The Scottish cultural magazine announced its closure last month, but will now continue thanks to an agreement struck with the organisation Outer Spaces

The Skinny, the Scottish cultural magazine that announced its impending closure last month, will no longer be ceasing operations.

A social media post shared by the team behind the publication revealed that its September issue wasn't actually its last and that it would now continue after an agreement was reached between publisher Radge Media CIC and Scottish arts charity Outer Spaces. Under the terms of the agreement, Outer Spaces will acquire shares in Radge Media in a bid to stabilise the publisher.

"The last month has been incredibly challenging, but the outpouring of support from contributors and collaborators reaffirmed the...

The post The Skinny to Return After Scottish Arts Charity Provides Support appeared first on The Quietus.

Coco Lone Neal is reminded that endings are beginnings, as she walks the ruins of the Sheffield Ski Village.

An early morning mist clings to the hillside and it is as if we are walking through a ghost, as if the ground were still smoking. My youngest is quiet against my back, bundled in her carrier, stormy eyes peering out. I grab the edges of my sleeves, pull them down across my fingers, picking at loose threads, unspooling. 

A wren churrs and chatters and I hum in response. Hawthorns line our path, bare beneath the canopy where above is green splattered with red. Each footstep crackles with twigs and leaves, all is turning and falling, and this is what I love about autumn: everything is on the cusp. 

Ahead, my collie Bear looks back to make sure we are near. She became ours through sheer stubborn love and would warn me if anyone was nearby. 

Parkwood Springs is a palimpsest, hard to pin down as any one thing: a sandstone ridge formed 300 million years ago rising up from the River Don; an area dotted with pockets of ancient woodland carrying singsong names like Scraithwood and Rawson Spring; a former landfill always looming; graves peering out from bracken and ivy in Wardsend Cemetery, World's End; a motley history of hunting, mining, coppicing, industry, recreation, and now my local stomping ground without which I wouldn't have survived mothering through lockdown. 

Ahead a barbed wire fence has an entrance cut into it and I squeeze through the gap, careful of my precious cargo. The ground is covered in a thick metal netting, a kind of diamond pattern stretching out in every direction, and where it hasn't worn away toothbrush-like bristles mimic dry snow. I walk towards the viewpoint, careful of every step. 

I am walking on the ruins of the Sheffield Ski Village, the parts that survived the fifty odd arson attacks of the last decade. Built in the 1980s, it was once the national training centre for the British Ski Federation, and at its peak had 180,000 visitors per year. Locals used to joke, The Ski Village is on fire!, and half the time it was true: smoke billowing up from the city's edge. 

On a clear day the views are spectacular - hills of terraced houses, towering apartment blocks, remnants of industry, and then, in the distance, the moors of the Peak District National Park. Not today. Today I shut my eyes and listen instead. Sheffield groans over the sound of the wind, a clunking, sawing, screeching, constant hum of traffic, whirring like a helicopter that never lands. 

Carrion crows too, cackling and dipping and on more than one occasion I have seen them mobbing the odd, brave buzzard who dares to hunt nearby. When I open my eyes again just one remains, silhouetted at the top of a tall pine. There are many more out of sight. They will be there when the apocalypse comes.

Bear disappears into the treeline.

'Bear!' I shout.

'Mama!' I hear back.

My eldest daughter is herded into view, dragging her father after her, trying to wrench her hand out of his tight grip. The questions begin, Why are the leaves falling? Are the trees cold? Where do flower fairies live when the flowers are gone?

We make our way down a narrow path, bordered on either side by a dense thicket. The once plump and sweet blackberries are shrivelled and dry, as are the bitter nettle seeds, and the gorse's usually edible yellow petals are absent too, much to our daughter's vocal disappointment. 

Buddleia has claimed the hillside here, spikes of soot-like flowers falling all around us. A peacock butterfly sparks. These are not the skeletal remains of a fire though you wouldn't be blamed for thinking so. Buddleia is often found in wastelands and gained the nickname 'The bomb site plant' for growing in sites of destruction during the Second World War. Classed as an invasive species I can't help but be quietly impressed by plants and creatures that can thrive in so-called dead spaces. 

As we come to another clearing the ground flattens out before disappearing into one last steep drop. Here buddleia is replaced by pine, and the ground becomes soft underfoot as the metal netting is consumed by the hillside. It is too dangerous to continue with children, so we walk instead to the edge to peer over the ruins of a fire blackened structure, its bones jutting up from the scrub like a shipwreck out of shallow water. 

The Ski Village was once the pride of Sheffield, driving its branding from industrial to outdoor city. In its final years I danced in a crowd of strangers here, staring out from a wooden platform onto the city that would become my home, its lights gleaming in the dark night. It is easy to stand here now amongst autumn ruins and slip into melancholy. Yet, there is a whiff of resistance, of survival against the odds as all around us green gains ground, lichen and moss patterning every hard surface, a sapling oak standing stark against the dying of the year. 

I have been talking to my four-year-old about death and last night she clutched my face between her two small hands and said, earnest now, When you die, I will bury you, and surely that is the ultimate expression of love? Edges, ruins, wasteland, perhaps they call to us, like the changing seasons, to remember endings are beginnings, are transformations. 

'Stop!' I shout, as she goes to pocket a shard of glass. She laughs, full of mischief, setting off her sister on my back. 

We ascend another way, digging our toes into rusting metal as if pickaxing a mountain in the snow. I sway like a drunk in an attempt to rock my youngest to sleep but we are flanked on either side by life that wants to keep us there: rosebush, hawthorn, gorse, bramble, clawing at us the whole way up. 

My eldest chatters in a torrent of observations, Crow! Spider web! Bottle! Holly! If it spikes you, say thank you! And then, as if remembering she too has a voice, my youngest chimes in, Down! Nothing is clean or fixed, no material stable, no colour alone, every surface is alive, porous, deep, surprising. Ruins bleed into the imagination, time itself is a playground. They climb the final few steps themselves. 

One day people will pull up the metal and the shrubs, cut down the trees and build platforms, bring order and purpose, chase out the alcoholics and the artists and the ramblers. What will become of its ghosts, its particular turn of memory? What is it I desire to find here, to offer my children? I fight off entropy every day along with everyone else: take the bins out of sight, pull up bindweed from the garden, say no no no to death. Every season my daughter wants to name what we are losing whilst I try to show her what is to come.

We sit down, trees arching above us, illuminated at the top of a steep wild slope. The sun hangs low in the sky, grasses and mosses are enfolding sharp edges into the earth. The children press their faces close to the ground, investigating the remains of the old ski slope which now looks like hundreds of petri dishes, all lush effervescent green, as if the remains of summer have been framed for us, held for one last moment in stasis, before they turn as well. 

*

I wrote this piece a couple of years ago and dug it out in light of recent developments. Parkwood Springs is a much-loved 150-hectare green space in the north of Sheffield, bordering communities identified as having some of the city's greatest need for access to nature. By the end of this year, tourism company Skyline Enterprises will be submitting their formal planning application to build a major outdoor leisure facility there. While we expected the former Ski Village site, which I wrote about above, to be redeveloped, the current plans extend into the surrounding area: an important habitat for wildlife and crucial for our own wellbeing too. If you would like to learn more or support the campaign to protect Parkwood Springs from overdevelopment, please sign our petition.

*

Coco Lone Neal is a mother, rambler, writer and associate at the Writers Workshop in Sheffield. When she isn't dragging her children and dog up hills in the rain, Coco is working on a book stitched together with river-blue thread.

Follow Coco on Instagram here.

Good lord, what on earth is he wearing? 

Further proof of the secret thesis re. glam

It's rather a bedraggled and arse-end-of-the-70s selection of singles Eno's dealing with here. Well, August is always a very slow month on the music front.

Other occasions when Brian Eno reviewed the singles for Sounds

https://musicpresspantheon.blogspot.com/2026/08/brian-does-singles-including-one-by.html

https://musicpresspantheon.blogspot.com/2022/03/brian-eno-singles-column-sounds-august.html

Last month I went to the launch of Taj Ali's excellent and timely new book 'Come what may, we're here to stay: the story of South Asian resistance in Britain'. The launch took place at Marsh House in Luton, the town where Taj, like myself,  grew up. 

The book gives a fascinating overview of South Asian activism in the UK, starting with anti-colonial fighters for Indian independence in early 20th century London and working through the workplace struggles of migrant workers to the fight back against police and far right racism. Where possible Taj has supplemented archive research with interviews with people involved.

I consider myself fairly well informed about some of this but the book made me realise how many stories have never been fully told. I had no idea for instance that the Indian Workers Association was first established in this country during the Second World War. 

The Asian youth movements of the 1970s and 1980s are at the heart of this book and are clearly a model from which Taj has taken inspiration:

'The Asian youth movements often supported families on outlying housing estates who were vulnerable to racist violence. In an era without social media, they were able to connect with activists and victims of racist violence up and down the country. Their resourcefulness at a time when Asians had few resources is inspiring. Today, when there are much greater resources among British South Asians both in terms of wealth and technology, what might our resistance look like? Who is doing the work of connecting communities up and down the country? And how do we navigate new challenges in the form of religious divides and the growing number of South Asians being influenced by far-right narratives about newcomers?'

In the context of a recent upsurge in racist attacks, he asks what kind of movements we need today, based around a 'plurality of tactics' and 'a strategic approach to anti-racist organising' able to 'prioritise time, energy and resources based on where the real threat is. It's easier to mobilise in diverse urban areas, but what about the smaller, more isolated Black and Asian communities'? Above all he is clear that 'Racism will not be defeated from above. It will only be defeated by us - ordinary citizens who refuse to look away'

The audience was perhaps a cross section of what a successful anti-racist movement might look like in 2026. The starting point for such a movement would surely be to be rooted in the communities most directly affected, draw upon existing relationships of friends, neighbours and families.  It would be outward facing, connecting with other communities and making the best use of people's different skills and positions - e.g. from those confronting racists on the streets to faith leaders doing multi-faith community work. It would have a strong sense of place and of history, but also not be confined to local areas or stuck trying to uncritically replay a template from the past.

The book's conclusion quotes Fahim Qureshi of the early 1980s Luton Youth Movement: 'Come out and organise. Take up the baton. We're sleepwalking into disaster if we don't organise ourselves and confront racism. It's only because we confronted racism in the streets and politically that there were changes made at that time; we need to do the same thing now.'

Luton Pride

I was pleased to see the short lived but lively Luton Youth Movement referenced in the book, with interviews with a couple of its leading activists. As I've written here before, I was involved in some of these events though as a quite weedy Luton Sixth Former wasn't much use as an anti-fascist streetfighter. 

There was a lot of civic pride at the book launch, people are sick of Luton being associated with racism due to the antics of Tommy Robinson (sadly also from the town) and want it to be known as a town - and ideally a city - known for its multicultural diversity and conviviality. So it is with some dismay that I read about the latest ill-informed attack on Luton,  this time at the Conservative Party 2026 conference where Shadow Home Office Minister Blake Stephenson, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire, claimed that 'There are parts of that town - and unfortunately the police will tell you this - it can be a very dangerous place. There are parts where white people won't go. They are like no-go zones'. This is nonsense. It may be true that there are parts of Luton - in fact the whole town - where racists won't go, presumably because they don't like seeing black and brown people in any numbers. But there are no areas where white people can't go, or are under any threat. The historic heart of the South Asian community in Bury Park is probably one of the safer areas, not to mention one where thousands of white people regularly go to see Luton Town play at Kenilworth Road. 

Meanwhile the real Luton moves on, part of quite a Beds cultural renaissance that includes Imran Perretta's touching coming of age film 'Ish', set in Bury Park and the debut album from  Ahadadream (I know he grew up in Sandy rather than Luton, but hey it's Bedfordshire!).

There have been South Asians in the Luton area since at least 1918, when five 'Indian subjects' were reported to be working at the Blows Down Lime Works (Luton Reporter, 28 January 1919) and as Taj mentions in the book there were members of the IWA in Luton as early as 1946. Larger numbers from Pakistan and elsewhere arrived from the late 1950s in search of work, and faced racism from the start. 

People were making similar ill-founded arguments to Blake Stephenson even then so let's give the last word to Zafar Iqbal Qureshi of the Pakistani Welfare Association writing in the Luton News on 28 June 1962 in response to a previous racist letter in the paper: 'As regards the Dunstable Road area being full of "gipsy looking Pakistanis creeping about" well, physically and mentally, as well as in looks, we Pakistanis can hold our own against any people on earth. There is nothing debased in our characters, or defective in our looks, that we should creep about like insects. We Pakistanis, by the grace of God, walk erect, dignified, and hold our heads high everywhere we go'.

The following is an excerpt from an ongoing conversation with James Clements, known across multiple genres as ASC, currently featured on Headphone Community. We are nearly halfway through his residency, and so far we've covered his origins and the Pirate Radio years, the Covert Operations era and the Grey Area work, his composition workflow and ambient as a parallel practice. Some echoes of these…

Source

An uncovered early-1990s transmission from Gerald Donald aka Heinrich Mueller - the producer behind Drexciya, Arpanet, Dopplereffekt and a constellation of further aliases - surfaces under
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The post Heinrich Mueller's lost Intellitronic transmissions surface on Rubadub appeared first on Inverted Audio.

In an extract from 'Green Shoes: Forty years of a radical women's craft collective', published this Thursday by The Indigo Press, Alison Hastie recalls how she first pursued a career in shoemaking in the 1970s.

I knew that I wanted to earn my living using my hands. I had previously got as far as thinking about weaving, but shoemaking was, quite literally, a better fit, as shoes were a necessity for everyone and something I found difficult to find. I had no idea about how to become a shoemaker, so I went to the careers office on campus for advice. The interview was quite awkward, as the poor careers advisor was almost lost for words. 'We once had a student who wanted to become a thatcher' was her first response. However, she did make the very useful suggestion that I find work near craft workers so that I could pick up leads to a shoemaker or to shoemaking itself.

So that is exactly what I did. After my finals I got a summer job at Bickleigh Mill craft centre, working in the cafe and then running it. My plan worked: the wood turner at the centre told me about Hood Fair. He showed me a beautiful hand-drawn flyer advertising the fair, which was taking place midsummer near Dartington, south Devon. Somehow I had not heard about this village, which was a hotbed of radical bohemianism, so different from the conventionality of Exeter University and the rest of Devon at that time. It sounded fun and would expand my limited knowledge of what was going on beyond my university bubble. This was 1978, years before the internet and mobile phones, so contacts literally had to be made on the ground (it's already hard to remember the world where you didn't just search online for 'shoemakers in Devon').

That would have been my search because I loved being in Devon. I had grown accustomed to the simple rural life we had lived as students: growing vegetables, making our own bread and socialising with friends. I could just about afford to run my old Mini, pay my rent in a shared house and have a social life on my waitress wage. It wasn't a flashy lifestyle; you had to make it work as there was no such thing as a credit card. Living beyond your means was not an option and I was completely used to my hand-to-mouth existence. I was young with no debts, contracts or responsibilities beyond myself.

That midsummer Saturday I happily loaded my Mini with a blanket on which to sell my wares, a bundle of vintage clothes and some jewellery that I had made, to seek, if not my fortune, then some leads for my future. My previous experience of selling from a blanket on the ground was at Barsham Faire in Suffolk, just after my A-levels. Barsham was the precursor to Hood Fair, and it came to an end in 1976 as a victim of its own success. Too many people came, and at the end of the fair a leaflet was handed out on which was written the instruction 'Build another Barsham'. If you enjoyed this, it said, then go home and make one happen where you came from - and that's what a bunch of people did in Totnes.

Barsham was an amazingly simple festival, where the site became the size of a village for a week, attracting locals and alternative types from miles around. Stalls were built that could have lasted for years, selling wholefoods, bread, baskets, candles, jewellery and wooden bowls, many of which were made on site during the festival. It was full of activity and energy, and the sun always shone. Pennants were put up around the site, and there was a great sweep down to a wide-open space for performances from the many theatre groups and performers who turned up. Music was played on all manner of instruments; there was a medieval vibe with lots of dressing up: men with long hair and beards in tights and tunics, women with Maid Marian-style dresses and flowing locks. Groups of children played and roamed around the site. There was plenty of beer and mead, followed by sore heads and sleeping minstrels. It was the perfect 1970s version of 'a field full of folk', the evocative phrase from Piers Plowman by William Langland, whose medieval allegorical poem I studied in Medieval English as part of my degree.

The best way to be at the fair was to be part of the action, so my friend Helen and I rather shyly laid out the necklaces and hand-woven purses that we had made on a blanket by a track. It was fun to be there and make some money, and we certainly looked the part in our Afghan dresses and long hair. As people wandered by, they would stop and look. It was one of my first experiences of selling something I had made, and it felt satisfying. When we'd had enough for the day, we would roll up the blanket and go home.

I realised that Hood Fair was Devon's answer to Barsham Faire, a non-electric medieval-style festival held in Hood Meadows, outside Dartington. It was brimming with ideas about counterculture and had a strong focus on performance and craft. Here again was a 'field full of folk' but this time on the banks of the River Dart. When I arrived, I was directed to a pitch, and there, just down the field, was a stall displaying a few pairs of handmade shoes. What luck! But the two men were both bearded and wearing work aprons; they looked old - at least thirty - and intimidating. I had to pluck up courage to go over and talk to them. First, I looked at the boots. There was just one style: an ankle boot made in light brown leather, the foot shaped with three lace holes and a brown crêpe sole. I loved them. Andy Langford and Graham Kitchener of The Conker Shoe Company, as they soon became, told me that they were just starting out themselves. My request to volunteer in their workshop in return for instruction on how to make shoes was received with little interest. 'It's tough work for a woman,' said Graham.

However, I made a date to visit their workshop and volunteer my services. They agreed but didn't think I would turn up. When I did, they didn't believe that I would be consistent and reliable, but I was. They didn't put me off shoemaking, but I understood their coolness. Why should they want to share their skills? I would have to make myself useful. Apparently, many people had said they would like to come to their workshop to learn but had never appeared.

I tried to be helpful. Andy and Graham were operating from Andy's mother-in-law's basement in a large house called 'Lakemead', which was high above the River Dart in Totnes and had a walled garden. We largely kept to the basement, but in forays upstairs I was introduced to Andy's wife Verity and her extended family. The house belonged to Guida Swan, a poet, whose husband Donald had taught at Dartington Hall School and had recently died. It was a beautiful and simply decorated house - artistic and intellectual - with wooden furniture, patchwork cushions, and paintings and books everywhere. I loved it, and it was typical of many of the houses I visited in Totnes at the time. However, the atmosphere was a little strained, as the extended family of three generations tried to find a way of living together in their new situation. I am not sure that having a shoemaking workshop below them helped. Graham and I would work in the basement while Andy pursued his main job as a business consultant above us in the study.

We accessed the workshop through the back gate from the lane so that we didn't disturb the household. It was a large room with a big window looking out onto the yard. As you entered, behind the door on the right was a pile of leather. A long workbench ran through the centre of the space and was equipped with a small grinding wheel for finishing the shoes and a couple of boards for cutting out the leather. Another workbench, in front of the window, came with a vice used to hold a raised workstation, which I would learn to dislike. At the far end of the room was a fireplace, and attached to the mantelpiece was a vintage pipe-whistle communicating device, a relic from the days of servants. By blowing down the tube, a whistle would sound. You would then pull out the bung and hear what was being relayed down the pipe. We used the device to communicate with Andy upstairs.

I was given an apron and simple tasks: punching and awling holes, then gradually moving on to hand sewing. That summer I would sit outside for my break, while Graham would often go for a pub lunch and never return. It was all rather chaotic, but I absolutely loved it. One day I was hammering away, punching holes in a component, when the worksurface I was using fell out of the vice and onto my right foot, splitting the upper of my precious red Clarks T-bar sandals. Blood spurted everywhere and we were all in shock. I remember a bowl and towels being found, then being helped into the back of Graham's 2CV and driven slowly up the hill to Totnes Hospital. This careless, painful accident has acted over the years as a cautionary tale in the workshop as a reminder to think about how I work. It took weeks of healing before I could drive again. At the time, I thought I'd got away with no lasting scar, but now, in my sixties, I can see and feel that my foot was damaged.

This mishap did not put me off. I continued to go to the workshop during the week, while on Saturdays Andy and Graham had a stall at Dartington Cider Press Craft Market. Local people were interested in our endeavour to make comfortable, robust and repairable shoes. Customers had their feet drawn around and chose their colour and style, as by then we had a couple of options. As summer moved into autumn Andy and Graham asked me to work longer hours, as orders were increasing. However, they were not yet able to pay me, and I was still learning, so they wanted me to sign on for unemployment benefit while working for them. Up until then I had been working evenings and weekends at The Market House pub in Crediton to earn money. I was too nervous to sign on and work, as that was illegal, so it was agreed that they would pay me a little. Then, with perfect timing, my friend Jill rang one evening to say she had found a job that came with a cottage in Manaton on Dartmoor, and would I be interested in sharing? I quickly looked at the map and saw that Manaton was much closer to the workshop at Totnes than Sandford, where I was then living. I said yes, as I needed somewhere more convenient; at that time my daily return journey was eighty miles.

*

Green Shoes: Forty years of a radical women's craft collective by Alison Hastie is out on 8th October (The Indigo Press, £14.99). Buy a copy here.

Just two weeks to go until the CD release of Hannah Peel's Underland on our Rivertones label.

Adapted from Robert Macfarlane's bestselling book, directed by Robert Petit, and scored by Hannah Peel, Underland is a mesmerising cinematic journey into the depths of the earth. Beginning in the shallow soils beneath an old ash tree, 'astronauts of the underworld' travel into ancient sacred caves, flooded storm drains, melting glaciers, underwater burial chambers and a deep underground laboratory built to solve the mysteries of the Universe.

And what better day than today, Bandcamp Friday, to preorder your CD copy? On Bandcamp Friday, the platform waives their cut of sales, meaning 100% of proceeds go to labels and artists. Hooray!

Stream / buy digitally or physically below or here.

Peruse the full range of books, zines, merch and records stocked in our Bandcamp shop here.

And if you're a Lunker-tier subscriber via Steady, remember you can cash in a sweet 15% off our Bandcamp shop for the entire length of your membership. You should be able to find the code in your email inbox.

'River Days' by Natalie Wildgoose.

A balm for the ears.

Taken from the (lovely) album Rural Tapes, out now via state51.

 In June I went to Bristol to do a Still In A  Dream event at Strange Brew. Wandering around, we saw all these posters for jungle raves and drum and bass club nights. I thought, "wow the scene is more pumping still to this day than I could have imagined"

Two newly reissued albums showcase the seismic psychedelia of George Clinton's Funkadelic at its rawest and most disruptive, writes John Morrison in The Wire 512

Funkadelic
Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow
Westbound/Org CD/DL/LP/2xLP/MC
Maggot Brain
Westbound/Org CD/DL/LP/2xLP/MC

Released the summer before Jimi Hendrix tragically passed away in 1970, Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow was not only the follow-up to Funkadelic's promising self-titled debut of the same year; it signalled the arrival of George Clinton's ensemble as the next great voice in Black rock and psychedelia. In his 2014 memoir Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?, Clinton acknowledges this by contrasting the album's release with Hendrix's death, an event that he notes as "the end of an era". During his brief but electrifying career, Hendrix moulded multiple aspects of the Black musical tradition - blues, rock, funk, R&B, jazz - into an electrifying corpus that opened up a new world of possibilities. With Hendrix dead and the psychedelic road map that he laid out for any adventurous soul to follow, Funkadelic went on to emerge as his mightiest descendents.

While Funkadelic were recording Free Your Mind Clinton absorbed and pulled inspiration from underground comics, Black power/radical leftist theory and Erich von Däniken's work theorising that aliens had made contact with and shaped the development of ancient human civilisations. Clinton took all the disparate cultural, historical, political and extraterrestrial influences swirling around in his head and drenched them in acid. The famously LSD soaked sessions produced an album that distilled the political, cultural and philosophical DNA of the 1960s into a new musical vision for the 70s.

Built around Eddie Hazel's gnarly blues and wah-wah drenched guitar, "Funky Dollar Bill" highlights the flipside of the concept of money as freedom explored on "Friday Night, August 14th". With lyrics like "The pusher push, the fixer fix, the judge acquits, the junkie leads his life, for the dollar bill", it's clear that here, money is less a vehicle for freedom than a tool for control. "Eulogy And Light" serves as the perfect album closer, with Clinton praying for strength in the face of temptation and moral degradation. In an innovative display of the band's willingness to experiment with sound and concepts, the music for "Eulogy And Light" is an earlier Funkadelic track called "Open Your Eyes" spun backwards. In doing this, Clinton and crew extract the source song's optimistic heart and repurpose its gospel-inspired tune into something stranger, more twisted.

Free Your Mind opens with the epic ten minute title track. Amid a ghostly mass of distorted guitar, feedback and cosmic synthesizer bleeps, Clinton screams "Free your mind and your ass will follow/The kingdom of heaven is within!". These simple yet spine-tingling chants formed something close to a succinct mission statement. More than just slogans, Clinton was directly addressing the intellectual, physical and spiritual demands of a new musical and ideological path. He has described "Friday Night, August 14th" as a "paycheck and party song" about how a little bit of money can buy a moment of joy and freedom. In that sense, the song feels like the spiritual heir to Louis Jordan's 1949 proto-rock 'n' roll smash "Saturday Night Fish Fry".

By the time Funkadelic entered the United Sound Systems studio in Detroit to record the follow-up to Free Your Mind, the band were at once a formidable live unit and boundless experimenters in the studio. The result of those USS sessions was 1971's Maggot Brain, one of the greatest psychedelic rock albums ever made and the crown jewel of Clinton's extensive body of work. The album opens with a simple and ominous message that is both a continuation of the core theme examined throughout Free Your Mind and a harbinger of the band's future: "I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe/I was not offended/For I knew I had to rise above it all/Or drown in my own shit".

Here the "maggots" are the corrosive forces of ignorance, self-doubt and control that infested Free Your Mind. To all intents and purposes, Maggot Brain is a trip through the other side of enlightenment, witnessed through the prism of life, death and the liberatory potential of madness. Famously, Clinton prompted guitarist Eddie Hazel to imagine that his mother had died before recording Maggot Brain's almost ten minute long title track. Hazel transforms his guitar into a wailing and mourning instrument of grief. Beneath his solo, a dreamy, six note arpeggio acts as the bedrock to one of the greatest guitar performances ever captured on tape.

"Can You Get To That" flips the energy from dark to light with its slick groove and doo-wop harmonies. A bright and joyous song at face value, the lyrics warn that even in death, no one escapes karma. "Hit It And Quit It" is a flamboyant acid rock tune with an odd metre that betrays Funkadelic's debt to both the church and the temple of Jimi Hendrix.

For an outfit that proved so adept at conjuring colourful, funky images of utopia, it's curious that they chose to close out their greatest album with "Wars Of Armageddon". Clocking in at over nine minutes long, the song is a minefield of explosions, screams and fuzzed-out guitars. The chants of "More power to the people/More pussy to the power" offer a reminder that Funkadelic's psychedelic ideals and ambitions never strayed too far from the funky, carnal physicality of life on Earth.

This review appears in The Wire 512 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.  

Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there.  

1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish the era's empty reservoir of inspiration by drawing from the aquifer of the archives.

But as the review reveals, the early '70s - when the book first came out -  similarly were also a moment of "re-cycling, self-consciousness and nostalgia" taking over "from spontaneous forward momentum" . 

Indeed Gillett cites Don McLean's "American Pie" as the terminus of his narrative for precisely that reason.

As so often, the Rift of Retro recedes ever deeper into the past...

Gillett's column in Record Mirror - back catalogue grave-robbing is in full swing as early as March 1970, ten years before the big reissue label boom of Edsel, Ace, Charly, et al. 

A record I bought! It features hand-scrawled liner notes by Joe Strummer. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Those cassettes whose popularity with the readers Du Noyer proudly mentioned .... as cheap introductions to regions of the past (nearly always black regions), they were a very decent offer and reader-service indeed from the New Musical Express or (should that be Old Musical Express in this case?)

I sent off for several of these but then my interest flagged... 

I was still too interested in the present.... didn't fancy turning into one of those tight-pegged pants, short-hair epigoners from a Biff or Serge Clerc drawing, forever (Courtney) pining for some long lost era of quality music....

Still I have to thank this tape in particular - and its compilers - for one evergreen delight

Straight No Chaser didn't turn me into a Blue Note disciple but it did introduce me to one of my favorite tunes of all time

I recreated the Straight No Chaser playlist on Tidal

Also made a playlist of versions of "April In Paris" (concluding that my favorite remains Thad Jones's)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Straight No Chaser was also the title of a magazine started a little later in the Eighties. Its founders include Paul Bradshaw, who had written about reggae for NME, and Neil Spencer who had edited NME during its postpunk era through to the era of the archival cassettes.

The look of that first issue is close to the NME cassette aesthetic, but more august and austere. 

I don't think I ever once picked up a copy of Straight No Chaser - I took it to be acid jazz aligned, Gilles Peterson-vibed, a neo-conservative alternative to The Wire (founded a few years earlier in the '80s). 

It seems to have been more adventurous than that, albeit always looking for the jazz connection in modern music.  Its slogan is "ancient to the future" and they seemed to have liked it when your futuroid musician paid homage to the ancient ancestors, aspired to the tradition of live musicianship, and generally talked that kind of Talkin' Loud type of talk... 

So they had Roni Size on the cover, in 1997, around "Brown Paper Bag" and New Forms. 

4 Hero as early as 1995

(but not as early as 1993)

And again in 1997

New Musical Express on the 1983 reissue of Charlie Gillett's 1971 book The Sound of the City.  

Reviewer Paul Du Noyer notes that "interest in old music has never been higher", with NME's own series of cassette compilations of vintage soul, jazz, reggae, etc, given as proof. He says the timely reissue of Gillett's classic tome can nourish the evident appetite for history out there.  

1983 figures here as a lull, a flagging of energy, with a wide range of listeners and musicians looking to replenish the era's empty reservoir of inspiration by drawing from the aquifer of the archives.

But as the review reveals, the early '70s - when the book first came out -  similarly were also a moment of "re-cycling, self-consciousness and nostalgia" taking over "from spontaneous forward momentum" . 

Indeed Gillett cites Don McLean's "American Pie" as the terminus of his narrative for precisely that reason.

As so often, the Rift of Retro recedes ever deeper into the past...

Gillett's column in Record Mirror - back catalogue grave-robbing is in full swing as early as March 1970, ten years before the big reissue label boom of Edsel, Ace, Charly, et al. 

A record I bought! It features hand-scrawled liner notes by Joe Strummer. 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Those cassettes whose popularity with the readers Du Noyer proudly mentioned .... as cheap introductions to regions of the past (nearly always black regions), they were a very decent offer and reader-service indeed from the New Musical Express or (should that be Old Musical Express in this case?)

I sent off for several of these but then my interest flagged... 

I was still too interested in the present.... didn't fancy turning into one of those tight-pegged pants, short-hair epigoners from a Biff or Serge Clerc drawing, forever (Courtney) pining for some long lost era of quality music....

Still I have to thank this tape in particular - and its compilers - for one evergreen delight

Straight No Chaser didn't turn me into a Blue Note disciple but it did introduce me to one of my favorite tunes of all time

I recreated the Straight No Chaser playlist on Tidal

Also made a playlist of versions of "April In Paris" (concluding that my favorite remains Thad Jones's)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Straight No Chaser was also the title of a magazine started a little later in the Eighties. Its founders include Paul Bradshaw, who had written about reggae for NME, and Neil Spencer who had edited NME during its postpunk era through to the era of the archival cassettes.

The look of that first issue is close to the NME cassette aesthetic, but more august and austere. 

I don't think I ever once picked up a copy of Straight No Chaser - I took it to be acid jazz aligned, Gilles Peterson-vibed, a neo-conservative alternative to The Wire (founded a few years earlier in the '80s). 

It seems to have been more adventurous than that, albeit always looking for the jazz connection in modern music.  Its slogan is "ancient to the future" and they seemed to have liked it when your futuroid musician paid homage to the ancient ancestors, aspired to the tradition of live musicianship, and generally talked that kind of Talkin' Loud type of talk... 

So they had Roni Size on the cover, in 1997, around "Brown Paper Bag" and New Forms. 

4 Hero as early as 1995

(but not as early as 1993)

And again in 1997

DJ Antepop plays three hours of ambient, deep house and dub techno on Brick Lane, all taken from the racks of the Inverted Audio Record Store.
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German composer Ulf Schütte explores the limitless possibilities of the modular synth through a number of projects (G. Steenkiste & U. Schütte, Phantom Horse, Datashock, to
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Voice and sound theorist Zeynep Bulut talks to Xenia Benivolski about her latest book, which delves into the friction between voices, electromagnetic sound, synthetic speech and listening beyond the demand for fluency

In Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025), Zeynep Bulut asks whether a voice could be understood as something co-constructed between bodies, technologies and environments. Drawing on experimental music, psychoanalysis, sound and media art, Bulut proposes the voice as a multisensory interface: a 'skin' that connects us to others while simultaneously maintaining the boundaries between us.

Bulut is an interdisciplinary scholar, voice and sound theorist and musician based at SARC, Queen's University Belfast. Her research is informed by her work as a singer, composer and performer, as well as by other artists, including John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Christina Kubisch. Here, she discusses the voice as a plastic and distributed medium, and her current work with people living with post-stroke aphasia.

Xenia Benivolski: How did you arrive at the idea of voice as skin?

Zeynep Bulut: The first point of departure was my doctoral research at the University of California, San Diego, where I was looking at the decomposition of verbal language in contemporary vocal and experimental music: the use of phonemes and invented languages, the amplification of bodily sounds, and multisensory explorations of voice that were not necessarily aural or vocal. I wanted to think about voice otherwise - as an expanded and distributed modality, rather than something limited to the vocal cords, verbal language or even the human body.

At the same time, I was making performance works myself. In one piece, Dialogues Between Multiple Soulmates [2006], I sang different phonemes and fragments of melody into plastic bags, sealed them and threw them away. I was interested in the plastic bags as containers for emotive states or vocal moments, but also in how my voice changed the form of the bags. That fed directly into my thinking about voice, plasticity and surface.

Another important point of reference is the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's concept of the Skin Ego, a reformulation of the Freudian ego as an interface between the self and the external world. Anzieu describes skin as a formation of sensory envelopes, some of which are primary; for example, one's first experiences of the mother's voice, or bodily sounds. In the book I expand that envelope into an expressive surface. Skin both connects and differentiates; it also marks a boundary. That became the basis for also thinking about voice as skin.

Your own voice has travelled between languages and places. Has theorising it changed how you speak, sing or listen?

It has changed how I think about the voice and how I project my own. My mother tongue is not English, and because I have lived in the US, Berlin, London and Northern Ireland, I am always attentive to changes in the tone, melody and intonation of my speech in English. My voice navigates different accents and language cultures, and it changes with different audiences.

People sometimes ask me, "What is not voice, or what is not skin, for you?" So, I'm not speaking about the voice, but voices in the plural, or a voice in the making. Likewise, I'm interested in surfaces as points of connection and differentiation. As a certified Deep Listening (a methodology developed by Pauline Oliveros) practitioner, I also pay attention to voices emerging within environmental sound. Practice has made those conceptual questions present in my everyday experience.

What happens in the space between two voices? Is friction part of voice making?

Yes. I don't imagine voices or surfaces completely merging into one another. When voice-as-skin and skin-as-voice come together, friction and tension become the point of connection. That tension can be generative without producing complete reconciliation or resolution.

I don't imagine the space between voices as simply dialogic or reciprocal, with two fixed subjects facing one another. It is distributed and mobile, because none of these voices is singular in the first place... We all carry many voices. In participatory artworks, people may make voices together that are simultaneously individualised and anonymous. The encounter doesn't make them one; it makes them more multiple, which has ethical and political implications. If we understand voice as emergent, we can contest the classifications that place voices into fixed categories and attend to voices we might otherwise not notice or recognise. So, depersonalised moments of voicing can open different narratives of empathy and understanding.

Hmm, could you give me an example?

Well, one is Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks [2004-present]. Her specially developed headphones convert electromagnetic signals in cities into audible sounds. To hear them, you have to move and interact with ATMs, shopping centres and other infrastructural sites, using your body as a kinetic instrument. Kubisch's work is often discussed in terms of infrastructural sound and environmental awareness, but it also allows us to consider how a voice is 'made'. When we try to make speech-like sense from non-speech sounds the city itself becomes expressive.

I also discuss tactile and biosensing musical interfaces by artists such as Atau Tanaka, Marco Donnarumma and Laetitia Sonami, which turn bodily signals into musical material. These works ask how bodies can speak without a given language and where else a voice might be made.

Terms such as "skin", "interface" and "plasticity" also belong to digital technology. What happens when a voice can be selected, worn or externalised?

"Voice skins" or "voice wear" are digital audio and computerised voice technologies developed often in the context of online gaming to let participants choose or change a voice for a character. They present voice as a synthetic construction: something you can wear and change according to how you want to be heard. That has creative possibilities, but also ethical implications. Plasticity is not only constant malleability. Referring to philosopher Catherine Malabou's scholarly work and writings on plasticity, I understand this notion as both the capacity to change and a resistance to change. Voice skin technologies are important to note because they expose how a voice is constructed, while reminding us that voices also carry histories and forms of endurance.

In the book I place these technologies alongside AVATAR therapy which was developed by psychiatrist Julian Leff in 2008, for people experiencing distressing auditory verbal hallucinations. Participants select a face and voice corresponding to the voice they hear, allowing them to visualise, externalise and interact with it. It gives form to a disembodied voice. These examples show how we change with our voices and how our voices change over time, just as our bodies do.

Where is this research taking you now?

My second book develops through research in music, medical humanities and critical disability studies. In my project called Sustainable Speech, I have been working with stroke survivors living with aphasia, as well as charities, support groups and speech and language therapists. Together we explore Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening meditations and verbal scores from experimental music.

We are trying to create a space for co-learning: to reconsider the pace of listening, auditory thresholds, what counts as communication, and the diverse ways people can make sound or interact. The project asks what we mean by "normal" speech, and why an immediate fix is so often expected. It is an opportunity to revisit the tools and possibilities of communication.

Building A Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin is published by Goldsmiths Press. It is reviewed by Matthew Blackwell in The Wire 512. 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.

After decades contributing to records where a single riff could transform a dancefloor, Charlie May turns that instinct inward on Trusted Farms.

For over thirty years, Charlie has occupied a position that seems increasingly rare in electronic music: the musician's musician, the person behind the machines, the extra pair of hands in the studio, and quite often, the person responsible for the melody you end up carrying around in your head for weeks on end. 

Alongside Duncan Forbes as Spooky, Charlie helped shape some of the most important electronic music to emerge from the UK in the early '90s. That partnership would also sow the seeds for one of Sasha's defining records: the central riff behind Xpander began life in Spooky's live material, before Charlie brought the idea into the studio with Sasha and helped transform it into one of electronic music's most enduring anthems.

Listen closely to Charlie's work and there's a particular instinct that keeps returning: knowing when a simple synth line is enough. Knowing which note needs to change. Knowing when repetition stops being repetition and starts becoming the entire reason a track works. More recently, as one-third of Quiet Places on ASIP, he's taken those same instincts somewhere looser — beatless, gridless and led by improvisation.

Trusted Farms puts those instincts front and centre.

Tiny melodic phrases appear and refuse to leave. Synth lines repeat just long enough to become lodged in your head. Parts rub against each other without being tidied into submission. There's a sharpness and directness to it all amongst the purposeful analogue warmth.

Some of these tracks feel almost ridiculously simple at first. But simplicity is difficult when you've spent decades learning every possible way to complicate something. Many of the parts on Trusted Farms were performed live with minimal editing. A synth line might be doubled, distorted, re-recorded and pushed back through another piece of equipment, but it remains the same idea. Instead of filling the gaps, Charlie works on the weight and character of what is already there. The melodies become physical; slightly worn around the edges.

For someone whose fingerprints can be found across some genuinely monumental moments in electronic music, Charlie has spent decades knowing what to add. Trusted Farms is about knowing exactly what to leave alone.

Available on black 12" and digital, mastered by Andreas Lupo LOOP-O Lubich and featuring artwork by Peter Skwiot Smith, Trusted Farms will be available on October 16th 2026.

Buy on Bandcamp

Buy at Space Cadets (UK/EU)

RSVP for the listening party

Cuban drummer Francisco Mela's free jazz odyssey continues on four new releases, writes Daniel Spicer in The Wire 512

Francisco Mela
Carnaval De Oriente
577 CD/DL

Jowee Omicil & Francisco Mela
OM
BasH! Village DL

Rafael Zaldivar
Zaldivar/McBride/Mela: Meeting In New York Vol 1
577 DL

Matthew Putman/Hill Greene/Francisco Mela
Bright Sun Outside
577 CD/DL

Cuban drummer Francisco Mela's route into the mysteries of free jazz has been a circuitous one. He started out as a teenager working in the bands of Latin jazz pianists and fellow countrymen Emiliano Salvador and Gabriel Hernandez before moving to the US at the turn of the millennium and building a reputation as an in-demand straightahead jazz drummer, playing with Joe Lovano and enjoying nearly a decade in pianist McCoy Tyner's trio. Following Tyner's death in 2020 and the forced hiatus of the pandemic, Mela emerged with a new fascination for and commitment to freedom, forging a fruitful partnership with the Brooklyn based 577 label and collaborating with heavy-hitters including William Parker, Cooper-Moore and Matthew Shipp.

His journey is not entirely without precedent. Milford Graves cut his teeth in the early 1960s playing congas and timbales in Latin and Afro-Cuban outfits and led The Milford Graves Latino Quartet, featuring a young pianist by the name of Chick Corea, before a 1962 encounter with the volcanic eruptions of Elvin Jones alongside Tyner in John Coltrane's quartet inspired him to turn to the drum kit and become a key architect of the mid-60s free jazz New Thing, entirely rewiring the possibilities of time and timbre in the process.

In Cuban pianist Rafael Zaldivar's trio, Mela teams up with Christian McBride, who held bass duties in Corea's trio with drummer Brian Blade, as heard on the 2013 live album Trilogy. In fact, on Meeting In New York Vol 1, Zaldivar at times channels a strikingly similar feel to Corea's sophisticated and sentimental tunefulness, embraced by McBride's muscular lyricism. It's a temptation Mela resolutely resists, avoiding Blade's deep swing in favour of a constant flickering fizz of cymbals and snare, dancing playfully around the idea of time. At other moments, Zaldivar summons puckish declamations more akin to Paul Bley, eliciting a brawnier churn from Mela punctuated by sudden gunshot snare cracks while, in a diaphanous free ballad, his subtle brush work shushes and sighs in gaseous textures. Here, McBride - not often heard in a free context - sounds a little out of place, cramming as many notes as possible into solos perhaps more suited to a contemporary post-bop milieu.

There's no such mismatch in the trio with pianist Matthew Putman, where the low end is held down by Hilliard Greene, a bassist with considerable avant garde credentials, having worked with the likes of pianists Don Pullen and Cecil Taylor, and saxophonist Charles Gayle. Bright Sun Outside navigates more familiar free jazz terrain and isn't afraid to ramble. Even some of its fairly brief improvisations, lasting just a few minutes, convey a sense of loose and leisurely meandering, with Putman flicking out spontaneous melodic gambits that seem quite content to never fully commit to a destination - like a succession of half-formed thoughts bubbling up in an unhurried internal monologue.

Mela is happily along for the ride, laying out a rattling commentary dominated by an arrestingly dry snare, each stroke deftly placed with neat precision. When Greene leans into rasping arco shrieks and Putman chops out sudden staccato stabs, Mela flexes his muscles with a more aggressive energy, like fresh flames springing up from glowing embers.

Mela's first solo album Carnaval De Oriente proposes a wholly different mood. Inspired by the sounds of the eponymous street carnival heard in his childhood, he rolls around the drum kit - revealing a loose, earthy sound reminiscent of Graves - adding shakers, cowbell and sundry percussion. All the while, he chirps spontaneous vocal chants and snatches of song that recall percussionist/vocalist Juno Lewis's mythically resonant Afro-Creole vocals on his song "Kulu Sé Mama (Juno Sé Mama)", recorded with John Coltrane in 1965.

On one track, Mela tinkers with rudimentary innocence on a glockenspiel; on another, he picks clumsily at an acoustic guitar. What he lacks in chops, he makes up for with unabashed enthusiasm. Whistling absentmindedly and chatting contentedly to himself, he sounds like he's having a fine time. When the full kit breaks through in a burst of dense polyrhythms, you can pretty much hear the smile on his face.

His concise improvised duets with Canadian-Haitian multi-instrumentalist Jowee Omicil are in a similar vein, as the pair explore the shared musical traditions of Haiti and Cuba. On saxophones and clarinet, Omicil displays some of the loquacious unpredictability of Eric Dolphy, while Mela rolls out a nimble undertow that occasionally comes close to a standard jazz sound, replete with full-bodied rolls and tumbles. Omicil's lip-smacking pocket trumpet works Mela up into a frenzied freakout of ecstatic vocal cries. Intuitive piano splashes invite a thoughtful drizzle of snare and ride. Mela sings with lusty abandon and thwacks out hambone rhythms on his own body.

Again, a palpable sense of spontaneous joy reigns throughout. There's an obvious similarity to Don Cherry's duets with drummer Ed Blackwell, as documented on the twin Mu albums: while reaching back past the dim origins of jazz, Mela and Omicil conduct imaginary Pangaean rituals bursting with the same omnivorous exuberance that colours all of Mela's music.

This review appears in The Wire 512 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

The electro-ambient trio Yayoba aptly describe their sound as "like a beam of light passing through translucent glass walls in a labyrinth." Their debut 'A Maze
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In this latest instalment of the Secret History of Film Music, Philip Brophy considers how Jon Brion's music engenders sympathy for the flawed characters in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017).

As discussed in the previous essay in this series, Jonny Greenwood provides an amazing score for Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). But two pieces by an earlier composer of Anderson's films bookend the movie: Jon Brion's "Bunker Bumper" and "Global Bully".

In One Battle After Another, they function as quietly majestic statements of the drive and exhaustion which propel the intergenerational tale of social reparation and familial separation. "Bunker Bumper" uncoils as a disjointed bossa nova: a gently struck bass drum marks time for the snare, hi-hats and cymbals, skipping with a detached, dainty air. Horns and strings entwine like a billowing flag in slow motion. Sometimes the horns are silenced as the strings climb high, as if they're searching for something. The music feels absent of harmonic progression; it simply surges, even struggles ahead. It plays near the opening as Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and their radical group French 75 attack a border internment camp. The music intones a sad, fatalistic comment on the limited impact of such revolutionary zeal despite the commitment of its participants.

The second track "Global Bully" plays at the film's end. Years later, Pat relaxes at home with his young adult daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), offspring of Pat and the long absent Perfidia. The domestic scene shows Willa reading a letter from her mother. In a voiceover, Perfidia acknowledges her mistake in deserting Willa, and expresses hope they will one day meet again. Over a lilting percussive pattern, more strings and horns are orchestrated, but here they coalesce around a chordal pattern. The drums call to mind the tinklers of North American tribal shell shakers engaged in ceremonial dances; the orchestra feels like a calming eulogy played at a church service. The piece acquiesces to how the feisty past can dissolve into a depleted present. It concludes with a touching embrace between Pat and Willa.

To label the placement of "Global Bully" here as mere closure misses the weight and precision that Brion's music bestows on the scene. Across Anderson's first four films, Brion developed a unique modus operandi of embedding music into movies which, arguably, redefined standard operations of 'scoring' and 'accompaniment'.

These two Brion tracks in One Battle After Another were recorded and produced 23 years earlier, for Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002). That film's sessions saw Brion continually feeding Anderson with ideas, sketches, recordings and even multitrack breakdowns. All were offered not as thorny strictures, but as flexible flotsam to be experimented with, in terms of how their sono-musical character could enhance and shape onscreen characters. How apt that some of these unused tracks surfaced decades later. As Brion has said: "There are lots of [film composers] doing great things, but it comes down to the director's 'follow-through'."

A small suite of prepared piano and percussion ensemble pieces makes up a sizable part of the Punch-Drunk Love score. They sound jittery and clackety, like a wooden digestive system attempting to process parts of a drum kit. They initially read as sound effects more than music - a perceptual doubting, enabled by Gary Rydstrom's deft mix which folds Brion's trap kit into Christopher Scarabosio's sound design (who has handled every Paul Thomas Anderson film since). "Le Petit Chateau" and "Hands And Feet" were based on micro-cassette recordings Brion made of Anderson verbally articulating his ideas for rhythms he wanted to use as timing devices for the film's long tracking shots. The voice of Anderson became the hands of Brion which became the limbs of Barry (Adam Sandler) who discombobulates throughout the movie in arabesques of anxiety.

Upon its release, many assumed the film to be a comedy, thanks to Sandler, but the point was there for an attuned audience: mentally unstable people often appear 'ridiculous', but to laugh at their pained performance is inhumane, not to mention imperceptive.

Brion's music plays two roles here. The first, through its percussive moments, is to sonorise the synaptic hell of Barry's panic attacks, and how desperately out of sync he is with his own body and those around him. The second lies in the sumptuous waltzes ("Punch-Drunk Melody", "Third Floor Hallway", "Blossoms & Blood") which spread the wondrous hope Barry glimpses when he falls in love with Lena (Emily Watson). Irrespective of cliche, the luscious orchestral arrangements welcome the couple into a better, dreamier world.

Brion's music is key in distinguishing Punch-Drunk Love from early 2000s romcom saturation. His arrangements are subtly saccharine, influenced by the lush strings found in rock and pop ballads circa the 1970s, arranged by Van Dyke Parks, Jack Nitzsche and Paul Buckmaster. Their sonority affectionately referenced the easy listening sparkle of 1950/60s hi-fi arrangements by Nelson Riddle and Les Baxter, through to Percy Faith and Paul Mauriat. Brion's encyclopaedic embrace of recorded popular music is felt in his distinctive melodic sensibility: a transatlantic nexus of solo-Beatles songcraft and Laurel Canyon recording. To be clear, the recording studio rules here, not the concert hall. Punch-Drunk Love used vintage microphones for many of its sessions. The film score brims with detail, space and clarity.

Following Punch-Drunk Love, non-mainstream cinema forged a strange meld of nerdy empathy, hipster cynicism and feminist angles in 'relationship dramedies': David O Russell's I Heart Huckabees (2004); Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) and Synecdoche, New York (2008); Miranda July's The Future (2011); Judd Apatow's This Is 40 (2012) and Trainwreck (2015); and Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017).

These films cannily merged po-faced ridicule with heartfelt feeling, to varying degrees of success. Yet in all these titles, Brion's music fortifies their narratives with an endearing romantic sensibility earned by their dysfunctional, antisocial and 'spectrum' characters. His Canyon-esque saunter and rich instrumental layering ameliorates any dismissive urges the films' characters elicit.

In Lady Bird, the titular lead (Saoirse Ronan) feels intentionally unlikeable. Equally deliberate is how Brion's score waltzes around Lady Bird's teen sense of independence. The film concludes with Lady Bird finally on her own, enrolled in a New York college. At a public phone, she leaves a message for her mother, admitting the rupturing effects of her teen angst created a wedge between them.

Brion performs the resonant piano theme like a silent movie accompanist: trilling high notes and copying what's happening on screen while allowing it space. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind features similar piano themes played over scenes with onscreen dialogue mixed low. This isn't simply a formal sonic device: it displaces the viewer/auditor from the psychic space of the story - where you identify or read what's happening to characters on screen - and relocates you within the characters' headspace. Positioned this way, the audience can feel a touch exposed, implicated in being present when characters are at their most vulnerable. "Global Bully" fades up in One Battle After Another as we see Lockjaw (Sean Penn) gassed and hear Pat prepare Willa for Perfidia's letter: death and life fused through emotive exhalation.

That seems to be a throughline in the work Brion has provided across the film and music industries. In discussions with Anderson, Brion noted the aim of Punch-Drunk Love was to "feel like a musical, but nobody ever breaks into song". Brion's music - and his tremulous voice which has appeared in songs in many of the films mentioned - is similarly shaped by repression, tension and elation, in a fountain of emotional surges.

Musical theatre sceptics mostly react against the unbridled emotionalism of onscreen characters liberated from their realistic surroundings. Yet this transcendental effect functions perfectly in recorded songs and popular music in general, generating one of music's prime private pleasures. Brion and his collaborators have long embraced how song sonics skilfully embedded in the production of a film score can be exhilaratingly transgressive.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy's original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. It was revived in 2025 as an online column: previous instalments published on The Wire website can be read here. Wire readers and print and digital subscribers can also find this essay on page 16 of The Wire 512.

Manchester-based producer GuestWorlds returns with Rare Earth, a deeply immersive second release following his self-released 2023 debut EP. Self-described as a "dubbed-out ambient fantasia", the album
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The Leisure Lounge was one of the great mid-1990s London clubs. Located in a former snooker hall at 121 High Holborn, the main room downstairs was basically just one large cavernous space dominated by a huge video screen on one side and two-tiered bench seating on the other - giving a slight school gym feeling. There was a small seating chill out area and bar at one end. According to the DJ magazine 'UK Club Guide' (1995) it had a capacity of 800 with a '22K rig with Amcron amps and custom built speakers'. It stayed open until 6 am initially but I think later opened from 10 pm to 10 am.

The club's opening party was in April 1994 and included the Buzzcocks playing live. Promoter Sean McClusky told the Independent: 'I want a fashionable crowd, but I want to encourage the nutters as well. Punk has energy and colour. It attracts all the characters. All I've done is give them a beautiful club to play in.' (Independent, 6 April 1995).  In its early days there was an exhibition of portrait photographs by Rankin in the chill out area. 

The club continued until at least 1998 (not sure exactly when it closed). My peak time going there would have been 1995, at that time there was Graham Gold's Peach on Friday and the club's own Leisure Lounge night on Saturdays, promoted by Sean McClusky and the late Bernie Schumann. The latter two had previously been involved with Club UK among other adventures and there was a similar 'uplifting house' vibe. 

Later Simon Hobart's gay indie night Popstarz was there too, and legendary drum'n'bass night Metalheadz. Oasis had a party there after playing at the Astoria in 1994.

Flyers below from May/June 1995, seemingly I must have been at that one with John Kelly, Fabio Paras, Tall Paul etc. on 10th June as I put a cross by it! 'Join the International Disco Jetset' says one, and we did. Glammed up beautiful people dancing to beautiful music, or so it felt. Maybe not so much on the way home afterward.

Note too the Red Bull sponsorship. I remember the first time I tried one of these energy drinks was in the queue at Leisure Lounge where they were handing them out as part of a promotion.  The drink had started out in Austria in 1987 but wasn't launched in UK until 1994/95 when for a while people going out at the weekend were largely replacing their alcohol consumption with other recreational substances.

Across its decade and a half existence, California's 100% Silk has specialised in a potent brand of liquid house and after hours techno to prime the
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Machine listening is transforming environmental sound into data points that support surveillance infrastructure, changing what it means to hear, argues Stephen Roddy in The Wire 512

On 28 February 2026, Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran was hit by a missile killing over 150 people, most of them children. Initial investigations have suggested that the US was responsible for the attack. While US data mining giant Palantir has not been conclusively linked to the atrocity, the wider US-led bombing campaign has made extensive use of the Palantir-supplied Maven Smart System to coordinate similar attacks.

Maven can combine large volumes of data from radar, satellite, communications and even audio sources before applying machine learning techniques to identify possible military targets. We now live in a world where our homes, schools and workplaces can become clusters of data points.

According to James Parker, academic and Earshot board member (see The Wire 499), machine listening integrates audio and machine learning systems to monitor, analyse, govern and modulate human and nonhuman systems through computational renderings of the soundscape. As these systems proliferate globally, they represent an imperial mode of decision making and environmental governance that is in conflict with the basic tenets of democratic accountability. Who owns and governs these systems? Who or what do they hear, and what remains unheard? Who acts upon the claims these systems make about the world?

Machine listening effectively expands the reach of these systems into the realm of the audible, proliferating throughout contemporary soundscapes: classifying gunshots, indicators of distress or aggression in human voices, and sounds associated with intrusion across borders and within protected spaces. Far from being neutral descriptors of a soundscape, these classifications are political, and operational categories and their detection can trigger responses from security or police forces and mark individuals for further surveillance.

Flock Safety, the surveillance tech company drawing ire for its operation of video and audio detection networks across the US, recently pulled plans to listen for indicators of "human distress" across their audio network due to strong opposition from civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Across Europe, comparable systems are already deployed in public spaces, transport lines and security networks in London, Groningen and Plzeň.

In a political moment defined by the convergence of private technological infrastructure with authoritarian state power, ubiquitous machine listening networks increasingly provide companies, states and militaries with acoustic classifications upon which they can act. What becomes of listening in such times?

Almost 50 years ago, composer and writer R Murray Schafer helped to establish the field of acoustic ecology around a central opposition between the lo-fi soundscapes of urban, industrial and mechanised life, in which dense noise acts to mask and corrupt clear and meaningful acoustic signals, and the hi-fi soundscapes he associated with the natural world. One unintended political consequence has been to allow the soundmaking activities of communities, often marginalised by race and class living and working in urban environments, to disappear into noise. This is not helped by the disturbing resonance between his oft-cited claim that "the world suffers from an overpopulation of sounds" and the eugenicist overpopulation tropes circulating throughout Western environmentalist thought of the 1970s.

The troubling concept of nature, as inherited from Schafer and his contemporaries, is usefully dismantled and reconstituted from a field recording perspective in Mark Peter Wright's Listening After Nature, in which he illustrates how nature is constituted by material interrelationships between culture, technology, place and practice. Wright's guiding question, "What am I not hearing?", surfaces the human lives, labour and infrastructural relations that are often concealed in the production of field recordings.

The emerging ubiquity of machine listening further complicates this problem. Decisions are now made and actions taken on the basis of features extracted from audio signals. What cannot be heard, captured and classified is excluded from the systems account of the world and becomes operationally non-existent. Conversely, audio that does not fit the systems' predefined categories for the world can become misclassified; and as the strike on Minab illustrates, misclassification within these systems can have devastating effects.

Is this pattern of low rumbling a harmless passing vehicle or an intrusion? Is that high energy transient a firework or a gunshot? What about this repeating pattern of falling frequencies - is that a barking dog or a human in distress? Classifications like these are bundled with other data like time, location and contextual information before triggering an alert, providing a recommendation or, in some cases, initiating an automated response. The sounds involved need never be listened to by human ears before being converted into operational data to support systems of classification and control.

These questions are explored by Machine Listening, a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, in Environments 12. The project is a speculative extension of a popular series of 11 environmental records released by Irv Teibel between 1969-79. It explores a future Earth in which a developing cybernetic ecology powered by planetary-scale computation has laced microphones and loudspeakers throughout the biosphere, automating the reproduction, synthesis and management of the soundscape. Dynamics of capture, identification, classification and data-driven intervention are stretched almost to breaking point across the 15 short but richly textured sonic works. Human voices vault and bounce in cacophonous chorus alongside their generative clones amid lush field recordings. Organic life and human technology are almost indistinguishable from one another as a planetary machine listening infrastructure feeds the soundscape back to itself in a continuous cycle of replication.

Where Schafer feared technology might mask nature, and Wright showed how it can constitute it, Environments 12 imagines nature to be continuous with data and deeply entangled with the infrastructures that detect and manage it. But the world imagined by the project is already being built.

Listening after Palantir cannot be about a return to some imagined innocence or a retreat into Schafer's idealised nature. Critical listening must instead focus on machine listening itself - exposing the classifications it imposes, the infrastructures in which it is embedded, and the power relations that shape its production and deployment. It must not only ask what the machine cannot hear, but what it has misheard, and who will suffer as a result.

This essay appears in The Wire 512. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.

Good morning, dear friends, random stumblers, and longtime readers. My ongoing contribution to this quiet corner of the world has been slowly declining, thanks to bot attacks, AI scraping, and the overall pillaging of what I've built here over the past twenty years. So I had to step away from the public stage and, over the last year, focus my energy on something even more personal and human.

Source

It's been lovely seeing Noodle Therapy's Field Notes find a way into people's listening habits since its release in June. It's evidently a record people are returning to, calling a favorite of the year (!) and seemingly finding a bit of comfort in its approach.

Previously just a 60-second teaser, we have an extended video into Noodle Therapy's world today, with the full version of The Dip. Co-written with Dennis White (1/3rd of Quiet Places), it's one of the album's more abstract and mysterious tracks, and a nice example of the curiosity and experimentation that runs throughout the album.

The video features footage shot near Noodle Therapy's (Dan's) home in Brighton, with Dan taking care of the filming, editing, and direction himself.

In amidst the endless how-to-hakken reels....

Listening to this perfect little tune - a favorite from 2step garage days - I noticed how the whole track is propelled along by horn fanfares.

I'm assuming they are synth-horns, if only because used in such a programmed riff sort of way, precisely the same in every iteration. 

They actually sound quite realistic in timbre, so it's possible the riff was played by a hornsman and then sequenced.

In "Clean Riddem"  the way the synthi-horn functions is very different from ersatz-sax is usually deployed in UKG. Typically it exudes a sensual, sultry smoky vibe and it takes the form of parping micro-vamps. 

Here it's more like the "jousting" fanfares that Dexys Midnight Runners went in for.  Sort of punchy and pugilistic. 

"Clean Riddem" and flipside "No Fighting" - ooh gosh!   Transfusions of pure joy...  ruff 'n' smooth in perfect balance. Unimprovable in every just-so detail. 

I did a whole post on  Angel Farringdon a while back

And here is the original Those Horny Horns post 

(oh and another slight return to the subject)

Melody Maker, 1982

Note how the copyeditor assumed that the 2 in "2 Bad Mice" was me having started and abandoned a numbering system but having forgotten to remove the 2 in front of the second entry - gah!

Also "gah!" - Mojo got someone else to do the big reported story on jungle and had me do the sidebar. Still I suppose, what with me by this point having already written about jungle for Vibe, The Observer, The Wire, and Melody Maker (twice!), and quite possibly some others I'm blanking on (Spin? Details?), they might quite reasonably have deemed it a good idea to get another voice in. 

Note also the embryonic form of my coinage "rhythmic psychedelia" (yes you heard that right - my coinage) in the reference in the Dead Dred bit to "jungle's psychedelic approach to rhythm". Published in the April 95 issue, which came out March '95, so written February '95.

The first appearance of the fully-evolved term is in a March '95 piece on A Guy Called Gerald

"After "Voodoo", the logical thing for Gerald would have been to follow all the other Detroit buffs up the funkless cul de sac of 'electronic listening music'. Instead, after a frustrating period signed to major label Sony, Gerald discovered the glory of the breakbeat.  Originated by James Brown and the Meters,  sampled by hip hop producers, breakbeats are what enabled a generation of post-rave producers to move beyond the 4/4 monotony of house, into the multi-tiered, hyper-syncopated rhythmic psychedelia of drum & bass."

See, I know what pushed me towards the idea in the first place - the backwards psych-smeary drums on "Mystic Stepper (Feel Better)" by Omni Trio. 

Also the way the drums get reversed on this 

Things like "Wrinkles in Time" by 4 Hero also. 

Of course you could say there was rhythmic psychedelia already going in actual psychedelia  - the time / tempo dilation in this (which amazingly they used to do live - it's not a studio artifact, at least not originally, it came out of what they did in concert)

And a lot of the really pronounced phasing is heard on the drums in psychedelic rock - the way they billow at the drum roll in this