Another lovely edition from Cornwall's very own Ancient Magic Books.

Taken in 2023 on a three week road trip around the West Coast of America, James Meredew's The Shady Motel & Other American Monuments is an offbeat, mostly people-less view of a tired-looking American landscape.

"I found it very strange how little people walked around the towns, it gave you an eery feeling every-time you entered a new place, I tried to capture some of that when walking around taking photos" - James Meredew

Risograph Printed
60 Pages
26x20cm
Context 135gsm Birch Recycled Inner Pages
Brown Craft Tape

Edition of 100
This book and all of its offcuts are 100% compostable

£16 and available here. We have also restocked some other Ancient Magic titles — An Daras / Portals by Rosie Kliskey (inspired by the ancient landscape of West Penwith in Cornwall) and West ~ A Cornish Surf Anthology by Pete Geall (an invitation to step into the world of spirited local surf scene in West Cornwall).

Splann!

Litany For The Border takes place in Berwick this month

As anyone who has taken the East Coast Main Line between the east of Scotland and England will know, one of the finest parts of the journey is when the train curves around the estuary of the River Tweed, giving an incredible view of the ancient and sometime-contested border town on the far bank. If they're able to see through the permanent rain lashing the carriage windows, travellers in February might be able to see the view lit up by a major new installation from artists Gareth Hudson and Toby Thirling, while those on the banks can also hear musical accompaniment by composer Eleanor Cully Boehringer. The collaboration takes place with light...

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The author of Human Punk and The Football Factory trilogy speaks to Tariq Goddard about class, Greek prisons and his new novella Peekaboo Bosh

John's King's The Football Factory was a novel for people who thought reading might not be for them, the power of those first discomforting pages as transportive as waking up in the Gulag with Solzhenitsyn or thumbing a lift with Kerouac. Beginning in the mind of a character literary fiction had taken care to avoid, the novel explored a sensibility that had traditionally been the province of pulp, its portraits as fully realised those found in McEwan or Barnes, but with none of that pair's decorative courtesy or insistence that lead personae ought to be middle-class professionals....

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Brian Coney celebrates the raging isolationism and precision destructiveness of the Canadian jazz punk trio's first essential album, Sex Mad

Sex Mad by Nomeansno

To parse the logic of Sex Mad, one must first inhabit the isolation of 1985 Victoria, British Columbia: a provincial capital where middle-class security doubled as a picturesque cemetery for the newly wed and nearly dead. Here, as the looming artifice of Expo 86 threatened to modernize the coast, the Pacific horizon acted as a literal dead-end and the Wright brothers' basement as a laboratory. While the global hardcore scene was calcifying into a thudding caricature - The Exploited's gurning pantomime merging with the metal-hocked bluster of the US crossover set - Rob and John Wright were busy...

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The following is an excerpt from an ongoing conversation with Richard Skelton, the current featured artist on Headphone Community. We have recently discussed his background and early formation, and now it's time to dive into his composition and sound craft. If you choose to join us, you will find some Bandcamp codes for many of Richard's albums [although it shouldn't be the main reason for signing…

Source

Jill Scott

To Whom This May Concern

A decade on from her last album, the influential neo-soul pioneer returns with an album of deft storytelling, rich jazz instrumentation and a cast of collaborators including Tierra Whack, Trombone Shorty and Maha Adachi Earth

There's real power in the act of stepping back and taking a breather. In our fast-paced, mile-a-minute everyday, we're not often afforded such an opportunity but having time and space can be transformative, especially in a creative context. For actress and singer Jill Scott, who makes her long-awaited return with her first album since 2015's Woman, her new project is a product of having had that room to step back, live life and reflect on the world at large. The end...

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The eight-track record will be released via PAN

Photo by Bruno Aiello Destombes

Upsammy and Valentina Magaletti are releasing a collaborative album.

Spanning eight tracks, the roots of Seismo lay in a commission by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, which saw the two artists soundtrack an exhibition featuring work from the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. A number of joint live shows between the pair followed, and a full-length album soon started to take shape.

Listen to lead track 'Superimposed' below.

PAN will release Seismo on April 10, 2026.

Seismo by upsammy & Valentina Magaletti
...

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Songs To Remember has been remastered for its updated release

Photo by Chris Dawes

Scritti Politti's 1982 debut album, Songs To Remember, is being reissued.

A remastered version of the LP, which is currently not available on streaming platforms and has been out of print on vinyl since 1985, is set to be released across digital, vinyl and CD formats.

Rough Trade is overseeing the reissue, and the label's founder, Geoff Travis, said in a statement: "Mark E. Smith, a Rough Trade artist at the time, once said to me, 'Scritti have the best rhythm section in rock music'. He didn't mention Green Gartside, so I don't know what he thought of him. I do know that at Rough Trade we were all in...

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It's the second song to be unveiled from forthcoming album PLAY ME

Photo by Moni Haworth

Kim Gordon has shared a new song, titled 'DIRTY TECH'.

Offering a critique of artificial intelligence and the use of some modern technology, the track retains the trap leanings of some of the material found on her past solo albums. In a statement about the song, Gordon said: "I was kind of musing about, is my next boss going to be an AI chatbot? We're the first ones whose lights are going to go out - not the tech billionaires. It's so abstract that people can't comprehend."

Watch a video for 'DIRTY TECH', made by director Moni Haworth, below.

Comprised of 12 tracks, PLAY ME is the follow-up to...

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The Radiohead guitarist said Universal licensed one of his songs for use in the film without his permission

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood has criticised major label Universal for licensing a piece of his music to be included in Melania, the recent film about Melania Trump, without his permission.

The movie includes an extended excerpt of Greenwood's song 'Barbara Rose', which he composed for the score for the Paul Thomas Anderson film Phantom Thread. Neither Greenwood nor Anderson approved the use of the song, and have now jointly requested that it be removed from the film.

A statement released on their behalf said: "It has come to our attention that a piece of music from Phantom Thread has been used in the Melania documentary. While...

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Detroit Love will host an event at FVTVR in Paris on May 9th, running for 12 hours across four rooms and two separate floors. The Carl Craig founded brand presents Mad Mike Banks performing live, alongside Moodymann, Juan Atkins, and Carl Craig. This is the fourth Detroit Love event held at the venue. Mad Mike […]

Detroit Love returns to FVTVR Paris with Mad Mike Banks live set

Carl Cox has released a new remix of James Brown's 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud'. The British club music veteran reworks the 1968 track with a combination of electronic elements and the original's funk foundation. Cox describes the project as maintaining Brown's rhythm and message while translating it for contemporary club […]

Carl Cox remixes James Brown for Black History Month

Kevin Parr on a 2025 of high winds and topsy-turvy seasons.

It was a Sunday morning in mid-November when autumn finally broke. A jet-stream flicker brought an Arctic shove, behind which rose a periwinkle sky and low sun streaming through the French windows. The cyclonic cycle had been welcome when it broke the summer drought but then lingered too long. It wasn't that someone had left the tap running, more that they'd left the immersion on, steaming up the mirrors and thickening the soup. We were lighting the fire to dry the washing and fight the damp, sitting in t-shirts while outside the cloud rolled up from Chesil like smoke billowing from a bonfire of damp leaves. 

We were back in the limbo of summer, only without the sun. Waiting once more for the shift — but what to do while we wait? The ox-eye daisies decided to come back into flower, while the frogs returned to the little pond by the garden gate. At night, they croaked in conversation as though it was early spring, while inside we struggled for sleep, lying beneath a sheet in November, our duvet that hug of cloud outside the window. 

I was missing my routine, the ritual of walks that I tread each autumn. I particularly love the seasonal shift in the meadows at Kingcombe. There, in early September, small coppers and common blues still dance across the yarrow and knapweed, the leaves on the oaks only just beginning to brown. The change, week on week, is as smooth and inevitable as the diminishing arc of the sun. The pattern is reassuring, as flowers fade so waxcaps begin to glow among the green. There comes the vast ring of parasols in New Grafs Meadow and the steadily emergent skeleton of the single oak in Redholm. This year, though, went topsy-turvey. An early flush of fungi folded in the damp warmth, ceding to a churn of buttercups and dandelions. The grasses plumped and greened and the scorched soil saturated. In Redholm, the parasols sunk into oily dollops, while in the garden a blackbird joined the song thrush in full song.    

***

The break brought frost and fieldfare as the soup cleared to consommé and steam curled off the backs of the cows. I was back in The Cairngorms, in the summer before this one, wondering if I was actually breathing or whether the air was so pure that it simply seeped through my pores. On the Monday, I walked the meadows until they dissolved into the dusk, crunching though the shadows and savouring the still. Autumn arrived abruptly, yet I was able to absorb the essence in a single afternoon. Just in time for the first bite of winter that followed later that week, though we avoided the snow of elsewhere. 

A fortnight on and we are back into the cyclonic cycle, sitting once more in a t-shirt as Storm Bram batters the windows and floods the lanes. And what I must not do is long again for the break. It is a response incompatible with contentment, and little wonder that so many of us are wondering where the year went — we wished a lot of it away. 

I am one of those people who struggles with change, although sometimes come those moments that remind us that change doesn't have to be bad. It was the Wednesday following my Monday meadowland walk, and Sue and I were sitting in the lounge as the world drifted outside the windows. The wind, though light, still came from the north and was pushing up the ridge opposite, giving perfect lift for the ravens to ride. Then came the sighting we've been expecting for several years. 'What is that?' Sue asked, although we both knew the answer. Our minds still worked through the process of probability before rationality brought confirmation. It couldn't be anything else.

G818, I later learned, a female white-tailed eagle that fledged in 2021. Some people dismiss the Isle of Wight released birds as 'plastic', but there was nothing artificial about my emotions in the then and there. Yes, I'll asterisk the sighting in my notebook, (species number 101 on the garden list), but I'll never forget the moment. 

In the introduction to her collection of writings on Tom Wilson, Anaïs Ngbanzo gives an overview of the influential producer's life

It was December 2004 and I was watching Bob Dylan get into heated conversations with journalists during his 1965 British tour in Dont Look Back. Halfway through DA Pennebaker's film, when Dylan sits at the piano and starts playing an early version of "I'll Keep It With Mine", the camera lingers on a man seated next to him, eyes closed, deeply listening. This was the first time I saw Tom Wilson. Over the following years it occurred to me that the photographs of Dylan's 1965 recording sessions, and those of Nico promoting Chelsea Girl at ABC studios, and the one of Frank Zappa standing in a bright studio during the recording of We're Only In It For The Money have one thing in common: Wilson is there. I started researching Wilson.

Thomas Blanchard Wilson, Jr was born in 1931. He grew up in Waco, Texas with a librarian mother and a father in the insurance business. He attended Moore High School, where he played saxophone in the school band. He later played trombone and took cello classes for a couple of years - the only formal musical training he ever had. His music-related childhood memories would involve his father conducting a choir at the Texas state centennial celebrations of 1936 and the jam sessions held on Saturday afternoons at his grandfather's carpet cleaning business. A year after enrolling at Fisk University in Nashville he had to take two years out getting tuberculosis treatment, but then, in 1951, he went further north to study economics at Harvard.

In Cambridge, Wilson became committed to university radio station WHRB - broadcasting classical and popular recordings. He later said: "I owe everything accomplished in the recording field to highly informal but inspirational training as a member of WHRB." The Harvard archives also show his membership in its most active political club: the Young Republicans. "For some, being a Young Republican was a full-time job, an exercise in wardheeling," explained an alumni report. "For others, the club was an easy-going, semi-social organisation, which provided interesting speakers and dances."

In early 1953, Wilson founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. The club was to create "an atmosphere here at Harvard that will foster an appreciation of the idiom," as he told the Harvard Crimson, extending an invitation to "all interested in jazz and its recognition as an indigenous art form." With its informal performance and lectures, the New Jazz Society received national publicity and established jazz among the more entrenched musical forms at Harvard. Wilson graduated in May 1954.

That summer he took a job at the Stop & Shop supermarket chain as assistant buyer, languishing at its South Boston headquarters for a few months. Although only 24 years old, he already had strong connections with gifted musicians of the Boston area jazz scenes and a plan to record them. In a 1956 interview for Metronome, Wilson recalled sitting in a friend's living room talking about trends in music when he said, "If I had a thousand dollars I'd prove something." The girlfriend (as yet unidentified) of fellow Harvard graduate Charles Henri La Munière, having command of an annuity, offered Wilson $940 that day to start cutting records. As a result he started his label Transition Records in Cambridge in March 1955. That same year he married Beverly J King; they would welcome their first child, Thomas Blanchard III, in 1956.

Herb Pomeroy's Jazz In A Stable is the first Transition record, and Donald Byrd was the first artist to be signed. Recordings were made in various locations - and through his lasting relationship with the university, Wilson was able to use WHRB's engineering staff and a completely renovated studio there known as "studio B." With the assistance of Harvard students and alumni A Ledyard Smith, Stephen A Greyser, Edward H Rathbun and Dean Gitter, Transition swiftly came to prominence in jazz recordings - collaborating with John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Cecil Taylor. Yet it continued to operate from Wilson's living room and it was losing money: Wilson had to moonlight as membership secretary in the Waltham Boys' Club during 1957-58 to make ends meet. Transition Records folded in the summer of 1958. The Wilson family moved to New York shortly after the birth of their second child, Darien Wilson, that September.

Upon arrival in the city, Wilson started a career in A&R (artists and repertoire) for indie and major labels, taking a job at United Artists until February 1960. Later that year he founded Communicating Arts Corporation, which produced jazz radio programmes on the New York metropolitan area classical station WNCN-FM, while doubling as jazz A&R director at Savoy Records and as executive assistant to Malcolm E Peabody, Jr, director of the New York State Commission for Human Rights. In 1962 he joined Audio Fidelity Records as associate recording director.

A pivotal encounter occurred in mid 1962: Goddard Lieberson, a former A&R man now heading CBS-Columbia Group, heard Wilson speak before a meeting of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Lieberson, under whose leadership the CBS music division had become the world's leading recording company, was impressed enough to hire him on the spot. Wilson's role as staff producer at Columbia from 1963 to 1965 would be a significant moment of his career - getting press attention as "the man who produced some of Dylan's hits" and who made a success out of Simon & Garfunkel's "Sound Of Silence."

In November 1965 he joined MGM Records as East Coast recording director, recording The Animals and signing The Velvet Underground, Nico, and The Mothers Of Invention. The vice president of the label, a Wilson admirer, entrusted him with a radio interview program called The Music Factory, sponsored by Verve/MGM and syndicated to college stations across the country.

This was the last role Wilson took at a record company before creating the Wilson Organisation in 1968 with a handful of partners, leasing its services to Motown Records. Subsidiary firms included Terrible Tunes and Maudlin Melodies (publishing), Reluctant Management (talent direction), and Rasputin, Gunga Din, and Lamumba Productions (independent recording production). "You know why I went independent?" he told writer Ann Geracimos in 1968 for a New York Times cover story. "Because I got tired of making money for a millionaire who didn't even bother to send me a Christmas card. I discovered if you are honest, you get a lot further. A guy's not going to respect you if you don't fight for what you think you are worth.

In 1976 Wilson told writer Michael Watts for Melody Maker that he and his business partner Larry Fallon had written a rhythm and blues opera, Mind Flyers Of Gondwana, that wove together Plato's allegory of Atlantis with African American history. The idea was that Johnny Nash would play the lead; other names mentioned were Gladys Knight (as a queen), Labelle, Gil Scott-Heron, Melba Moore and Minnie Riperton. The Righteous Brothers were to play Mason and Dixon, and it was hoped that Bob Marley would record a reggae soundtrack. They were trying to get Stanley Kubrick interested in a film version. But the project never saw the light. Wilson, who had a history of heart trouble, died at home in Los Angeles, California on 6 September 1978. He was 47 years old.

Working on this book, the first devoted to Wilson, I wondered what he would have made of it. Geracimos writes in her article, "A Record Producer Is A Psychoanalyst With Rhythm", that:

"Although extreme frankness is one of his strong characteristics, he is reluctant to talk about some of his extra-curricular activities (any drug-taking experiences, for example), because of what people back in Waco might think. 'Just don't say anything that might hurt my family,' he says. [...] The pressures of the profession evidently lead him to seek diversion in a number of unorthodox ways. Rock 'n' roll music, of course, is not all sound. It refers to a certain style as well, which Wilson, in trying to court extremes and the happy middle simultaneously, represents perfectly. The public side of Wilson is responsible and pragmatic."

This is an edited extract from the introduction of Everybody's Head Is Open To Sound: Writings On Tom Wilson, edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo and published by Éditions 1989.

You can read Francis Gooding's review of the book in The Wire 505. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Subscribers can also read the review and the entire issue online via the digital library.

In the second pod of 2026, John and Luke dive into the game changing waters of Missy Elliott's third album

Missy Elliott (along with Timbaland) meets The Quietus' benchmark for genius, not necessarily via the route of producing three all time great albums in a row but as someone who changed popular music decisively, twice. And it is the exemplification of the second of these occasions, the stupendous Miss E... So Addictive album from 2001, which creates the Low Culture conversational glue of this months' podcast. John and Luke consider the scenius of late 80s early 90s Virginia (compared to Oslo in the same period!) and the years of hard graft that eventually made Missy Elliott and Timbaland's talent look so effortlessly achieved....

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The debut album from the North Carolina-born singer-songwriter-producer, finds the digital age's only medieval princess bursting with ideas and cartoonish intensity. Truly, Hemlocke Springs contains multitudes

Those among us who harbour a secret fondness for 'Be Prepared' - Jeremy Irons' delicious villain song in The Lion King - may well have pricked their ears last October when Hemlocke Springs released her single 'Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Ankles'. It's a demented tune, opening with a sped-up Nutcracker tinkle that gives way to an infectious romp, stuffed with cartoonish sound effects and ripe, expressive vocals: a song that sounds a bit like Scar on steroids, or Scar if he was releasing pop music from his lion's cave in 2026.

The song's nursery-rhyme-meets-antiquated-fetish title harks...

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Charles Tyler Ensemble

Voyage from Jericho

Former Cecil Taylor side man brings together a band featuring Steve Reid and Earl Cross for a thrilling document of the New York loft jazz scene in the 1970s

Voyage from Jericho by Charles Tyler Ensemble

Released 51 years ago on Charles Tyler's own Ak-Ba records, Voyage From Jericho captures a period when Downtown Manhattan lofts resonated to the sounds of a jazz avant-garde determined to do things on its own terms. Frederiksberg Records' sumptuous reissue, complete with photographs, flyers and deeply researched liner notes by jazz scholar Cisco Bradley, brings this essential part of Tyler's discography back into circulation. A brilliant alto and baritone saxophonist, Tyler is perhaps best known for his contributions to Albert Ayler's transcendent...

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