an association between 1st April and foolishness is mentioned by Chaucer in The Nun's Priest's Tale where a vain cock is tricked by a fox into believing it is 32nd March. Some scholars inevitably disagree and put this down to a mistranslation. 

A 16th century French poet mentions poisson d'Avril (April fool or literally April's fish) and a Flemish poet, Eduard de Dene, referenced a nobleman who sent his servants on foolish errands on 1st April. The first agreed British reference is from 1686, John Aubrey mentioning 'fooles holy day'. 

Pop culture is littered with fools. In 1973 Lee Hazlewood, the cosmic cowboy, asked a foolish question...

Poet, Fool Or Bum

In 2019, a reactivated Sebadoh saw Lou Barlow return with some typically ramshackle, melodic indie rock reaching the point where he 'won't be a fool in your eyes'. 

Fool

Gallon Drunk weren't a band to do things by halves. A noisy, chaotic early 90s blur of suits, guitars, sideburns, noisy blues and jazz. Some Fool's Mess was Single Of The Week in the NME in 1991, back when these things really mattered. The live recording here is from 1993 when they toured the US supporting PJ Harvey

Some Fool's Mess (Live In Chicago)

Escape- Ism is Ian Svenonius' latest vehicle for deconstructing music and overthrowing existing power structures. Last year's Charge Of The Light Brigade was one of my albums of the year. In 2021 they released Rated Z, their fourth album, a casual combination of arrogance and minimalism. Electronic rock 'n' roll reduced to its barest elements. 

Suffer No Fool

Lastly I need to direct you here to Bedford Falls Players where Mr BFP has done an entirely unofficial edit of Walking On Sunshine and Fool's Gold, Rockers Revenge and The Stone Roses mashed together in an unholy and total trip, seven minutes of Fool's Gold- En.  Free/ pay what you want. 

On 23rd November 1989 The Stone Roses made their one and only Top Of The Pops appearance, gatecrashing the shiny world of the BBC studios and the top ten with the groundbreaking indie funk of Fool's Gold. The fall of the Berlin Wall, The Stone Roses on Top Of The Pops- the 1990s started here. 

The photo at the top is the corridor of a hotel we have actually stayed in. I felt lucky to wake up in the morning and 

Edit: that last sentence for some reason was never completed. I got distracted and forgot to finish it. It should have read something like this...

The photo at the top is the corridor of a hotel we have actually stayed in. I felt lucky to wake up in the morning and not have been sold into some form of modern slavery. The hotel was a one night stopover and was cheap. The fire escapes had groups of men hanging around them smoking and the fire escape was in our bedroom- in the event of a fire the escape route was through our room. Off our room were two further rooms, one with a broken window that would not close and the other a cell. As I was about to put the light out to go to sleep and huge spider ran across my pillow. It was grim but also very funny. 

Pictures Of A Floating World

There's an exhibition on at the Whitworth in Manchester at the moment of the art of two Japanese artists, Hokusai and Hiroshige (it opened two weeks ago and is on until November). In the Edo period (17th and 18th century Japan) the pair were responsible for a multitude of ukiyo- e prints, made on woodblocks and printed in beautiful colour onto paper. The most famous of them is Beneath The Great Wave, a picture that changed Japanese art and then when the country began to open up to the west, one that changed Western art too. It's become one of the most famous prints in the world and there are two originals from the Edo period in the exhibition.

Hokusai and Hiroshige captured Japanese landscapes and weather and everyday scenes, rural and urban life. There are pictures of samurai, actors, geisha and farm labourers as well as endless versions of Mount Fuji- Hokusia's series Thirty Six Views Of Mount Fuji eventually ran to forty six and Hiroshige responded with Fifty Three Stations Of The Tokaido Road. The prints- the detail and draftmanship, the layout (so influential on modern visual arts, comics, books and magazines) and the vividness of that world- are astonishing. I loved it and will definitely go again. It's a joy just to spend time looking at them.

They were known at the time as 'pictures of a floating world' which is a phrase which has stuck with me since Saturday afternoon. 

What's more, it's free- and the gallery was busy, people of all ages wanting to get close to the prints. 

Coincidentally over at 27 Leggies Ernie posted some songs by Japanese band Nagisa Ni Te which were well received. Ernie's post and the music reminded me of the Japanese band Yura Yura Teikoku who I posted about once waaay back in 2010. Yura Yura Teikoku were a three piece psychedelic rock band from Tokyo, formed in 1989 and splitting up amicably in 2010. In 2009 DFA put out some of their music which is I imagine where I latched onto them. 

Hollow Me came out in 2007 and was then part of the 2009 DFA release after being featured in Sion Soro's film Love Exposure, a Japanese comedy drama. 

Hollow Me

This one is from a 2010 live album.

Ohayo Mada Yaro

Sweet Surrender is from a 2007 single, a krauty motorik psyche rock excursion that kicks up a storm. 

Sweet Surrender (Remix)

The other side of that single was Dekinai, spiky guitars and rattling drums, a thrilling slice of Tokyo psychedelic rock. 

Dekinai

The remix is even better, somewhere in a sweet spot in between Stereolab and LCD Soundsystem. 

Dekinai (Remix Extended)

Monday's Long Song

Twenty years ago Patti Smith and Kevin Shields appeared at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank in London. Patti had written a poem for her friend and one time lover Robert Mapplethorpe called The Coral Sea, a poem she started when he died of AIDS in 1989. She tried to perform it as a spoken word piece but could never get through it all, the sheer weight of the emotions, his illness related suffering and death too much for her to complete a public reading. 

Performing it with Kevin Shields changed the performance for her- Kevin's guitar and FX soundscape altered the performance and provided Patti with a bedrock to explore the words and her feelings. They performed it live twice, once in June 2005 and once in September 2006 and released both as a double CD in 2008, each disc the best part of an hour long. It's not something one pulls out and listens to very often and it was probably best seen live, a book length poem set to improvisational and experimental guitar playing by the My Bloody Valentine man but when it hits, it's very powerful. This is Part 4 from the 2006 gig, a fifteen minute long section, the climax of the performance, Kevin's glide guitar shimmering, the drones and vibrato ebbing and flowing as Patti reads her tribute to Mapplethorpe with passion. As they egg each other on Shields' playing becomes an MBV style wall of noise, an ecstatic You Made Me Realise freak out section only a flick of the finger and stomp on an FX pedal away. 

The Coral Sea 12/ 09/ 2006 Part 4

The section from ten minutes in, where Patti is silent and Kevin drones and glistens, is ripe for sampling- put a drum beat underneath it and add some flute and whispery vocals and you could have a new MBV track out before the band do. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Neo- Indie Dance

I was never a fan of the term indie- dance back in the 1989- 1992 heyday. It seemed reductive and a little sneery, music press shorthand for guitar bands suddenly getting onto the dancefloor and finding a remixer who could help them crossover. Much of the music was brilliant but the way it was portrayed and written about was not. There was an element of bandwagon jumping too. But those records- the remixes of Happy Mondays Wrote For Luck, Fool's Gold, Weatherall's 12" remixes of songs from Screamadelica and then of everybody else, Flowered Up, New Fast Automatic Daffodils, The Soup Dragons (ahead of the pack as singer Sean is always keen to point out, releasing I'm Free ahead of Primal Scream's Loaded)- still sound like sonic gold and can still fill a dance floor. 

There's been a renaissance of the sound, the shuffly drums, psychedelic guitars, extended length tracks, cosmic synth sounds and freewheeling spirit circling back into the world. Recently Das Druid, Marshall Watson and Cole Odin, several of Sean Johnston Hardway Bros remixes, Holy Youth Movement and others have been reinvigorating a sound that is now over three decades old. The temptation to throw some of them together into a Sunday mix, a revival of the sound of Thursday night indie nights at late 80s nightclubs but with a bunch of 21st century tracks, was too much. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Neo- Indie Dance

• Strange Fruit: Monopolar
• Das Druid: Freedom
• Holy Youth Movement: Better Together (Hardway Bros Cosmic Intervention Mix)
• Marshall Watson and Cole Odin: Just A Daydream Away (Space Flight Mix)
• Le Carousel: Echo Spiegel (Curses Liquid Metal Mix)
• Jagwar Ma: Come Save Me (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
• Psychederek: Thinkin' Bout U Pt. 2 (Venus)

Strange Fruit are an indie- dance/ psychedelic/ cosmische band from Jakarta. Their forthcoming album Drips comes with remixes- Hardway bros and Tom Furse from The Horrors- and four songs, all of which mine that seam that got us shaking our action at the point were the 80s became the 90s. Shuffly drums, burbling synths, cosmische production and blissed out vocals all present and correct.  

Das Druid are from Australia, a band who are open about their influences, describing their Das Druid EP as a 'love letter to the evolving spirit of the Madchester scene'. Rather than shy away from it, they've embraced the comparisons. The EP comes with Justin Robertson remixes (in his folk- dub Five Green Moons guise), a man who moved to Manchester in the mid- 80s specifically for the music (and the university), and one from South Manchester's own Ruf Dug. 

Holy Youth Movement are from Bristol, a five piece taking cues from Primal Scream and Underworld with Jagz Kooner at the controls. Sean Johnston's Hardway Bros provided two remixes, both of which are sprinkled with indie- dance dancefloor gold dust. 

San Francisco pairing Marshal Watson and Cole Odin's Just A Daydream Away were a 2023 highlight, an EP with various versions of a cosmic/ indie- dance song, smothered in a sheen of day glo early 90s via 2020s production that glides and shimmers. Hardway Bros weighed in with a pair of remixes of this one too. 

Le Carousel's The Humans Will Destroy us is already sounding like one of the albums of 2026, a ten track synths/ guitars celebration of/ farewell to humanity. Last year's single Echo Spiegel was remixed by Berlin based producer Curses who put a  chunky 1991 indie- dance break under Phil's psychedelic/ electronics and pushed it all to the fore. 

Jagwar Ma were an Australian psychedelic/ dance trio from 2012 who made two albums between 2013 and 2016. In 2011 they released Come Save Me as a single and it came with an Andrew Weatherall remix. Between 1989 and 1991 Andrew did as much as anyone to invent a new sound, guitars and dance beats, samples and sequencers. By 1992 he was keen to move on and to leave indie- dance behind. In 2013 he remixed Jagwar Ma following a jaunt to Australia, sticking a massive indie- dance breakbeat underneath the song and in so doing reinventing a sound that he invented twenty years previously, a decade ahead of some younger bands then re- discovering the sound. Weatherall absolutely shines as a remixer here. 

Psychederek is from Stretford, a young musician/ DJ with a growing and excellent back catalogue. The sound of a psychedelic Stretford. His Thinkin' Bout U single came out last year, four different versions with the Pt. 2 Venus mix built around that indie- dance shuffle. 

Oblique Saturdays

 

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's suggestion was Breathe more deeply.

My responses were some deeply heavy dub techno from Basic Channel and Deanne Day's Hardly Breathe, Weatherall and Harrow mid- 90s deep house/ techno. Both encouraging deeper breathing. The Oblique Saturdays crowd made some excellent and varied suggestions- Blu Cantrelle's Breath, Kylie's Breathe, Warren Zevon's French Inhaler, Thandi Ntuli and Carlos Nino's experimental breathing, Kate Bush, Serge and Jane engaging in deeper and heavier breathing, Massive Attack's Teardrop and Aggelein by Valium. Thank you Jake, Khayem, Rol, Ernie, Jase, Iggy, Walter and Scaley Pecker for your contributions. Here's Kylie from 1998 with a song that as Scaley observed has a touch of William Orbit's Ray Of Light production about it.

Breathe

This week's card said this- Abandon normal instruments.

Eno was surely a man who would gladly abandon normal instruments. At first I thought about Einsturzende Neubauten, Blixa Bargeld and co. using homemade instruments constructed from scrap metal and tools, wielding angle grinders, hammers and metal plates and with jackhammers drilling through the stage at the ICA. This is Kollaps, eight minutes of industrial and experimental sounds from West Berlin in 1981...

I also remembered Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns describing Sabres Of Paradise recording what would become Sabresonic in London in 1993 and they mic'ed up Gary banging a scaffolding pole with a wrench and shaking a tray of matches to create the drum and percussion sounds for Smokebelch. 

Smokebelch (Exit)

Back in October 1988 I went to a gig at Liverpool Royal Court, a triple bill headlined by Billy Bragg with support from Michelle Shocked. The first act on the bill were The Beatnigs, a San Francisco band who combined punk, industrial and hip hop and played the bonnet of a VW Beetle with metal chains, a rotary saw and a grinder. I don't have any Beatnigs recordings but Michael Franti and Rono Tse would go on to become The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy and reworked one of the songs from Beatnig days in the new band, a hip hop/ spoken word, alt/ industrial classic from 1992. 

Television, The Drug Of the Nation

Lastly I thought about Tom Waits and especially 1999's Mule Variations, an album which uses normal instruments- brass, violin, bass, guitars, harp, pump organ and also turntables and samples- but sounds like it was made in a junkyard using bits of metal and old car parts. What's he building in there?

Feel free to abandon normal instruments and give up your suggestions in the comment box

Am I Conscious Now?

Am I Conscious Now? is the latest release on Jason Boardman's Before I Die label, an album that gets its full release today. Hawksmoor (James McKeown) has been making music since 2017 and in that time has released thirteen albums and EPs. It's ambient with a side dose of cosmische/ krautrock, expansive and immersive and full of textures. 

For this latest work, James undertook some extensive experimentation and research with a psychedelic compound called 5- MeO-DMT, a substance found naturally in some plants and in the glands of toads found in the Colorado River. Many people who've used it describe it as producing a mystical experience and what Hawksmoor himself describes as a 'total psychological reset'. He adds, 'It completely changed my life, outlook and perspective'. Not something to be taken lightly then. Am I Conscious Now? is a musical/ ambient response to that experience.

Trying to describe ambient music sometimes feels like a fool's game at the best of times. 'Language doesn't really work', James/ Hawksmoor says about the use of psychedelics, 'it's everything and nothing'. He followed this by saying that his experiences with 5-MeO-DMT culminated with him feeling like he was reborn. 

The album is it goes without saying a bit of a trip, a haunting but beautiful record that works best as one single piece. There are drones and oscillations, the Moog and Organele M producing long sounds that rise and fall. Opener Amygdalla Opening is the entry, a two note drone, layers of synths combining to push and pull. Golden Dolphins follows, chords and chatter, single key notes and an acoustic guitar, the sound of dolphin squeals and whistles and a wordless human voice. It's either deep below the surface or very high above it. Waves of echo and elements of sound bouncing back and forth. Flooding A Maze (In Slow Motion) is golden guitar chords strummed slowly and dancing, ringing sounds, things shifting slightly as the track unfolds, a diagram or oil pattern slipping in and out of focus. Towards the end a bleep comes through, like someone far away trying to make contact. On Urdhva Hastasna (a Yoga pose, the raised hands pose) two guitars pick their way round each other, one a circling finger picked part and the other a counterpoint. Behind them, there's a hazy backdrop of cosmic synth sounds. Infinite Tapestry sounds ancient, what could be a dulcimer or some other archaic instrument pressed into psychedelic service, notes and drones and ringing sounds. Water droplets fall, the guitar returns, synth whooshes rush in, a track that has both motion and stillness- the sense of sitting still while the world moves around you. 

Side two offers more. Ti Kallisti has piano and reverb, ambience that suggests... I don't know, emptiness? Fulfillment? The past? Now? Adviata swims back towards the drones and the submersion sounds, a voice possibly appearing along with an Indian sounding guitar part. Clear Light breaks the surface and lets the light in- a voice singing an ah ah ah ah part, beamed in from an ashram in 1967, George Harrison drifting in to Hawksmoor's ambient world. Into The White Sun changes the sound and tone again, bass guitar notes, cosmische drones coming via Cluster or Harmonia, the pastoral kraut sounds of mid- 70s West Germany. Our trip ends with Astromeria, three minutes of ending, the bass guitar again prodding away, warm and woody, the synths like flares of light, blasts of horn and disembodied vocals, a landing, a coming round or coming to. 

As I said, writing about ambient music can sometimes feel like a fool's game, trying to describe sounds and the feelings they provoke. Some of what's written above might look like nonsense in the cold light of day and Am I Conscious Now? is much more than I can sum up in a few paragraphs. It feels like a profound and intense album, not the kind of ambient to put on in the background but a record to immerse yourself inside and be open to the effect it might have.  

You can buy or listen to it here. 

How We Gonna Kick It?

Sometimes I think that there is no finer sound than that of The Beastie Boys in full flight in the mid- 90s. Take Root Down for example...

Root Down

A Jimmy Smith bass loop, vinyl crackle and wah wah guitar and then the three Beasties chucking rhymes and lines around, referencing Dick Hyman, Sweetie Pie, The Meters, the Fruit of The Loom guys and Ad Rock's killer line in the first verse, 'Everybody know I'm known for dropping science'.

 Later on they break off for the immortal and ever usable line, 'Oh my God that's the funky shit!' before jumping straight back in with more verses, lines and imagery flashing by like a graffiti covered train- the NY subway system, the Zulu Nation, Grandmaster Flash, Kool Moe Dee and Bob Marley are all in there before they finish with a nod to their producer Mario C, 'That's a record, that's a record 'cause of Mario'. 

There's so much energy and innovation in those few minutes, the samples and the arrangement, the voices, the dynamics... they had it all. The Beastie Boys were a visual experience as well as an audio one- here's the video. 

The mid- 90s come flooding back watching that don't they? 

Root Down was released in May 1995 as an EP with various versions of the song and some live songs, including Something's Got To Give On It, a stoned and slow anti- war jam song, the three Beasties on guitar, bass and drums, all loose and funky. This is the studio version as found on 1994's seminal Ill Communication.

Something's Got To Give

The Humans Will Destroy Us

Le Carousel's second album has been a long time in the making and finally arrived last week, ten years after the first one. It was worth the wait. Belfast based producer, DJ and composer Phil Kieran, the man behind Le Carousel, has made one of 2026's best albums to date, a blend of electronics and guitars, drum machines and synths, cosmische, shoegaze, ambient, dark disco and psychedelia, that nods its head in sound and tone towards Andrew Weatherall and David Holmes and that asks some big questions that are particularly apposite- what's happening to us? Are we going to destroy the planet and ourselves? Are we going out by climate collapse or war? Is it too late to save ourselves? 

Light The Flare stutters into life, a drum machine, a grinding bassline and a wash of synths and then several layered voices, 'This ship's going  down/ Can anyone see?' Then comes a response- 'we're not alone'- as synth arpeggios splash across the top. 'There's always someone there'. This runs into Everyone Is Gone, a shoegaze/ psychedelic guitar piece with blasts of synth and keys. The Good One is a psychedelic cosmische glide- by, followed by Destroy Us,  where there's a touch of Spiritualized in the drone of the organ chords, a slow mo analogue song with hand drum percussion and shakers that builds gradually, multi- tracked vocals coming in, unfolding over six minutes, heading towards a fragile optimism and the counter- intuitive angelic vocal, 'destroy us'. The humans are asking for it. 

Side one ends with We're All Gonna Hurt, a dark disco/ acid house delight that first saw the dark of day last year, motorik drum machine beat with layers of Giorgio Morodor syths and keys and a ghostly male- female vocal pairing, 'I want to take you away/ This way/ Sooner or later/ We're all gonna hurt'. The machines and the voices sound like they could go on forever in an endless loop of dystopic disco delight.

Flip The Humans Will Destroy Us over and Echo Spiegel opens side two, spacey Vangelis Blade Runner chords and thumping club rhythms. Parabolic is all squelchy Space Echo and wobbly vintage synths. The analogue synths and warm widescreen production root these songs partly in 1970s West Germany and partly in the late 80s/ early 90s acid house/ Screamadelica days and it sits alongside David Holmes' Blind On A Galloping Horse too, another 2020s album made in Belfast that tries to get to grips with the state of the world around it. Rough Ending fades in gently, a lullaby that suddenly goes widescreen, a wall of synths and the ghost of Peter Hook's bass. 

Goodbye My Friends- we're getting close to the end now- is strummed guitar chords and more of those floating angelic vocals, wah wah synth and hissy drum machine, Spacemen 3 at the end of their journey, Screamdelica crashed and burned. Beautifully warm, embracing departure. The Humans Will Destroy Us concludes with You're Killing Me Inside- twinkling sounds, long organ chords, FX, acres of space, and a female voice backed by a male one, 'I love you/ You're the best thing/ I love you/ But you're killing me inside'. I don't think it's an individual they're singing too. It could be a lover or a partner but more likely, I think, it's us a species, it's all of us. 

What a way to go.

You can buy The Humans Will Destroy Us digitally at Bandcamp. I think all the vinyl's all gone but there might be some in shops. It is, I think you may have picked up by now, highly recommended. 

Innocent Reprise

A Mountain Of One have recently called it a day. The band, built around the core duo of Mo Morris and Zeben Jameson and joined by Leo Elstob, formed in London in 2005 and released music in two phases- the first between 2007 and 2010 and the second in 2019- 2023. In the late 00s they were part of a new Balearic scene, with the phrases yacht rock and cosmic disco frequently thrown in. Their music always had a dark edge to it, a slightly frazzled sun burnt psychedelia that kept them the right side of the soft rock/ yacht rock dividing line- for me anyway. Their 2022 album Stars Planet Dust Me was one of my favourites from that year, with its singles Dealer, Custard's Last Stand and various remixes (Andy Bell/ GLOK, Midfield General). 

In 2007 they released two EPs, titled EP1 and EP 2 and then collected them on a CD called Collected Works. EP2 is a trip, five tracks that come clad in a reflective gold sleeve and on side 1 Innocent Line and Innocent Reprise. 

Innocent Reprise

Birdsong, echoes, repeating guitar notes, then the tck-tck- tck- tck of a cymbal, a circling guitar riff beamed in from the late 60s/ late 80s and we're off on a ride. There's a flute and some organ and then some delicious backwards guitar. A deep and rich psychedelic stew, Balearic, yes, but it's not residing in the poolside cocktail lounge, but somewhere a little messier altogether. 

Monday's Long Songs

Spring has sprung recently- the days are getting longer, evenings are lighter and the sun was out last week and on Saturday, temperatures reaching mid- teens. At the weekend people were wearing shorts and sunglasses round south Manchester (it felt a little early in the year for shorts to me but each to his own). 

While searching for something else I found Music To Watch Seeds Grow by Brian d'Souza, released in February. The seven tracks are ambient, a musical accompaniment to research about how sunflowers interact below the soil. Apparently in nutrient rich soil competing sunflowers exhibit spatial awareness and show a sense of co- operation- they share rich soil, avoid competing and position themselves to benefit each other. 

'They deliberately root elsewhere to avoid conflict', Brian says, 'demonstrating that co- existence can be a stronger biological drive than dominance'. In other words, sunflowers reject the survival of the fittest. 

Brian turned this phenomenon into music. The final track on Music To Watch Seeds Grow is Hector's Sunflower, a nine minute piece of twinkling ambient music made by capturing biodata from his son's sunflower and turning it into sound via his own modular synth. And if that isn't a good way to start the week, I don't know what is. Listen to Hector's Sunflower here. The whole thing, Music to Watch Seeds Grow 007, is here. 

The sunflowers in my photo were in a neighbour's garden in 2022. Sunflowers have become part of the world of Isaac's death and his grave. In summer 2022 when sunflower season started I took some each time we visited him at the cemetery and they took on a some kind of meaning. The turn from winter to spring and the appearance of sunflowers in the shops is something I look forward to now each year. Someone left some Lego sunflowers at his grave last year and they're still there, adding a splash of colour through the grey of winter. 

I've just noticed too while writing this that today is the 23rd, a nice coincidence to go with Isaac's 23s. 

Back in 1994 Dutch duo Quazar were joined by Underworld's Karl Hyde, electronic trance from Utrecht and stream of consciousness words from Romford in perfect harmony for a sublime nine minutes. 

Sunflower

Humanity As An Act Of Resistance

David Holmes returned to NTS for his monthly God's Waiting Room last week, a two hour long show that sequences speeches and excerpts into his musical selections. The speeches include comments on Donald Trump's Middle East fiasco, Ted Cruz, the Epstein Files, bombing a girl's school in Tehran, the state of Israel, the blockade of Cuba, the lunatic Christian Maga fringe, ICE, Ram Dass, Howard Zinn and more. In between and around these there are songs from Shockheaded Peters, Aphex Twin, Little Annie, Country Joe and The Fish, Sandals and DSS, Primal Scream, Grian Chatten, and Habitat Ensemble. The full track list is here. 

Humanity As An Act Of Resistance can be listened to here. 

Some people say pop and politics shouldn't mix, but some people are wrong. Music is made by people who live in the real world, it isn't just entertainment. 

Grian Chatten's band Fontaines DC have contributed a song to the latest War Child album, Help 2 (a sequel to 1995's Help). War Child raises money to help children affected by warfare and conflict. Fontaines have covered Sinead O'Connor's Black Boys On Mopeds, a song that in 1990 highlighted Margaret Thatcher's hypocrisy. One of her hypocrisies. 

'England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses/ It's the home of police who kill Black boys on mopeds.'

In 1990 Sinead sang it at the BBC on The Late Show. In 1989 police chased Nicholas Bramble. He was on a moped they suspected him of stealing- he hadn't stolen it, it belonged to him. As they chased him he careered off the road and crashed. He later died of his injuries. Colin Roach, a black man from Hackney, was arrested and died in a police station of a gunshot wound- the verdict was suicide but few believed this and a cover up was suspected. Calls for an inquiry were ignored. Both men are remembered in the song.