On reading this one is reminded of the essential vanity of the music business, its inability to balance hope and reality, the way that the alien nature of how money works clashes with the utopianism that doing things on impulse (such as releasing challenging records) releases.
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Paws Sex Hands, Waiters, Dolfinz – Split 12”
Maybe it’s the tension in the effort of stopping everything morphing into a sub Primal Scream splurge in favour of just being an actual song that makes it so attractive. Who knows?
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Playlist 4: The Playlist Pogrom
My name is Stephen, and I have a penchant for kitsch pop songs like I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper, Rasputin, Ça Plane Pour Moi and Kool in the Kaftan.
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Fear and Loving in Heaton Park – Cloudy, with frequent golden showers
Having reached his mid-forties without attending an open-air festival, Stephen James assumed that The Stone Roses’ Heaton Park gig would be a baptism of fire. He was half right…
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Uncle Weird’s Weird Jukebox – Part One
I can really bore you with this thing about eating in BeneLux pop from 64-68. The Eurifans sang about eating mustard, Het Pocomania sang of the benefits of eating parsley with a very straight face indeed, daddy-oh and then there’s this track by Ruud Knolraap & The Sweet Vegetable (Knoolraap being a turnip).
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Sunwølf – Beyond the Sun
The titles should give the nature of the music away; Morose Land, Solar, Inertia… redolent of the size and overbearing physicality of nature itself: of watching the world go by, of not bothering to waste words or gestures
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Mere – Mere
It’s safe to say that on record, Mere make music that relies on atmosphere and turns of phrase, moody extempores that sort of promise that something will crystallise very soon.
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Heroin In Tahiti – Death Surf
I suppose you could say it’s the music Mizutani would perform if commissioned to record a summertime special soundtrack.
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Boutros Bubba – Ridiculous Wrists
They were always a strange proposition. Gnomic is a good word for them, from the daft crab walks the singer, Vreselijk Ongeluk (Dreadful Accident), used to perform onstage, to their eye popping artwork
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Rooie Waas – Het Is Maar Een Constatering
The sound at times isn’t too far off Young Gods, especially the opening few tracks; though the music is more punk, more make-do-and-mend, created from sort of electronic debris found down the Kringloop.
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