i'd like to be warm now please baby jesus.

i am indoors with the radiators on and i'm wearing gloves and a hat. It is soooooo cold here the house's heating system can't handle it.

as it was fine today we did manage to get out and have a walk along the seafront and take a couple of photos.

reading

i'm knee deep in books at the moment - i usually am but at the moment it's particularly deep as Borders had their closing down sale in the run up to xmas and so i have a lot of stuff to read.

so far i've read Death of Grass by John Christopher (he also wrote The Tripods) which is one i'd been fancying for a while. It was ok, a less cosy Wyndham-esque apocalypse but without Wyndham's charm.
i'm almost through Dan Abnett's Titanicus which is typical Abnett. not his best but eminently readable.
i'm unsure as to what to read next - probably going to be either Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age, John Connolly's The Book of Lost Things or Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods.
I also have a load of unread graphic novels that i'll pepper these with including Grandville by Brian Talbot which looks pretty fine.

The latest issue of WWR went online just before new year and included a huge list of other people's choices for the year. It was a great response from those people i asked. some couldn't do it and some wouldn't for whatever reason, the only thing I'm concerned about was no response from Banks, if you're reading this fella get in touch - hope everything's ok. the variety of stuff people picked was really varied, Jean-Herve Peron's list was pretty funny and consisted of 10 albums he'd like to record himself.

xmas was the usual turmoil but was fun to see the family up at the farm.

hope y'all had a good time and have a great 2010.

Britain in the snow....

is the most pathetic thing you'll ever see.

swansea has had about 2 inches of snow last night and as a result all the schools and colleges are shut. i'm not complaining about an impromptu day off but it's pretty feeble.

the rest of the country has had a little more than us but not enough to justify changing the television schedules to accomodate a show entirely about the last few days snowfall. Airports are shut, motorways are shut, britain is shut.

then you look at countries that actually have snow to a depth worth talking about and see that they continue functioning as normal. there seem to be lessons worth learning in there somewhere.

i just robbed this picture off Warren Ellis' website because it's fab.

today is..

wet,
warmer,
Saturday,
almost over,
hectic,
uncomfortable,
busy,
noisy,
tidier,
late to start,
pixelated,
chauffeured,
reviewed,
recycled,
browsed,
drank,
boiled,
candlelit,
surfed,
darned,
drunk,
shopped,
hoovered
and
not necessarily in the right order

Quieter World

I have an idea for a spin off from Quiet World. For lack of a better name i'm currently referring to it as Quieter World.

The bare bones of the idea is to invite people to make a recording of their immediate surroundings wherever they happen to be at a certain time for, say, five minutes. These would then be archived via the QW site as free downloads.

a new time is then set for another week, month, whenever. kinda like a global audio snapshot.

it might be fun?

if you're interested get in touch.

beer is good...

mornings, less so.

downloading the Quiet World

Just a quick message to let y'all know that the download page at www.quietworld.co.uk has been significantly updated to be both easier to use and also to include many of the more recently sold out titles.

It's cold here but there is beer in my near future, bean stew in my nearer future and fireworks tomorrow - yay for fireworks.

an arrival

The new album is finally out. the (rather large) box of discs arrived on friday and I spent the weekend bagging up the first batch to be sent out. After visiting the post office earlier today i now know one thing for sure, that this label business is pretty expensive. Fun though.

The weather has finally turned here and Autumn is upon us with a vengeance. Went for a walk through the woods yesterday. The trees are shedding and the ground is thick with needles and leaves in various different shades of red. From the feel of the weather i don't think autumn is going to hang around too long though. winter is fast approaching and will be a long one. I'd noticed over the last couple of years that we are fast moving towards a state where we only really have two seasons per year - summer & winter. Spring and Autumn seem to be getting shorter with each passing year. it's a real shame, for many reasons but mostly, because they're my favourites.

i have a week off work so have gotten started with the next issue of WWR as the releases are still pretty well piled up after the summer's travails. Two new Andrew Chalk LPs turned up today though and that's always something to get excited about. They're as beautifully packaged as ever and i'm sick with envy (in a good way) at just how good he is at this music making (and sleeve making) lark.
My main ambition for this week though is to clear some shelf space so i'm going to be indulging in plenty of reading and also trying to get some books up on ebay to clear a bit of room here (and reimburse myself for the cost of making the new album).

peace to you all
ian

A short temporary visit

Sitting next to my right elbow as I type this is the sample copy of my new album, 'A Brief Sojourn', which arrived from the printers today. It's pretty nice.
unlike recent Quiet World releases this one won't be wrapped in a little poly sleeve but is housed in a half size dvd case. Not one of those slimline ones but one that is half as tall. They look very nice. I'd had a few sent to me via Wonderful Wooden Reasons over the last year so when Darren Tate mentioned that his printers had them in and he was using them for his new album I jumped at the chance to get some for this one.
All being well I should have the rest of them by friday (monday at the latest).

also, the latest issue of the zine is now online at www.wonderfulwoodenreasons.co.uk and at www.myspace.com/wonderfulwoodenreasons
there's over 20 albums featured and some of them are real gems.

btw - i have a facebook account if anyone'd like to add me and say hello.

peace
ian

starting to come out of hibernation

Hello my friends

after a suitably slow summer of avoidance of anything that felt even remotely like work i'm starting to get back in the swing and doing things again.
i've spent most of the last 3 months with my head buried in a succession of books and it's been a lot of fun. i'll put some vague write-ups about some of them below.

WWR is in limbo until i can get a new seedee player as mine decided to die on me the other week. it's the fourth player i've trashed in the last 3 years which probably speak volumes about how much i use them.

in the next month or so there should be a couple of new albums from me. the long awaited collaboration with Banks Bailey is imminent - i just need to make some tweaks to the sleeve design - and very soon will see the split cassette on Agharta with Andreas Brandal. I've only heard snatches of his music through his myspace so it'll be interesting to catch some more.

peace
ian

these aren't really reviews so much as things i put on the board at Whitechapel. so if they seem oddly worded that's why...

I've just, as in 5 minutes ago, finished 'The Warlord of the Air' by Michael Moorcock. It was fantastic. It's been a while since i enjoyed anything quite so much. Barstable (the protagonist) is a slightly dim man with a moral compass that points straight ahead. Moorcock takes him on a journey to the heart of his misconceptions regarding the steam-driven 'utopia' he has found himself in in a way that is realistic, believable and wonderously fantastical. I have the other two waiting to be read but i'm going to eke them out over what remains of my holiday.

Michael Moorcock's The Land Leviathan. the second in his oswald bastable steampunk series was, whilst not being the airship and anarchist laden romp of the first (The Warlord of the Air), still a fine way to spend the day. This one spent more time on world building than on plot development which made for a nice gear change but i'm hoping the third will be a combination of the two.

Richard Brautigan - The Hawkline Monster. I love Brautigan. I read his In Watermelon Sugar way back in my stoned youth and loved the unrepentant hippie utopianism of it. Trout Fishing in America (probably his most famous) came next and was also wonderful but in a more poetical Beat manner. The Hawkline Monster is on the surface a more straightforward novel where two killers are hired by Miss Hawkline to kill the monster that lives in the caves under the house. Such a mudane plot was never going to satisfy Brautigan though and things soon take a side-step. For me though it's the gracefulness and the dance of his prose that is the real joy.

have finally finished Lud-In-The-Mist by Hope Mirrlees. It turned out to be a proper windbag of a novel. Endlessly impressed by it's own intelligence without ever really putting that intelligence to work in a meaningful way. By the halfway point i found myself referring to it as Lud-In-The-Mud as a result of the effort involved in wading through the sticky morass of the authors prose. I think there was a pretty nifty little tale in there somewhere but her writing style was distinctly lacking in any sort of wit or melody and as such it never ceased being an effort to keep my attention on the page.

have just finished The Osiris Ritual by George Mann, the second of his Newbury & Hobbes Steampunk mysteries. I thought the first (The Affinity Bridge) was a fun, if a little flawed, romp through a fog-ridden london that mixed zombies, robots and airships into an entertaining neo-victorian thriller. It's recommended for those looking for a more than satisfyingly pulp steampunk fix.
this second one wasn't as good as it's predecessor. The plot was a little rushed and lacked grandeur and scope but mostly i think he sacrificed too much of the world-building that was so well done in the first. I heartily approved of how naturalistic he allows the newly emerging technology to feel but half the joy (for me at least) of this sort of genre fiction lies in how the author interweaves technology and the subsequent cultural and societal changes into the narrative. i felt like i didn't learn anything new about the universe he's created and without that it may as well have been set (to an extent) in our own victorian era.
That said though, Mann has an engaging style and the book was a fun, fast-paced read with a third volume still to come.

taking time for

reading.
walking.
thinking.
listening.
looking.
resting.


being, not doing.

new music on the horizon

just to fill you all in on some new music heading your way soon from me.

i wasn't going to release anything until the end of the summer but i was asked for some music for a split cassette release by Arma from AghartA in Lithuania. I don't really know when it's coming out but it'll be fairly soon. It'll be a limited edition of 50 cassettes and I'm only getting a couple of copies so really if you want one then you'll need to contact arma direct by visiting the website.

My contribution is a 29 minute drone piece called 'The Prescient Machine' and is the first part of a series of releases i've been putting together this year based entirely around acoustic sounds. There'll be at least another two in the series (the next album with Darren Tate and an album to be released next year). Before either of those see the light of day though I'll be issuing the collaboration between myself and Banks Bailey, called 'A Brief Sojourn', sometime in September.

peace
ian

something to watch

charlie brooker is a newspaper columnist and tv presenter here in the uk.
he writes two weekly columns for the best of the daily newspapers - The Guardian. his monday column is a hysterical rant about whatever crosses his mind whilst his weekend one is a review (or assault on) that weeks TV called Screen Burn.

This second column morphed into a tv show (Screenwipe) a few years back of which they've done 5 series (all are available on youtube and are well worth a watch even if you live outside the UK)

For the most recent series however things took a slight twist as they renamed the show and dedicated the series entirely to looking at how the news is presented. it's brilliant stuff. interesting, thought provoking and very, very funny.



American readers may like to check out the episode dealing with the US way of presenting the news.

webcomics

hello
a flying visit to point your eye bones in the direction of some groovy things to read.

this one is Warren Ellis' Freak Angels. it's an ongoing weekly serial that's kind of a follow on re-imagining of John Wndham's Midwich Cuckoos. It's not the best thing he's ever done but it's very readable and completely free. it's an ongoing tale which has been running for a little while but the link will take you to the first episode.

these others are all autobiographical / confessional type strips. this first one led me to the other which then led to the third.

'ellerbisms' is probably my favourite of the three. It does have a slight tendency towards an almost mawkish sentimentality (but i am a cold hearted individual so take that opinion with as big a pinch of salt as you'd like) but he's unafraid of tackling downs as well as ups and it's regularly funny with a clean cartoony art style that perfectly suits his tales. you'll have to go back a couple of strips to see why he's got a swollen mouth.

The Everyday I discovered through the authors regular appearences in the Ellerbisms strip. his strips are less substantial but have a nicely self-deprecating feel going on. he's just starting a series on his visit to Glastonbury festival. The first episode is a little bit of a whinge about the hassle of getting there which left me thinking that anyone willing to shell out that much money to attend that cattle-farm (literally) of substandard corporate endorsed, major-label, 'sham-indie' twaddle kinda deserves to be treated shoddily. Bruce fucking springsteen!!!!! I mean, come on?

Sorry Comics is an interesting jaunt through the authors experiences. His art really reminds me of something but I can't quite nail it. I've only read a few of these but they're well observed and very nicely executed with a more leisurely (although still short) pace than the other two strips. there are also lots of links down the side of the page to other webcomics that might be worth checking out.

peace
ian

restless mondays

the holidays have finally started. for the students at least. me, i was in work today. it's a very different place when the students aren't there. it's almost creepily quiet but it does give one lots of opportunity to play with all the toys that i don't usually get access to.

today's toy was the upright piano. my piano playing skills are non-existant but i flatter myself that i can, when sat there, produce a nicely minimal construction. as a result I have two 'traditionally' played pieces and two plucked pieces all of which i'm pretty chuffed with. no download of these I'm afraid as they're going into the pot for the as yet untitled new album I'm making with Darren Tate and also for a new solo project I've been working on.

tomorrow's toy is the grand piano in the college theatre.

...............................................................

After work finished i headed to clyne park which is just across the road from my house. It used to be the grounds of the big old manor house (it's called Clyne Castle but it's just a big house) where the folks who pretty much owned Swansea lived. The house is now a halls of residence for the university (rich kids only need apply) and is very nice. As an undergraduate I once helped out at the annual convention of the Association of Social Anthropologists which was held there.
They've recently built some (very expensive) flats behind the castle that whilst being kind of groovy looking and sci-fi are also staggeringly out of character with the suroundings.

here's the castle...



and here're the flats...



(doesn't the big pillar look like a tower of toilet rolls)

like i said, I like them both but not necessarily next door to each other.

But it's the gardens that i really like. Lot's of meandering pathwys through the trees and some real nice views over the bay.

It takes about an hour to walk there, around and back which suits me down to the ground as I'm timing my walks by my copies of the BBC Sherlock Holmes radio series each episode of which is 55 minutes long (and fabulous).

I'm listening to very little music at the moment (although I really should be) as I'm feeling quite 'wordy'. Been reading a lot but what has been occupying a huge amount of my time is my new found fondness for audio books. i've been a fan of radio plays for a while now mostly from listening to the new Sapphire and Steel plays and the adaptation of Brian Talbot's The Adventures of Luther Arkwright starring a pre-Dr Who David Tennant.
They can take a bit of getting used to as they do have a tendency to sound fairly quaint and if you're a sound junky like me it's easy to get lost in the mechanics of the incidental soundworld. But the actors are generally pretty good, as are the production values and so is the writing although as today's listen was the Holmes classic A Study In Scarlet (just a fantastic title) the quality of the writing is pretty much a given. With lines like 'He was beating a cadaver with a cudgel.' how could you resist.

(btw, Lee - if your reading this I need to borrow your bluetooth thingy as that line's going to be my new ringtone)

Audio books are a different prospect. This is simply someone reading you a story. I first tried them as a substitute for music on a long drive last year. I'd spotted the Harry Pottor books as read by Stephen Fry on a download site and got them more out of curiosity about having Stephen Fry (who I'm a massive fan of) read me a story than as to what he was reading. Needless to say they were fantastic. He reads them perfectly and they are a thoroughly enjoyable romp. I have loads of the things now. Neil Gaiman reading The Graveyard Book was OK but he is a little adenoidal and also sounds as though he shares the same voice as Douglas Adams, although it's probably his full time now as Adams is dead. On the subject of Adams it was cool to hear him read through the first Hitchhikers but i got bored halfway through Restaurant. I gave The Stand by Stephen King a go but a combination of the readers horrid whiney accent and the turgid, emotionless, meandering, cliched tat of the text conspired to make it a loooooong and boring experience which, for some unfathomable reasons I insisted on listening to all the way through.

It's going to take me a little while to work though all the Sherlock Holmes but waithing in the wings are recordings of Stephen Fry reading Chekov's short stories, an early radio play of Night of the Living Dead, The Road by Cormac McCarthy and lot's of Kurt Vonnegut.

peace
ian