Sometimes my life is so eerie. And if you think I'm happy, paint me white/(yellow).

Tweet I'll tell you what just caught me by surprise - the fact that I am moving to Leicester in two days time. Like I've known this for a while now, but I've never really thought about it. Or prepared for it.

my first new friend of next week

The facts, as I know them, are as follows. I start a job in Leicester University at 9am on Wednesday morning. I arrive in Leicester at 10pm on Tuesday night. Yet I do not have a place to live. I do not even have a suitcase or any contacts there apart from the professor who gave me the job. All this gives me, oh, a day to book a hostel, purchase a big case, and pack a capsule of necessary stuff for life in Eng-er-land.

England is a country that I've hardly ever visited in spite of it always deeply interesting me in an almost anthropological way. It's so close to us and deceptively familiar (thanks to TV and mutual emigration, not to mention colonialism), yet English culture is, at heart, probably nearly as divorced from ours as it is from the French. 

Confession time. I am a weird, conflicted, quasi anglophile.

Here is a far-from-complete list of the things about England which are alien to me, but which fascinate me...

...people who describe themselves as hobbyists, football hooliganism, pathological pedantry, historical reenactment societies, footballer's wives, Jordan, Storkboy's ex-flatmate English Dom, vegetable growing competitions, their military, those slot machines they have in pubs, people who describe themselves as very specific 'enthusiasts' (e.g. a pre-WWII military map 'enthusiast'), Tango soft drinks, Deal Or No Deal, The Sun, supermarkets that sound familiar but which I've never shopped in (Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose), the word 'giro', families wearing paper hats during Christmas dinner, The Archers (a middle class British sitcom - surely one of a kind?), Dappy from N-Dubz, the whole Madeleine McCann thing, The House of Lords, Countdown, pigeon fanciers, the fact the English have a Legoland even though Lego originated in Denmark (but then again it involves obsessively building things out of tiny bricks - sort of English, right?), Russells Brand and Kane, their general bemusement about - and indifference to - Northern Ireland, Eggheads, Punch and Judy, Morris dancers, the remarkable breakdown of their TV into what seems like a million regional stations within a geographical area the size of half a US State, their allergy to a single European currency, the fact that they have a TV Channel called 'Dave', Bruce Forsyth, the cultural distinction between the north and south of their country (which would probably be strong enough to merit a civil war in a similarly culturally diametric Arab state), regular Joes who get interviewed on Sky after a news event and talk in this curious rhetorical way (as if they are recounting a story in the pub for the twentieth time - "well the wife had gone to work, and there was a rumbling about the house. I fought to myself, that's funny, we don't get erfquakes in this corner of Shropshire"), Time Team, E4, Michael Barrymore's Strike It Rich, the intriguing idea that English men seem to be completely enamoured with tits while their US and global counterparts are all ass-men (actually, the Irish might have this in common with them), the very notion of drinking a strong lager in your own house of an afternoon, the seaside in shit weather, did I mention tits, the phrase 'at the end of the day', the aching - nay romantic - hanging on to sporting achievements from a generation or more ago, jingoism, Danny Dyer, their love/hate relationship with the British flag and what it symbolises, the likes of Morrisey and the Gallagher brothers and their doubly intriguing relationship with said flag when you consider their Irish roots, Fern Britton, darts, bowls, snooker, other so-called 'sports' a person fares well at when filled with alcohol (skills?), singing as opposed to muttering in church, The Beano fan club (couldn't access it as an Irish child), Gordon the Gopher, proper cathedrals, and finally, their achievements in the western literary tradition.

failed conference on how to make the union jack sound again

MP3: Dexys Midnight Runners-Jackie Wilson said (when you smile)

MP3: John Lennon-Julia

MP3: The Boo Radleys-From the Bench at Belvedere

MP3: PiL-Rise

MP3: The Specials-A Message to you Rudy

MP3: The Smiths-Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get what I Want

MP3: Burial-Fostercare

MP3: Dizzee Rascal-Fix up, Look Sharp

So long Kells, and see you on the other side of the channel 'heap readers - where I'll update you on the Leicester way of life. I'll try to be as cruel/ kind to it as I am to Kells.

Oh the wrecking ball of nightmares is on its way to me (Mark McGuire, an appreciation)

Tweet You know that cliché, the one that goes "maybe, I'll finally get to work on that novel"? That's me. I sometimes say that, and sometimes think I mean it too. My novel, if I ever write it, will be pitched at teenagers, and will feature evil birds (the ones that walk, such as magpies and crows), good birds (the ones that hop, such as thrushes and wagtails), an ancient Irish supernatural force, the trapped faces of people knotted into a tree trunk, and two teens who spend a wet November in Bundoran during the nineties.

Pretty sweet sounding synopsis isn't it? It'll have to sit in the brain cupboard until I learn to write convincing characters and dialogue though. I was talking to my friend Karl about this particular problem over the weekend and he suggested I just start writing blind, allowing the characters to generate themselves and develop as the project progresses. It's a nice idea, but I worry that I'm too solipsistic and any lengthy story I might write would be populated Being John Malkovitch-style by multiple replicas of me. That's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is a collection of teenager-shaped wooden clichés that wouldn't make it past the first storyboard for Skins.

we dare you to fall asleep. we just dare you

Enough frustrated writer speak, it's MP3 time.

I got an email during the week asking me if the 'heap was going to focus only on techno from now on. This touched me, because it meant that people are actually reading the blog. To the anonymous emailer - don't worry, it's not. Things ebb and flow around here, and my tastes remain the same as they ever were. Sure look, I'll even prove it:

MP3: Mark McGuire-Brain Storm (For Erin)

Mark McGuire is the guitarist from Emeralds, a band whose album 'Does it Look Like I'm Here' was my favourite of last year (something I didn't get around to cataloging as I was focusing on songs). He seems to shit music - solo albums, CD-R releases, label retrospectives, collaborations, you name it. And impressively, considering the proliferation of stuff bearing his name, it is all good. His guitar work is unmistakable: clean trebly notes tumbling over themselves in slowly changing cylindrical patterns, punctuated by cathartic moments of feedback on a loose leash (but a leash all the same - the lad has a deceptively controlled style). All the while, whether working solo, with Emeralds, or with collaborators, his guitar communicates an intoxicating and youthful worldview. His music may be mostly composed alone, but it is the opposite of introspective (something borne out by the fact that a few of his solo recordings are named after or dedicated to other people, not to mention his love of collaboration). You get the feeling that Mark McGuire is the sort of chap who sits on a porch, looks up at the sky, and, like our own Richie Egan, thinks "look. at. the. fucking. moon".

MP3: Trouble Books and Mark McGuire-The Golden Waste

How excellent is Mark McGuire? I can answer that. Mark McGuire is so excellent that he collaborated with one of the most nondescript bands you could ever imagine (if you don't believe me check out anything Trouble Books recorded prior to his input), ignited some sort of spark, and helped them create an utterly fantastic album. Morto for Trouble Books though, because it really does just sound like an Emeralds album with vocals. Ah no, I'm being sly. They peddle a fairly decent Phil Elverum style of song that was just perfect for a McGuire impregnation.

MP3: Emeralds-Alive in the Sea of Information

The Source. I could try to add to this track with words in some way, but it would be feeble and redundant at best.

Emeralds are playing Whelans on the 24th of September. I'll be living in England then :(

My favourite home listening techno - part 2

Tweet I see that the Field's new album, Looping State of Mind, has leaked. It's not due out until the end of October! Surely this is some sort of record? You have to feel genuinely sorry for the guy. Look at him, he needs a hug. And a shitload of vitamins too by the looks of things.

this is what repetitive looping music can do to your complexion

Well if there's a silver lining to the cloud, word on illegal torrent street *ahem* is that the album is a monolithic return to form after a decidedly unsure-of-itself second album. We'll have a good deep consideration of it here in due course.

12: Metro Area - Metro Area

This slick album takes the bit in the Billie Jean video where Michael Jackson struts down an illuminated pavement and sexes off with it into a sexy future where techno and disco copulate mechanistically with each other on a glass table. Listening to Metro Area at home can turn a mundane task such as ironing one's boxers into a fun adventure towards erotic oblivion, the sort where you wake up a week later on an oily mat in a semi detached house in Drogheda with the faint smell of poppers in your nostrils. All because you pressed play on your iPod.

MP3: Metro Area-Miura

11: Pantha Du Prince - This Bliss

At this point, I must stress that this list isn't ranked. I wrote the names of fifteen albums down on a notepad a few weeks ago and now I am crossing them off in no particular order. If it was ranked, however, This Bliss would be a strong contender in the jostle for the top spot. It is an achievement of extraordinary scope and musicianship that only grows in stature as time passes. It is at once airy and spacious but filled with a cathedral-worthy amount of glassy detail - and to me, to balance such a sense of space with well wrought detail is an accomplished trick that very few producers manage to pull off when they attempt this sort of lush orchestral techno. 

Come to think of it This Bliss might well be the consummate home listening techno album. Its emotional sophistication, aesthetically perfect sonic architecture, and relatively contemplative pacing, all add up to a fairly unbeatable experience for vibing out on headphones. It's a masterpiece. 

MP3: Pantha Du Prince-Walden 2

Maxithermal's golden greats #7 zip up your mickey storkboy

Tweet

Now that Storkboy is father to this beautiful creature we can all laugh...

...but did ye know, there was a point in his student life when his fertility was in doubt?

Over to you Storky.

By popular request (okay, two people expressed mild interest), here, in full, is a little anecdote through which a certain time and place asserts itself in all its glory. Zippergate.

First let me set the scene. The month was April (the cruelest month, don’t you know) and, as Prince sang it, the year was 1999. We were seven months into a punishing five year bender. The city against which this epic fable unfolds was the legendary western outpost of the twelve tribes - crusties, swans, claddagh rings, and buckfast. They call it Galway.

It is hard to explain just how deep we had sank into degradation and liver corruption. Each Thursday, following three or four nights drinking, a tweed capped wearing psycho whom I shared a house with, would land in from the off-license with a bottle of Wadski vodka - it was called something else, but Wadski was what we called it in our regressive alcohol damaged lingo at the time. Yah we had our own language; not being capable of communing with the general public, we developed a speak. It was low on syllables and mostly pertained to booze, renegade swans who enjoyed raping ducks, and other canal based wildlife that appealed to our destroyed brains. It suited our needs just fine.

On this particular April night, things were looking messy from the outset. The Stone Roses were singing about the resurrection on our Stone Roses tape, and we were already having trouble reaching the bathroom - it was yet only six or seven o’ clock. The Wadski went down like butter and already the flickering lights of the college bar and the Warwick were singing to us.

“Lezzzsgo”.

So we fucked off down to the college bar, with at least one of us discharging some Wadski into the canal along the way. What a strange and beautiful walk it was; we were young enough to still be excited about living away from home, yet were surrounded by booze drenched comrades who stuck together no matter what.

The bar was wedged. Though it was April I can well imagine they played Christmas songs (they didn't). I can see a crew of happy red faces and drink sloshing around in pint glasses. We were raring to go and out for wherever. We secured our tickets for the Warwick niteclub (the best-kept secret in Ireland. Wait, it wasn't really a secret. Or that good), robbed some leftover drinks, and queued up for the Salthill-collegebar nightlink shuttle buses, where all those who were in on the aforementioned best secret in Ireland sang Sawdoctors songs and clapped each other on the back.

The Warwick was more than a nightclub in those days. It was the manifestation of our way of life. Loads of happy drunk people on the longest extended vacation of their lives, most not yet turned twenty. After-bucca, Vodka-shock, and Vambucca. We sank them all. Video killed the radio star. Smells like teen spirit. Basket Case. N17. Creep. 

I remember events following this particular night with the sort of clarity that either completely defies my drunken state or confirms the extremity of it. I scored, which was not that common an occurrence. Boogying along to Rebel Rebel or some such, I caught the attention of a girl with very good taste; I swear she didn’t look like a pigs corpse dug from the ground following a week of decomposition. Anyway, while tongue twisting with this babe she suddenly pushed me away with an ejaculatory “Ugh”. There was some sort of problem. 

“Whassh wrong baybee”, I slurred. 

“You’re wearing a retainer. Ah no. I'm sorry, I find them a bit weird. Ah wait, I'm going to be honest. I hate them” 

“Ok then, fuck off.”

I suddenly accepted for the first time that I was in fact wearing minging orthodontic equipment. (I was in denial).

Folks, it goes downhill from here.

I met the crew at the bar. “That fuckin bitssh doesshn’t like my retainer, what will I do?” 

“Fuck the bitch, drink another vodkabucca” 

This I did, with gusto and aplomb. It gets blurry here for a while, but next thing I know I’m stumbling around in the misty Galway night. I’m hardly able to stand, the nightclub has finished and standing out the back of it, leaning up agin a wall and attempting to urinate. 

Zzzzzzzzzziiiiiiiipppp. 

Oh oh, somethings stuck. Tug, tug, it won’t come undone, and there is skin involved.

Aaaaaaaaaarrrghh.

I try to unfasten it; I pull and squeeze but nothing is working. 

I’m sobering up quickly and ten gallons of scrumpy and Wadski are knocking on the back door. This takes priority, so I find a derelict patch of ground, and, unable to fully remove my trousers due to some particularly gruesome metal-foreskin interaction, I let loose a volley of stinking alcohol with everything at an awkward half mast. Finished, I look up from my crouch. It seems that I'm suddenly surrounded by bouncers. They frog march me to the gate where my friends are waiting. They can see my horribly lopsided gait, but they don’t know yet about the man-injury that is causing it. I tell them to leave me. I stumble home alone.

a swan that mates with a duck makes a 'swuck'... one that mates with a frog creates a 'swog'

Later, I show it to the lads, and there is chin stroking and ruminations about pliers (something which will come back to haunt me the next day) - finally there is ridicule and torment. Having decided that I was too drunk to go to hospital for fear of getting pumped, they at least help me cut the trousers around the zip, before I put on fresh underclothes and go to bed.

I wake up in a bleary haze, with absolutely no recollection of the previous night. Until I go to the toilet, that is. It all comes flooding back in a tidal wave of morning after guilt, nausea, and all the other crippling shame that comes with this sort of drinking. 'It' was swelling, and if there was any hope of dealing with it the night before, it had certainly evaporated now. Instead of going to hospital in Galway (which would have saved me a lot of pain) some sort of homing instinct kicked in.

So I got the bus to my home town of Kells [to be contd...]

MP3: The Stone Roses-Bye Bye Badman

all the skittering waterbugs that smell like rotten apples

Tweet A week ago my brother tweeted "I heard something like Autumn growl on the North Circular Road today". I chastised him for being a mentaller because it was the start of August, but he might have been right. I'm staying with him tonight, and something like Autumn did growl on the North Circular Road today. I clocked a few jinny joes drifting by earlier, and remembered a John McGahern short story where they continually float past a pub on the bottom of Grafton Street, causing the characters to get into an argument about where such things could possibly come from in central Dublin. I then remembered filling a bag with them once, climbing up a mound of topsoil on wasteground behind my house, and releasing them into the breeze while shouting something stupid like "release the seeds" at the top of my voice.

Autumn didn't really growl though. It purred. A growl will come sometime in September, when a wet shred of black polystyrene whips off a skip and flies down the North Circular; a ragged spectre, showing jinny joes how Autumn is really done in Dublin.

MP3: Basic Channel-Enforcement

MP3: Basic Channel-Presence (edit)

Come run down a rabbit hole with me, into the bowels of Berlin and the world of dub techno. Umm, not easy eh? Well if you are finding this journey difficult, just imagine I am falconhoof. Good? Good. Where does this slippery story begin? There’s no clear answer, it’s just too slippery; but we need to start somewhere, so we’ll start in Berlin in 1993, and consider a mysterious nondescript twelve-inch production called ‘Enforcement’ that was released by ‘Cyrus’ on a new label called Basic Channel. Not that it was easy to know what Basic Channel was. Because of a deliberately smudged photocopied aesthetic, you had to work to make out such information on their records' sleeves.

Later, as more twelve-inches appeared, under different aliases, the logo became more distorted, faded; it had deteriorated through entropic processes into such a decayed state that the only thing left to identify the releases (apart from the strange numinous music they contained), was a catalogue number. Initially shrouded in complete mystery (remember this stuff was released before the internet entered daily life), but later found out to be mostly the work of the producers Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald, the Basic Channel series of releases became the backbone of one the great dark vaults of dance, the dub techno genre.

We started in Berlin in 1993, but the roots of the Basic Channel/dub techno sound (I’m lumping them together because Basic Channel and dub techno were really one and the same thing at the start) stretch back further to dub itself. Dub’s technique of creating space by subtracting and wiping elements from production was key to the Basic Channel sound. What they did on their releases, in an increasingly sophisticated manner, was boil techno right down to its hissing, pulsing core. The manifesto was clear on the deteriorating sleeve art - this was exceptionally minimal music. It was a crafted consideration of the very innards of the techno organism; a cellular structure under the microscope, throbbing, pulsing, reproducing. It was biological.

Basic Channel continued to release music between 1993 and 1994, during which they took their stripped-down template of repetitious hard techno and pushed it through every permutation possible. As the series progressed and the cover art dissolved into what appeared to be photocopies of photocopies, the music became more spectral, gaseous and even serene (it is no mean feat to invoke serenity in a listener while maintaining 140 bpm). The hard Detroit contours of ‘Enforcement’ had been blown to pieces at this stage, and tracks such as ‘Presence’ wriggled and coiled towards endless analogue horizons. Indeed, ‘Presence’ in its original edit is over twenty minutes long, and like much of Basic Channel’s music its influence is strongly felt in minimal techno. You can draw a direct line between an expansive track like this and the adventurous minimal producer Ricardo Villalobos’s game-changing, literally never-ending (both sides of the track mix into each other), ‘Fizheuer Zieheuer’.

To the uninitiated, Basic Channel’s music can sound daunting, repetitive, or too abstract; this is understandable, because this is a form of techno that emphasizes rhythm and texture so heavily that, apart from the odd tiny compressed snippet, melody does not figure in its construction in any shape or form. To those who criticise this, I say just imagine for a while that melody is overrated, or at least not strictly necessary for the enjoyment of music. Doubters should try out dub techno the same way they might try out sushi or some weirdly textured Chinese dumplings. In some Sichaun cookery, texture is valued as much as, if not more than, the taste of food; so much so that Asian cookery techniques allow us to experience texture in many exciting ways. It’s just a matter of adjusting our palettes. 

Dub techno is, above all else, an exploration of the textures of techno. In the seemingly repeating, yet always changing, pulse of Basic Channel’s music, an adventurous listener might soon find themself lost in meditative contemplation. They will eventually find themselves confronted with moments of insight into the actual ‘form’ of sound, namely, sound detached from signifying elements of music such as melody and lyrics; a position where it can be appreciated for its own sake. By constructing a musical launchpad that allows the listener to do that, Basic Channel create a body of work of considerable artistic merit.

(While the original Basic Channel recordings were never intended for release on CD, two compilations of their releases appeared on CDs with the legend ‘buy vinyl’ stickered on the jewel case.)

MP3: Basic Channel-Quadrant Dub I (edit)

[most of the material above originally featured on the fourforty4 blog]

corn rigs and barley rigs

Tweet I am toying with the idea of making a podcast. Or maybe the idea of making a podcast is toying with me? Either way, I'm fiddling around with audacity a lot. So much so, that a forthcoming post is more than likely going to feature a 128kbps stream of double drone; specifically, non-descript droning music I read about on dusted magazine interspersed with the non-descript droning of my voice. The weekly podcast challenge will be to determine where each song ends and my voice begins. Just how droning can one man get? Well, a pissed off person once told me that my conversational voice could penetrate a concrete bunker. I'm the human soobwoofer baby. Tim Hecker should sample me.

The techno home-listening list is percolating at the moment, but it shall return early next week. In the meantime, lets rifle through the last.fm stats and pick out some recently played songs (what was my life like before every aspect of it could be converted into readily accessible empirical data? My eyes strain in the fog... I see... I see something... a young lad dancing to Blur on a grey shore?... nope - it's gone).

MP3: Ravi Shankar-Raga Kirwani

Fuck knows what they are singing about on this track, but we can assume it is reddy brek for the soul as it is a raga chant. The best part of this song starts from about 2.10 mins in, where there is a call and-response between the group raga bit and each contributing solo voice/instrument, all singing a wriggly refrain that sounds like a snake coming out of a basket.

MP3: Raymond Scott-Little Miss Echo
MP3: Raymond Scott-The Happy Whistler

Once upon a time, long before the balding keyboardist from Roxy Music became human shorthand for pioneering electronic music, there was this fella. Raymond Scott was born in 1908, which would make him a dusty 103 if he were alive today. Raymond (not his real name, he was originally Harry) made his fortune from composing bits of music for the original Looney Tunes cartoon clips. But his real passion was the embryonic field of electronic music. Back in those days even the most basic sequencer music required stacks of equipment that not only looked like the inside of the space shuttle or a cold war nuclear lab, but cost the same too. The cartoon soundtracks must have generated a bit of bread because he bought the works. What did he do with all this sci-fi equipment... compose a teenage symphony to God? Not quite. He made a series of albums designed to send babies at various stages of their development to sleep. I shit not. He called it the 'Soothing Sounds for Baby' series.

I seriously doubt if many babies crossed over to the land of nod listening to the (often quite piercing) sounds of Raymond Scott's albums but, regardless of how they succeeded in their original intention, the records have experienced a cultish afterlife as weird auguries of modern electronic music. Actually, auguries makes them sound like curiosities. The truth is, they are much more robust than that. Once you get over the astonishing earliness of them, the 'Soothing Sounds for Baby' records stand alone as trend-resistant ambient music.

Hmm, it just so happens that I could test out the original function of these records. I have a six week old nephew, Karl, son of Storkboy, son of Tommy, son of Gammygee the Feeble. I might play him 'Soothing sounds for Baby Volume 2 (for two month olds)' next week, and see if the little champ either nods off to sleep listening to it or gets annoyed. I'll report back to the 'heap with the results.

MP3: Arp-Pastoral Symphony I. Dominoes II. Infinity Room.

When I was a child I was extremely sensitive to weird stuff. Even if it frightened the living shit out of me (which it often did), weird stuff hooked me. Yet I never managed to be a fully fledged weirdo. I was too uptight to take the plunge and fully embrace weirdness. I either just appreciated or got frightened by the uncanny from the sidelines - whereas other youngsters with similar aesthetic sensitivities probably became pagan or ran away with the travelling amusement arcade or some shite. Oh, fie! Such a cage of adolescent torment! Too square to be weird, and too weird to be square *sigh*.

One of the things my nascent weird barometer sniffed out pretty quickly was an insert that RTE1 used to play odd evenings in the mid-to-late eighties. It was a proggy animated clip of Kraftwerk's Autobahn (a supreme moment of what-the-fuckery on our national broadcaster's part, I'm sure you'll agree). I am not sure how many times they actually played it; it may have been only twice, but it might as well have been a million, so badly is the clip burned into my mind. Actually, screw that, it is radioactively frazzled into my id, and my brother's too - we've discussed it.

In the clip - broadcast just before the angelus - a lean and naked blue alien swims and jogs through an amniotic world full of tubes and endlessly replicating versions of itself to the tune of Autobahn. I'd watch this through my fingers, on the verge of puking, feeling simultaneously appalled and engaged.

Mufti day was always a little unusual in Navan Mercy Convent

Now when I read books, look at paintings or listen to music, I often crave the strength of the responses I originally had to things like that particular clip, even though such things might have once scared me. There is a deliciousness in any deep response to a work of art, even if that response is being weirded out.

So, um yeah Arp then. That MP3 sounds a bit like Autobahn doesn't it? I was well up for describing it, but it looks like I picked up my tin whistle and took ye all on a merry dance down tangent street. Woops.

My favourite home listening techno - part 1

Tweet ...not just techno for home listening; it's for headphones too. 'Cos techno is great on the bus. Unlike Belle and Sebastian's music, it drowns out chattering grannies and babies crying. It also makes you feel a bit cool and street - like you are starring in your own personal arty German documentary, as opposed to your own personal twee super 8 movie (which I used to enjoy imagining back in my Belle and Sebastian phase).

This list was initially assembled in a highly scientific fashion using last.fm statistics, likert scales, and complex logarithms. I worked on it deep into the night, scrutinizing my screen as green LED codes flickered over my spectacles to a 4/4 beat. I paced the room, completely off my tits on various bitter disco powders, dribbling and jerking, with a calculator in one hand and an iPod in the other. But the results didn't add up. The scientific approach kept throwing me curveballs - THE ALGORITHMS WERE OUT OF SYNC WITH MY GUT INSTINCTS.

In complete desperation, I hastily scribbled the names of fifteen techno albums onto ripped pieces of paper, put them in my Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker, and rattled it good and hard. The results were as follows...

15: Akufen - My Way

This album came out when glitch music was all the rage (unfortunately - outside of the deeply untrendy environs of the 'heap - glitch nowadays only remains popular among tragic Iberian hipsters who smell of crack cocaine and chewed sardines, and the odd outpost of weird Canadian stoners). It was produced by a Quebecois bloke called Marc Leclair who apparently used over 2,000 tiny samples in its construction. These were all harvested from his shortwave radio dial in a small town in the wintry north of Quebec.

The factoid above either lends a spooked charm to 'My Way' or creates the spooked charm itself - I don't know, because I first heard the album in the context of said factoid. Either way, there is no denying that the entire record is an artistic representation of the curiously twiddled late night radio dial, a shamanic red line moving slowly across dimly lit numbers in the gloom. Romantic, no?

Listen closely to 'Deck the House' for a lick of the Toto song that Roger Sanchez sampled for 'Another Chance'.

MP3: Akufen-Skidoos
MP3: Akufen-Deck the House

14: Luomo - The Present Lover

Luomo is a pseudonym of Sasu Ripatti who is not only a classically tranied jazz drummer but who, under various other pseudonyms such as Vladislav Delay, is one of the most forward-thinking producers in dance music - for example, he is the rhythmic backbone of the Moritz von Oswald Trio (a trio which, I digress, have the perfect name for a fictitious cold war band in a Don DeLillo novel). As Luomo, he created two stone cold classic microhouse albums, 'Vocalcity' and 'The Present Lover'. I already blathered a lot about 'Vocalcity' on the heap...

...I said...

"the word 'organic' gets bandied around a lot in relation to certain types of dance music. Volcacity deserves the description though. If you buried it in your back garden and sprayed it with baby bio, it would probably grow into the next Luomo album."

Writing that, I knew that there is in fact another Luomo album called 'The Present Lover' and, if push came to shove, it would be hard to judge between the merits of either that or 'Vocalcity'. Both albums are slinky and deceptive - they feel like regular house music, until a freaky point down the line where you realise that the music is subtly quite tricksy and shapeshifting, and listening to it can feel like getting your reflection caught between two mirrors in a supermarket cabinet. And it's both weird and magic.

MP3: Luomo-Tessio

13: Polygon Window - Surfing on Sinewaves

The sleeve of Aphex Twin's embryo album 'Surfing on Sinewaves' shows some jagged rocks off the Cornish coast. Later in his career, as individual compositions became either convoluted or ferociously simplified, he would try to remind his unusual fan-base (a weirdly incompatible mixture of early acid-house heads, people who were good at higher level maths, indie fans, and twerps) that his productions have a certain rooted identity, and said identity originates in the waves that lash against Southwest England or, less so, Limerick (which is where his family comes from, but which doesn't matter that much, in spite of what many pedants protested when Jim Carroll felt out the 'best of irish music' on his On The Record blog).

'Surfing on Sine Waves' is one of Richard D. James's less strong albums, yet it is entirely devoid of trickery, and it has a primitive mystery that he would do well to even manage to appropriate now. Also, he was a teenager when he made it. Yeah, I know. Deep.

MP3: Polygon Window-Audax Window
MP3: Polygon Window-If it Really is Me

Finally - there is a great new music blog on the block, belonging to Dave Donnelly of Sputnik Music, State, and AU. Find him here.

Post finally - hip hop, slowly starting to love it, thanks.

I am speaking through barbara

Tweet Whuh-oh my x chromosome is all itchy and shit, which can only mean one thing - I'm going to write another list. A short and sweet one, though; just long enough to ease the symptoms of restless list syndrome. It will be a list of what I think are the best home-listening techno albums, albums which shine on headphones but which would work in clubs too. I've seen people list their favourite home-listening dance albums on Amazon, and they mostly seem to select glitchy, fiddly, Warp records-y stuff. I'm ruling all that out. My criterion is simple. You must be able to dance to this music without pulling some drastic interpretive shapes. Coming tomorrow.

MP3: The Former Soviet Republic-I Mean Everything

Ian Wright is The Former Soviet Republic. He just finished recording an album called The Former Soviet Republic is Made of This, which is full of stirring and heartsick songs with a confessional bent. His music is slowcore in a lovely chiming way that is reminiscent of bands like Bedhead and Low and the melodies are thick and soupy, if that makes sense? Ian is launching his album in Whelans upstairs on August 20th. Support comes from Big Monster Love. If you pay €7 you get to see him. If you pay €15 you get to see him and a CD of his album. If you pay €33,967 you get to not only see him and a CD of his album but an exclusive VIP gig for you and 14 friends in an actual Former Soviet Republic.

Exhibition: Loreana Rushe

Loreana Rushe of Lolomix fame will be exhibiting her work from Thursday in a place called R.A.G.E. on Fade Street, Dublin. Loreana's distinctive work is full of colour and monsters; her psychedelic illustrative style mixes elements of Japanese mythology, popular culture and comic book art into playful images that seem to come from a self-contained and fully-realised imaginative universe. Ch-ch-check it out.

Tenaka Mix for State.

Tenaka - State Mix by Tenaka

Ronan Carroll will be releasing a full-length album soon and as a teaser he made the above mix for State magazine which is boldly comprised of mostly original music. Go on da Ronan.

Finally, Birds with Arms.