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.

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.

Just three albums this month as I’ve been listening to a lot of Brian Eno records ready for an upcoming understated classic. First up is 50 Words For Snow by Kate Bush, the second album that she has released this year. Back in May I wrote about Director’s Cut, which presented re-recorded and re-mastered versions of songs from her albums The Sensual World and The Red Shoes. This time around it is an album of brand new material, the first since Aerial in 2006.

I think it’s time to discuss your philosophy of drug use as it relates to artistic endeavour… That quote is from the movie “The Naked Lunch” directed by David Cronenburg (see also this) and it also opens “Bug Powder Dust” by Bomb The Bass, the five star single that opens “Clear”. A rollicking piece of rock rap dripping with pop culture references that runs for four and half minutes and does not stop until another quote from “The Naked Lunch”, it is probably one of my favourite songs of the 90s.

There was much excitement about Contagion at work. Finally a movie that explains as part of the plot! A bunch of us went to see it, mainly to see whether a disaster movie about a global pandemic could hold up as entertainment and to have a bit of a giggle if it couldn’t. I liked three things in particular about the film. I liked the cinematography, especially the opening sequences with the index cases staggering around.

I saw that a friend had ‘liked’ this book on Facebook and reading about it on amazon, I was curious enough to give it a go. It is the autobiography of the philosopher Mark Rowlands, specifically the experiences and lessons learned from raising a wolf, Brenin, from cub to maturity and beyond. The book addresses different aspects of philosophy including the nature of evil and the interaction between humans and other animals.

This month we have albums by Björk, Coldplay, M83, and Radiohead. Album Digest October 2011 - Intro I listened to Wilco’s The Whole Love again the other day. I happened to be walking past the venue in Portsmouth where I went to see them live back in 2004 and it seemed the right fit. I really enjoyed the album after a period of not having listened to it and I found that being familiar with the songs allowed me to better appreciate the production of the album.

Hmmm, a rather grey looking selection of covers this month. The albums I have listened to most are: John Beltran Ambient Selections FabricLive 59 mixed by Four Tet The Rapture In The Grace Of Your Love Wilco The Whole Love I have actually only had the Wilco album since Monday of this week (the 26th) but it has inveigled its way into my consciousness quite quickly. As I have said before, this blog owes its name to a Wilco song and they are quite an important band to me.

A week or so ago, I finished reading Dune by Frank Herbert. It tells the story of a revolution within a Galactic Empire that takes place on a harsh and unforgiving desert planet called Arrakis. One central theme is how destinies can be shaped despite being intertwined around many axes. Another is the importance of adaptation in the fight for survival. I came to Dune via the David Lynch film and then the Sci-Fi Channel’s mini-series, which I was able to stream through LoveFilm.

FUN FACT: It was because of the artwork to this album that I obsessively scrawled onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome onourwayhome on my pencil case at school. I also had a very passable u.f.orb logo drawn on it too. In The Blue Room I had my first “close encounter” with The Orb in 1992 when the single Blue Room was in the charts.

I bought a collection of electronic music this month. I mixed them all up in a smart playlist on iTunes, the smart aspect being to limit to tracks that had been played fewer than five then six then seven times etc. This made sure I was still listening to all the tracks equally often, despite the randomness. Biosphere N-plants Ford & Lopatin Channel Pressure Gus Gus Arabian Horse Instra:Mental Resolution 653 Jon Tejada Parabolas Biosphere N-Plants I think this album makes Biosphere the most reviewed musician on this blog at the moment but I don’t mind too much, he makes some great stuff.

Happy Birthday! No matter how intellectual one gets about these things, the primary function of music is to have fun. With this in mind it is a good time to turn to Roxette then, as they are almost always the epitome of fun. I received Look Sharp! as a present for my ninth birthday. This was probably a bit young to fully understand all the emotions expressed on the record. It’s just as well that it is also crammed with the kind of pop confections that made “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus!

I have now been writing decent length articles on this site for about a year. I have learned a lot in this time, mostly about writing but also how to express your feelings and how to marshal your ideas and passions into action. For this month’s “five on the fifth”, I would like to share with you some of the things I have learned. Writing posts consistently is hard… There are a lot of things that get in the way of regular posting.

Quite a mixed bag this month. SBTRKT SBTRKT Zomby Dedication Brian Eno Drums Between The Bells Bon Iver Bon Iver Washed Out Within and Without This month’s collection of albums is a rather mellow bunch. The SBTRKT album (self-titled) is probably the most frenetic of the five though even that does not exactly pound four to the floor. Most of it is pretty calm, though the occasional burst of pop to spice things up: sometimes it is as downtempo as the rest (Right Thing To Do and Trials Of The Past) but at other times things spark into life, as on Pharaohs.

“I read the news today, oh boy” (The Beatles, A Day In The Life.) Sometimes watching the news feels like a series of repeated blows to the face: arbitrary, cruel and unrelenting. It gets draining and upsetting, and leaves you fearful of what might come next. You won’t need me to tell you about the tragedies that have occurred all over the world in the last few days: drought in East Africa, the gunman running amok in Norway, the death of Amy Winehouse and the horrific train crash in China.

Your rails, your fins, your thin paper wings Second Toughest in the Infants (STITI) is the second album by Underworld, released in 1995. This was just ahead of the mania caused by the .NUXX version of Born Slippy appearing on the Trainspotting soundtrack a little later. Born Slippy itself, the blippy techno confection released between their début Dubnobasswithmyheadman and this album. STITI then is very much the calm before the storm and features a band (in the truest sense, which is unusual among electronic acts) in full flow.

Reading a few articles about the recent launch of Google+, a few things hit home. Google tends to launch a product that works and not always one that is perfect or finished (like, say, Apple). Sometimes it takes them several iterations to get right. They love the beta tag. In fact, I think it was Google (or possibly Flickr) that made me aware of the concept of beta software. Along these line I thought about this blog and its one year anniversary.

Just as with the understated classics I want to set out my stall early on that good movies are good enough. Both Betty Blue and today’s choice The Jungle Book are never going to win any sort of consensus prize for the best movies ever made but they are really good. They also have a personal history attached that makes them worth writing about. When I was younger both my sisters would be given VHS copies of Disney movies at a rate of about two a year, one for Christmas and one at their birthday.

When I was growing up a framed print of a map hung on the wall in the hallway. It was one of my favourite things, littered with strange latin names and with Vs where Us should have been. The outlines of the continents and countries were all familiar and yet slightly distorted, becoming more recognisable around the shores of western Europe. I don’t know the provenance of that map print but at some point it got taken to the charity shop and replaced by Van Gogh’s sunflowers.

I have had the sort of month that is not conducive to listening to much new music. Therefore this month’s post is only going to consider two new albums and two albums that I have bought behind time. Because of various bits of stress and poor mood, I have ended up going back and taking refuge in some old favourites and not listening to new stuff. At other points I have also gone back to the Fleet Foxes’ album that I wrote about last month, which has grown on me even more since.

I admit that it was the artwork that got me interested in Tubular Bells II. Trevor Key’s wonderful icon of the twisted tubular bell is even more mysterious rendered in yellow and blue. Seeing it one day in Woolworth’s in Leigh Park back in 1992 aroused my curiosity. The huge display must have been part of the massive publicity drive for the album. Despite dwindling sales for his newer albums, a sequel to Tubular Bells represented a huge potential for sales.

What’s your favourite number? I was ambivalent on this issue until a few months ago until I came across the following quirky result: if you start with the prime number 41 and then add 2 you get 43, which is also prime and then if you add 4 to 43, you get 47: also prime. And this continues to produce prime numbers if you add successive multiples of two to your running total, UNTIL… you get to the 41st number in this sequence, which is 41 squared.

No man is an island (not any more) You are tracked pretty much everywhere you go. CCTV, the GPS on your phone or the signals sent by your more primitive model to the masts to keep in touch with the network. Your cash withdrawals, your purchases in Tesco and your journeys on public transport all add to the picture of where you are. If you drive, your sat nav will hold clues to where you have been and, if you disappear, where you might have gone to.

Four albums this month: Kate Bush Director’s Cut Africa Hitech 93 Million Miles Fleet Foxes Helplessness Blues TV On The Radio Nine Types of Light There is a pleasing red hue to all the covers this month. I had time to write four full reviews of the major albums I listened to. Like last month I have included a video at the foot of each review. Enjoy! Kate Bush Director’s Cut Director’s Cut is not a new album from Kate Bush but a collection of re-visits to old songs, four from The Sensual World (1989) and seven from [The Red Shoes](http://en.

Background Tiger Bay is Saint Etienne’s third album and I think it is among their best. It was released in June 1994 on Heavenly records. I first owned a copy in 1998 when I picked it up while living in halls as an undergraduate. The reason for including this album in the understated classics series is the same as for Second Light by Dreadzone: it marries traditional forms to newer electronic music1.

The other day while writing some rather self-pitying notes in my blog book (yes, I handwrite all this rubbish before I go to bed at night!) I came up with some useless superheroes, or rather the only superheroes that a washed-up guy in his early thirties could hope to be. Because I haven’t got any ideas for “five things on the fifth” this month, I decided to flesh out a few of these.

Album of the month: Mirrorwriting by Jamie Woon Jamie Woon was brought to my attention late last year by Pitchfork who wrote an article about the video for lead single Night Air. I’ve put that video down below because I think that it is very good, a simple well executed and the tune itself is brilliant, probably my favourite individual track of 2010. It’s a downtempo tune full of dark spaces and empty beats, full of nocturnal promise and mystery.

I saw Betty Blue (original French title 37,2 Le Matin) for the first time in 1996 shortly after having read the book and it remains one of my favourite films to this day. Although there are many obvious reasons why a sixteen year old boy might like it, I think it does stand up to scrutiny beyond the sex and nudity. This post is a brief explanation of some of the obvious and not-so-obvious reasons why this is a film to be loved and cherished.

Facebook is wonderful for keeping in touch but I’ve noticed that quite a few of my friends tend to use it to tell the world that they can’t sleep. Here’s some advice for you if you find yourself unable to sleep one night. I’ve often had to try these out myself! Note that these are just things that work for me and your mileage may vary, particularly if you are fortunate enough to have a partner next to you!

As I mentioned before I am re-reading the novels of Iain Banks and this weekend I managed to finish Consider Phlebas. A little post about it will be coming up soon. One of my favourite things about the Culture novels is how the ships are named and having found a list on Wikipedia, I thought I would share ten of my favourites with you! You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave Ravished By The Sheer Implausibility Of That Last Statement All Through With This Niceness And Negotiation Stuff Prosthetic Conscience Of Course I Still Love You Size Isn’t Everything Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again Dramatic Exit, Or, Thank you And Goodnight We Haven’t Met But You’re A Great Fan Of Mine Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The Great names all I am sure you would agree.

This is not an Album Digest March 2011 Well as I said at the end of last month’s album digest post, I took a bit of a break from pursuing new music quite as closely as I have been. As promised, I sidestepped the new R.E.M. and Elbow albums - although I had been promised the latter as a birthday present it is yet to show up, maybe I will look at in April.

Never mind the Ballards I have been writing about books by J.G. Ballard pretty much to the exclusion of all others. Gradually the posts have tricked out about four novels and ground to a halt. I’ve got a fair way through two other books but I am getting very tired of reading his novels all the time, much as I love them. The mistake I made was that I hadn’t read enough of them in the first place.

In the understated classics series, I try to alternate between pop/rock and electronic albums. Keeping with this trend number eight is the wonderful dub-infused album Second Light by Dreadzone. Released in 1996 it was well-received critically and four of its tracks featured on John Peel’s best-of-year list that year. Little Britain received a lot of radio play, a popular choice for that flag-waving period of britpop and assorted other demons.

February, the shortest month, harbinger of such delights as Groundhog Day and Valentine’s Day. Could it possibly produce any good albums? Well the candidates are the eponymous début album by James Blake, Zonoscope by Cut/Copy, Let England Shake by PJ Harvey and Smart Flesh by The Low Anthem. Furthermore, there was an unexpected bonus when Radiohead announced that their new album would be out and available to listen to this month too.

Hurrah for more exoplanets making the news this week. This time it is a star with a whole bunch of small planets very close to the star, usually they tend to be single gas giants larger even than Jupiter as this list of stars with exoplanets from Wikipedia shows. But these stars are all so far away! The closest star with an exoplanet found in orbit around it so far is 10 light years away (Epsilon Eridani) and this week’s system was found over 2000 light years away.

It turns out that programming the UNO game is not that complicated once you start designing the thing. This post will get the rules and game elements clear. The deck An UNO deck consists of four sets of coloured cards (red, yellow, green and blue) together with eight wild cards. The non-wild cards are marked with either numbers or special symbols. The numbers range from zero to nine with two of each number except for the zero, which is unique.

Form and function, deformation and dysfunction I think we should get one thing out of the way first. For me, there is nothing erotic about a car or a motorway. The place in popular culture of the car in particular as sexual icon has always bemused me. In fact, I’m really rather ambivalent about cars. This matters when discussing Crash, the 1973 novel by JG Ballard that resumes this strand of posts about his novels.

Here’s to 2011 and the start of a monthly album digest. I want it to be a brief trot through some of the albums I have listened to each month. Sometimes January can bring a few quiet releases by big name bands. This happens if the previous album did not do as well as the record company hoped or if it is the kind of artist who would get lost under the hype of all the Christmas releases.

I’ve found twitter to be a bit boring lately but today a perfect storm brew up and once again the Daily Mail and one of its odious columnists was at its centre. Melanie Phillips’ opinion piece was a perfectly constructed piece of trolling that implied that since the repeal of section 28, schools have been flooded with an influx of gay propaganda in subjects like maths, history and geography. Well I’m all for it, Alan Turing was a genius brutally mistreated by his country despite turning the second world war in favour of the allies - that story is maths and history is combined.

Idewild are a solid band who have released four or five albums that I could consider for this series. I’m even in the sleeve credits of one: Post-Electric Blues, if you’re asking. In the end I went for 100 Broken Windows because it means a lot to me. It has more of a place in my life than the others. Usually I find that this happens if I can remember where I bought an album.