Apr. 9, 2012
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon was written in 1956 and tells of the experiences of West Indian men moving to London for work. It has been described as the definitive novel about the experiences of the Windrush settlers. The narrative centres on a man named Moses who was one of the first to come to London and finds himself the first port of call for many subsequent immigrants:
It look to old Moses that he hardly have time to settle in the old Brit’n before all sorts of fellars start coming straight to his room in the Water when they land up in London from the West Indies, saying that so and so tell them that Moses is a good fellar to contact, that he would help them get place to stay and work to do.
Tags: Books, Sam Selvon, Fiction, Twelve, Nineteen
Apr. 3, 2012
I pay to have this blog up and running. That is, I pay for the space where it is stored and I pay for the name. I have to look after all the files and plug-ins, I have to perform all the updates and optimise the database tables. All this is great fun but wouldn’t it be cheaper to slap the mattischro.me address onto a hosted WordPress.com account?
Well, yes it would.
Tags: Ideas, Blogging, Internet, Economics, Twelve
Mar. 31, 2012
Five albums for Album Digest March 2012
Fanfarlo Rooms Filled With Light The Shins Port Of Morrow Grails Deep Politics New Build Yesterday Was Lived And Lost Scuba Personality A nice collection of albums this month - things usually pick up in March after a slow period after Christmas. One of these is a “catch-up” (the album by Grails) but apart from that one, everything else was released in the last five weeks or so… I should probably have included the album by Racehorses that I bought on my birthday but I will have to leave that for next month as I haven’t listened to it that much.
Tags: Album Digest, March, Music, Fanfarlo, The Shins, Grails, New Build, Scuba, Twelve
Mar. 21, 2012
Among Fields of Crystal / Wind in Lonely Fences I have written about a fair number of ambient albums in this series (and there are at least two more to come!) but perhaps none are as unobtrusive as this one by Howard Budd and Brian Eno. It’s a subtle collection of music that sits at the margins of your consciousness: for a long time it was the music that I turned to when I could not sleep but I could just as easily imagine it as (ahem!
Tags: Understated Classics, Howard Budd, Brian Eno, Music, Twelve, Electronic
Feb. 28, 2012
One EP and three albums for Album Digest February 2012:
Burial Kindred EP John Talabot fIN Lilacs & Champagne Lilacs & Champagne The 2 Bears Be Strong Last February was a pretty good month for song based albums, although the likes of Radiohead and James Blake provided plenty of electronic noodling in and around their song structures. (Interestingly, out of the two out-and-out song based albums, one was one of the worst albums of the year and the other one of the best).
Tags: Music, Album Digest, February, Burial, John Talabot, Lilacs and Champagne, The 2 Bears, Twelve
Feb. 9, 2012
Ages ago I set out to write a post for each of JG Ballard’s novels. In fact it is the oldest post on this blog. Most of the novels (I don’t have the two autobiographical novels Empire Of The Sun or The Kindness Of Women and the late period novel Milennium People) are sat in a row on top of my broken bookshelf, part of the weight there that bowed outer frame of the unit and made the inner shelves collapse.
Tags: Books, Reading Projects, J. G. Ballard, Twelve, Update
Jan. 31, 2012
Five albums to see in the new year:
FOE “Bad Dream Hotline” Leila “U & I” Diagrams “Black Light” Pyramids & Horseback “A Throne Without A King” FabricLive 61 mixed by Pinch FOE Bad Dream Hotline I listened to “Bad Dream Hotline” about four times thinking “who does her voice remind me of?”. In the end I realised it was Sophie Ellis-Bextor, though in parts she sounds like KT Tunstall too.
Tags: Album Digest, January, Music, FOE, Leila, Diagrams, Pyramids, Horseback, Fabric, Pinch, Twelve
Jan. 23, 2012
I got into Début via a cassette from the library, much like I did with Together Alone by Crowded House. I suppose it is less obscure than many of my choices for this strand but I do think that Post is more well-known (because of It’s Oh So Quiet, which we shall mention here only briefly) and that Homogenic is probably more popular among her fans.
What I really like about Début though, as much as the album itself, is the panoply of remixes and alternative versions that surround the release.
Tags: Understated Classics, Bjork, Music, Electronic, Pop, Twelve
Jan. 13, 2012
Once upon a time there was a man who loved to paint. He studied the art and craft of painting for many years. He chose to invest his time and energy into creating the most realistic portraits that he could paint. For him the joy came not from completing the paintings but the process of recreating the real world with the strokes of his brush.
For many years he continued to study the art of painting.
Tags: Ideas, Modelling, Short Story, Twelve
Jan. 5, 2012
Dreams Of A Life is a documentary about Joyce Vincent, a woman who was found in her flat three years after her death surrounded by wrapped christmas presents and with the TV still on. £2400 in arrears on her rent, she was discovered by bailiffs who forced the door down. The film attempts to work out happened to Joyce by interviewing people who knew her. In two other strands that unfold in parallel, various events from her life are re-enacted along with the clearing of her flat by forensics officers.
Tags: Films, Documentary, London, Self Improvement, Twelve
Dec. 29, 2011
Some rather brief pen pictures of this month’s albums. I’ve been a bit busy!
Radio Slave - Collected Remixes Thud thud thud. This is pretty much how all Radio Slave remixes go. I really liked his fabric mix and borrowed a few tracks for a playlist I made called “Dancing In Space”. Anyway, back to the thudding: it’s no bad thing, the remixes have a nice formula that works well for discovering new tracks like UNKLE’s Burn My Shadow (Ian Astbury’s vocal is given plenty of room to shine) and K3’s Play To Win.
Tags: Music, Album Digest, December, Radio Slave, Pinch and Shackleton, Emika, Eleven
Nov. 22, 2011
My earliest memory is waking up in Queen Alexandra hospital in Cosham after an operation on my ears. I must have been about four years old and it was the middle of the night. I was in a room on my own and the door was locked. It had been daylight only seconds before so I got out of the bed and walked to the window to look incredulously out at the amber world that lay beyond.
Tags: Ideas, Memories, Insomnia, Eleven