That is the language presented by SoRA - the School of Radical Attention. Established in 2023 in New York, SoRA gives classes and group activities for all ages, often at no cost, in the evenings and weekends aimed at getting participants to care better for themselves, the people around them and our world through being less distracted and more in tune. The design and presentation deliberately nods towards older communities who set out to respond to technological change (think the Transcendentalists, the Arts and Crafts movements and even I guess the Solar Punks over the last few decades) and their point is that in our Big Tech age, getting together and doing things irl is fundamentally political because it is offline. Unfracked. They are however eager to distinguish themselves from Neo-Luddites and say they aren’t anti-screens/internet, we just need to be doing this on our terms and not those of a few world dominating corporations.

Reading about SoRA the week after I returned from a Buddhist retreat at the end of April felt timely. Scanning over the list of classes they had run they seemed to be very rooted in the things we had been doing on the retreat. Learning how to better live in the present without distraction, and how to relate to the past and the future in solid, positive ways, rather than problematic ways that set us up for a harder time in life. Over the week I spent a lot of time considering why I do what I do, how I do it and the flow states that I have been able to achieve doing it. We did workshops on deep listening and then applied it to how we talked and heard and responded in groups and one-on-ones. It made me think about my own listening patterns and where I choose to really give myself to the person or music. If you think the language that SoRA are presenting has some truth in it then let’s do a little thought experiment. This is about listening to music and while it applies to how we listen to each other I’d like to use music to explore what’s happening here.

When I’m in a record store and I have a pile of 20 records to skim through I am listening with a strategy - I want to hear a particular approach from the artist to production, rhythm, the small things that communicate to me their way of making music and I have a list of things I use to identify that within a few seconds or bars of a track. This is very active listening but in a fast, superficial way. Next let’s think about a radio in a taxi. I tune in and tune out according to what’s on and my state of mood. The radio is, in a way, designed to function as background noise that you can choose to elevate and give your attention to if you’d like to. This is, in its nature, not particularly active listening.

A certain elder in my family never allowed music to be on during meal times because it was an insult to that music, it relegated it to background noise. They believed that all music should be attentively engaged with and there’s a part of me that likes that - it sifts the world of music to a place where we get the good stuff or we get to pay attention to something else. Putting on a record or CD - something physical and chosen by us - creates the space to pay full attention to it and to be totally present, “lost” in it.

Next consider streaming from a DSP (Apple, Spotify, Youtube etc) - are we listening to it like the radio or the record?

I’m not totally sure but I find its often closer to the radio. And I generally don’t use the algorithm, if one does then it’s much closer to the radio, almost beyond it as there isn’t a someone choosing the next track but a merging of database, machine and human. What is that? Essentially it is the fracking of my ears. We all know how the economic model works with a DSP, and this model determines this fracking - it’s the only way anyone gets paid their less than 1 pence. Although there are times when I’m listening with all my attention, beyond that the turning of music into an endless commodity all accessible everywhere all the time means that our engagement is rendered almost meaningless. Is it possible feel passionate, a kind of ownership over your relationship to a record or an artist if the only thing you own is a subscription to Mega Corp.? As an artist myself I don’t really want to state the obvious, but I came back to it over and over again whilst looking at what SoRA is trying to do, that to pay attention to something cultural in a meaningful way we kind of do need to do it offline. It’s certainly easier.

The final example to consider is listening to music in a venue with a crowd around you. Here we have a place where we can engage, without being mined for our data (for the most part), our attention is fully our own and, I guess according to SoRA, in this world simply by doing that, we are doing something political about the current situation.

“Getting lost in these elements unleashes a purity of consciousness which is ironic given the states of inebriation in any one club” was a line from the introduction to the show which reflects much of what I was getting at.

Having not thought about Eshun for a while it was a sweet reminder and prompted me to go back to it. In doing so I came across this conversation from 2000 with Eshun. Reading back, 26 years later, is strange. So much of what must have felt fleeting (they refer to 1999’s summer of the internet) has solidified in unimaginable ways. Not least the music that lies at the heart of Eshun’s focus at the time.

“Drum ‘n’ bass was using so much remixology. Key drum ‘n’ bass tracks were often remixes of previous tracks” he says early on.

This idea of remixology has become permanent, continuous. It is much of what we consume culturally, whether it be the lack of films which are not IP, or the recutting of the world through social media content and yes, much of contemporary electronic music. I would go further and say that the bedrock of AI is the resynthesizing of what has already been produced - an LLM cannot be trained on what hasn’t yet been made.

And yet Eshun then goes on to say,

“I have given up listening to people saying all adventures are over, all heroism is done, we are all born too late and have got no options but to sit around and recombine the forms of other, greater people than we are. How many years I have heard this? The grand narratives are all done. There is nothing left to do. It is always told in our own good fortune. Once I started meeting Sadie Plant and Nic Land at CCRU I realized this wasn’t at all the case. Everything was to be done. All the adventures are still there.”

With this I fully agree. Music remains fertile, we just need to keep playing, not be afraid to probe away and remember that you don’t have to follow formulas to create things that move people.

The final quote I wanted to share was this one, it sums a lot of my thinking around art and the things we make as a species.

“Everywhere around you, the death of critique becomes visible. But critique and criticism are not the same. In my case I started to connect music with art and science fiction. Then you start realizing they are already connected and social disciplinary apparatuses are at work to separate them. Once you see that they are connected, the effort stops to bridge them.”

These social apparatus give us so many of the boundaries between things and they are all imagined, products of our need to categorise. But we should not need to categorise, it is usually an exercise in limitations. Binary choices are so often constructs that limit us. In politics people will say all year should a political party move to left or to the centre in order to win? This is a false choice, political parties should synthesise peoples needs with ideas for a better world. Different people in that party should be free to land where they fit on those continuums. Boundaries also curtail what is possible in art and we grow through de-realizing them (to use an Eshunian term). The film Sinners was a near perfect example of this. It cut through genres like jelly and wobbled with new forms, fresh, inspiring ideas that resynthesized old tropes.

There’s much more in this convo that I think is relevant, Eshun’s visions and strength of purpose have stood up to the last twenty years of history forcefully.

https://networkcultures.org/geertlovink-archive/interviews/interview-with-kodwo-eshun/

And if you’d like to hear the radio piece I made it is here -

The full book is here as a pdf, I’m not sure what happened to Verso’s planned reprint (anyone know?!)

In other news we have entered April, and so following Boris Rodoman’s Seasonal Rhythms in the Life of B. B. Rodoman (1984) we are about to peak before the slump of Spring of Dust and Mud. Be warned! <3

“I leave the day open. I go with the day. I flow with it wherever it may go. I let myself be carried along by the current. Now I swim. Dive.”

Two quotes from Slovej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume. The first, from pg 80, explains what’s happening. Tara Selter has fallen into a fold of time. A Groundhog Day of sorts: she alone has become caught in the 18th of November, each day is marginally different but it remains the 18th November, day after day after day. Everyone in her life is blissfully unaware, and her attempts to communicate her strange fate become a form of further dislocation. A growing madness. The second quote are the last lines of the novel. A form of tiny resolution.

On the Calculation of Volume wasn’t a book I particularly enjoyed reading but it struck into a theme that I return to routinely in my own grappling with life: our perception of time. Towards the end of January I found myself lying on the floor of the Neue Nationalgalerie in the darkness with Cristian Marclay’s The Clock playing out to a few hundred people around me. I’m going to presume most people here have had the chance to see this work, and it has been written about so heavily over the last ten years that I’ll keep this description brief. It is a 24 hour long film that is a perfect collage of film clips each with a clock or a reference to the time that is synchronised to the actual time. It is a clock in itself, as well as being a kind of cinematic commentary through its choice of clips and the editing within. Ten past four in the morning in The Clock is ten past four in the morning in real life.

Watching The Clock you are so acutely aware of the time we are literally watching it tick past, yet the clips are often so enjoyable that we suddenly realise thirty or forty minutes slipped by. The one effect it always has on me, and why I love it so much, is that it immediately plunges you into the eternal truth: our perception of time is elastic. Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s definition of happiness was a sunny afternoon lying in his rowing boat on lake Geneva, with his fingers dipping in the water and his eyes shut. The water on his hand kept him awake, but time slipped by. Happiness is relief from time. Drudgery is the remorseless awareness of the grind of time.

Those moments in nightclubs where five hours swallows itself and is unaccountable for, and then a single five minute track suddenly opens up a dimension you weren’t aware of and somehow, magically, lasts for hours. The collapsing of time in club spaces for me has often served as one of the proofs of why these spaces are worthwhile. Time is, of course, the long arm of the capitalist economy. Without the ability to quantify time it becomes difficult to extract profit from people. The more metrics we can apply to people’s lives, the more can be extracted. The tyranny of the quantifiable, the tyrant of the success demon, hovering in our consciousness from childhood for eternity, it guts the creative sparkle of ideas for ideas sake and transforms every idea into something to use for economic gain.

The bliss of deep immersion in something becomes pushback on this. Nowadays switching off and losing ourselves in an act that has no discernible benefit to anything beyond our own pleasure is a form of systemic pushback. It is often repeated that we enter a club for the freedom to be our true selves, whatever that may mean. We also enter a club to be free from the strictures of time. This is a form of getting lost, even if it only lasts for a while. In this system it is of course temporary. Fleeting visions of what could be beyond an economy that wasn’t so rapacious in its greed. One of the reasons certain cities and times have felt more open in their possibilities was precisely because people did not have jobs that reeled their minds in every waking hour of the day.

It was this point that lay at the heart of a memory that returned watching The Clock last month. Some years ago, at some point on a Sunday afternoon in a building that thrummed with the misty liquidity of a party well into its second day, I watched a friend close her eyes and duck her head between her legs. She vomited. Head still between her legs she opened her eyes and stared intently into the sticky liquid around her boots. She saw what she looking for, fished it out, popped it back on her tongue and gulped. The image of Chloe retaking an E came back to me lying in front of the film. A comic memory of a moment in a place when time truly did not matter, two or three days were worth going out for and two or three days were worth it on the recovery side. None of us cared where we were going because where we were - in a general sense - felt good. Existing like this was enough and eeking it out on part time jobs that were flexible to cater to such an existence was also a perfect balance. Later on, as success in some forms crept into my life I wondered if I had wasted any years of my life when I could have been more productive, but that is what economic striving does to our minds. It eats away at the moments of bliss, when time doesn’t matter. There really should never be any regrets around what people call ‘wasted youth’. To express such regrets is another form of neo-liberal dogma.

As children we feel the elasticity of time almost painfully. One of the primary reasons for this is that we are experiencing new things every day. New feelings and new understandings pour in abundantly. When we age we do more by rote. Whole months go past where we are in complete routines. It is the routines that make time feel as if it has sped up, as if the years are shifting into a kind of fast-forward that is multiplying alarmingly. Trying new things, learning, and again switching off, play a strange paradox here. In themselves, zoomed in, time slips by, we are absorbed and, most likely enjoying ourselves. But zooming out they can help us feel as if time is actually full and this, conversely, helps us to feel like time isn’t just slipping by but is also a richer struggle.

A little tribute to The Clock on callsuper.net has appeared - the recording of my all night long set at The Island in Bristol last month has been looped so it will always be the same point of the set playing at every moment in a 24 hour cycle, just hit PLAY <3

“If capitalism makes ugliness inevitable, I’ll prove it wrong one chair at a time” - William Morris

Two sassy Williams. Both English. Both vaguely annoying in their earnestness but also a little adorable for it. One known for, amongst a big cauldron of creative endeavours, mystical side-eye. The other considered much of the Victorian world he inhabited absolute tat and didn’t he stop harping on about it. The lives of William Blake and William Morris didn’t quite overlap historically, but obviously shared an awful lot in how they approached things. Between them they conjured a sea of quotes and aphorisms that capture the role of craft and art in life. These two I see as a continuation of one another, and have jotted down a couple of times in moments of doubt over the years.

The first quote, well, many people have made a similar point over the years, and yes, we are all tied up in a whole knot of systems we certainly didn’t create. But there is a point in there about sticking to the things you want to see and believe in, that is useful in its mad purity. Then Morris basically fills in the unsaid - we are all under capitalism for better or worse, and it produces dross in every aspect of our lives, both digitally and physically. Every time I click a consent form when online (at least 10s of times a day) I acknowledge I’m ok with being fed digital garbage in order to see the thing I want to. This is also Morris’s inevitable ugliness. Deep in wherever we are in history at the moment, struggling to make sense of so many grim patterns of performing that have been created by the tech-centred/social media focus of work today, performances that make you question people you respected, that eat greedily at your sense of self, deranging your dopamine, performances that very quickly send the word ‘nope’ rattling across your synapses…. These, these, these are all inevitable uglinesses.

Last year Noah Davis had his retrospective at the Barbican. His life, tragically short, was a lesson in ignoring what you see that is awful, and doing what you believe in (and is positive). Davis’ approach in his paintings set out simple, pure - in a Blakean sense - principles: no spectacle, no great explanation, no irony, no shouting for attention, no trolling or gimmicks. It is an expression of building the thing you want to see (a museum for exceptional Black art in a working class part of the city), an expression of profound beauty in the everyday. Ordinary parts of life radiating for what they are, without glitz or glamour. An unassuming dedication to the craft of art and an ongoing warmth to humanity. If I’m honest, I’ve slightly rolled my eyes at the space that Blake and Morris take up in the art consciousness of the UK, but here it felt like I was encountering their principles and it was humbling.

At a similar time I had been putting together the zine for the Dekmantel and thinking of extending my writing to here. In my head I wasn’t convinced about substack, but it was a way of beginning a different way of engaging with my audience and what I do creatively. At that time I had been reading about fan clubs and I wrote about them in that first letter. The way people engaged with the things they loved, and created their own thing around these things was, to me, a better form of connection than the more atomised one we generally experience today. And it led to actual new things being created: I mentioned a library of vampire fan fiction that exists for the results of the thousands of Dracula fan clubs. Today online you follow people whose work you like alongside every banal aspect of life and it all fights together for a few fractions of your attention. Global disasters collapsed next to work out tips, next to cocktails, next to Epstein, next to tacos, next to two years of creative endeavour… and as of a couple of weeks ago, TikTok was folded into a new company that is an extension of the US government with all the horror you can imagine that goes with that at this point in time in regards to ICE and surveillance capitalism.

There is no comparison here between the positivity of Noah, the two Williams and this idea of mine, just a reminder that we must do better to step beyond the horror show. The idea was to take the template of the pre-internet fan club, and update it for today. It’s taken much of a year to figure out what this club should be and how to run it. But here goes.

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Hello to the Almighty Rhythm Power Organization.

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The details and way of signing up is all here - callsuper.net

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Open to anyone, it can be free, it can be paid. It is an evolution of last years A Rhythm Protects One project, to something that is built around us, and I can work through.

It will connect how I sell tickets for parties (which hopefully keeps things more word of mouth between us) and share what is inspiring me (essentially embracing WhatsApp as a social network) to physical things I make such as printed matter and CDs and Tees.

Along the way I have decided against using substack as the tool to build it around. That said I have enjoyed writing out thoughts and observations here this last year so this, in its current form, will continue. <3

Feeling joyful whilst surveying the city, I wanted to start the new year with a sense of cheer here. What is happening in London in respects to clubs and music broadly feels positive coming into 2026. Genuine options abound, across the board musically, run by decent people with solid intentions. From established larger spaces, to places committed to deeper, alternative experiences, here’s a brief round up of things in my purview, a guide for my own sense of optimism and a reminder of places I would like to lose myself in based upon friend’s reports. Please tell me what I’m missing under the line.

In no particular order Fold, MOT, Ormside, fabric, Number 90, Club Cheek, Earth, Village Underground, Om, Peckham Palais, The Divine, Moth Club, Carpet Shop, Cafe Oto, The Cause, Dalston Superstore and Phonox are all doing their own particular things with integrity and relative consistency. There are increasing numbers of off location spaces that are in use. Alongside them there are more parties than there have been (say a decade ago) that operate amongst their communities and not through the usual online channels, not going to list them here but they have been my starting points for thinking about how to approach throwing a party in the city for the last two years. Pearls was the first iteration of that, last years ARPO at The Distillery the second. I will think about something else on that front probably in the second half of this year as I think in a healthy ecosystem it is important to balance the established spaces with nights where there are a hundred more variables/unknowns.

There are spaces such as the Lion and Lamb, Spanners, The Glove That Fits, The Greyhound and The Eagle that fit the pub/bar club model and I suspect given how many clubs have opened in the last year or so (four from the first list) we will also see more of these types of spaces open in the next year or two. There are particular parties in particular spaces that have something special - free movements, Adonis, Trough, 160 Unity spring to mind here.

Unfortunately the tenacious growth in the capital has been mirrored by decline snowballing elsewhere in the country, particularly in the north. Liverpool, Leeds and Sheffield have all suffered terrible rates of closure and there remain few shoots emerging. Ghosts abound - Freedom Mills, Wire, Hope Works - victims of the pandemic, the recession and tedious patterns of sobriety. The only thing I will say about that is as capitalism has forced personal optimization and corporate health/beauty culture into every aspect of our existences, of course it eventually came for our fun and our hangovers. Going out for two days does remain, in this age, a solid fuck you to all that. Anyway Manchester seems well enough, the cluttered geography of the north allowing it to swallow up audiences that are not served by spaces closer to home. Bristol ticks along.

Whether all these shifts are the edge of something or the middle its difficult to say. Many of the measures Sadiq Khan has introduced to help places open, and protect them once they get there, are only really just kicking in. Labour have added the power to overturn licensing refusals from local councils, which should in theory make it easier for applications in the coming years. It honestly feels like the story of things being endlessly ground down in the music industry is turning though, and we can hope that the change in this city begins to ripple beyond. One of the things that helps are stories with a little lustre, the encouragement for people to try. After years of negative ones I really hope we see a shift from these brutal notices to something with a little more sparkle this year.

My two most listened to new LPs - Cerys Hafana’s Angel and Snuggle’s Dust - both seemed to capture the best of two wider trends. The first a small resurgence in Celtic/gaelic artists extending folk traditions to contemporary meditative places. The second a product of a thriving local scene in Copenhagen. Irene Bianco, Emil Palme, Fine etc. Astrid Sonne, Elias Rønnenfelt and ML Buch having led that charge a few years ago and I guess so much of the music the result of a confluence of solid musical education that exists in Denmark and a reaction against the techno scene that dominated the city in the previous decade.

I guess it also chimes with a wider cultural moment this year just for bands. It felt like between Oasis and Geese a huge chunk of mainstream bandwidth was taken up. Blood Orange, Wet Leg, Turnstile all released albums and even the Beta Band reformed. My only comment here is really that I find the domination of the privately educated over the last two years on mass musical culture (last year brat and this year Geese) just fucking dull. Geese make perfectly decent music - I think I enjoyed their record more than brat - but they come from a boring, moneyed place and the success of their white male rock star type in this form is actually a perfect symbol for this age of Trump and Conservative success.

There was lots of impressive music that I didn’t return to very often after my initial bedazzlement (Los Thuthanaka, Blawan, Carrier). Usually not because it wasn’t still great, but just because it didn’t give me whatever I craved emotionally when I went to put something on. And there was, as ever, lots of music that I was excited for and then disappointed by (Oklou probably near the top of that list). One thing I will say about Cameron Winter is that the songs are fleshed out and built up in a way a TON of older songwriters just haven’t been doing so much since the 2000’s, which was an issue with the Oklou record. We have had so many wispy songwriters who half sing and half write songs over the last decade and it’s not surprising that this has been usurped by a return to bigger, sturdier ideas.

The second half of the year - post-ROSE - was dominated by the upheavals of moving country and a vaguely enforced happy decision to leave music making for a while, until I find a space and mental desire in London to start again. Doing the Arpo shows meant being able to set up situations that I felt were the best since the pandemic - simple, small warehouses and clubs, long sets and the a crowd that felt healthy in its mix. Nights which felt restorative emotionally and musically. Nights where the attitude of the audience is as important as the sound, each element vital in making the thing great. This also culminated in another Everything is True a few weeks ago which embodies all of these elements.

I really didn’t expect the album to land as well as it did personally with people (I’ve long given up trying to guess what critics will think as it never chimes with my own gut), but the earnestness with which people talked to me about the project stunned me. Someone described the whole thing as “slow music”, as in you had to slow down to lock into it which seemed ironic to me for a club record, but also true given the number of ideas I had tried to stuff into it. Along with ROSE this was the absolute high of my year.

Perhaps this was an extension of the prevailing sense that we crossed a rubicon in our collective understanding that the endless scroll, the swole of slop is all a form of vice. Big tech has lost the argument. It is the year we began to just ban social media and in 2026 it is likely Denmark and Norway will follow Australia’s lead. Losing access to TikTok and Snapchat is apparently pushing kids to just text and call one another instead. Honestly am surprised but maybe I shouldn’t be? In the history of pointless inventions genmoji rank high, and the logical response is to get back to <3 and *_* By the end of the decade we may well have begun to correct some of the relationships between the state, technology, commerce and our interior lives.

Niklas Brendborg’s studies about Supernormal Stimuli, how our world is optimized to be addictive as possible in every aspect of our lives (the natural place for the attention economy to reach) has desensitized us and left humanity lonelier and less understanding of one another was published this year and felt about as zietgeisty as any other nonfiction book I came across this year. Brendborg’s work also demonstrated how quickly we resensitize to food, sex, watching films, books and time itself when we put the screens down or change how we use them. It was a constant reminder to myself and again gives me some hope that the future will be better than the present last few years.

TikTok trialling BOTH split screen mode/dual clip and a less addictive algorithm was maybe the nadir we needed to reach? Or was it the Harper’s article on gooners/gooning/goon-caves/goonlife? Or was it Palantir considering moving into the education sector? Or KKR now owning the literal water that we drink and wash in?

The point here is that everything is enmeshed. The only option we have is to make our own spaces. Spaces where we come together and listen to music, poetry, recitals, plays and, ultimately, talk each other. It has felt like millennials urge to call out, to wage unyielding online campaign as a form of brand, has begun to be seen by the following generation for what it is - an act usually rooted in the campaigner/caller’s identity more than anything else. The next gen do not know much of a world before the enmeshment. This is now their world to navigate and regulate. In 2026 this will be a world of creatine and of phone numbers, a world in which glitzy and ritzy presentation is suss, lofi aesthetics continue to return and we don’t document everything. 2025 was a kind of ground zero in that future.

I don’t believe in faves so take this with salt:

Fave new book

Sasha Debevec-McKenney - Joy is my Middle Name

Fave new record

Cerys Hafana - Angel

Fave new film

Sinners

Fave exhibition

A year of big hitters… Kerry James Marshall at the RA/Noah Davis at The Barbican/Paul Thek at Thomas Dane/Wolfgang Tillmans at The Pompidou

The courtyard had some shade, a blistered green metal table, an old bench that had supported lifetimes of long, lazy lunches and, dotted on the other side, some foldable metal chairs. All around grew, judging by their height, ancient roses. They were in full bloom, the petals sheets of rich blood. I went to smell one and lo, this was not a plant I had ever encountered. It was a curious hybrid, a marriage of fruit and flower, for inside those petals there was a bulb, a bulb that was in fact a huge, plump raspberry.

A lady emerged. She looked grounded but a little courtly too. A bit like Miuccia Prada with a navy, woven, broad hat crowning an outfit of white shirt and linen apron. She was the lady I was to meet to discuss the shoes with. She pointed out that the roses that grew at the edges of the yard had been blown by the wind into the warm yellow walls and the resulting red mess of ripe raspberry mulched into the wall looked like…

My phone vibrating woke me up. I’d slept through an alarm and the artist liaison was wondering why I wasn’t in the cab. There were twenty four minutes before my set started. The previous day I had been up for twenty four hours and my body was clearly trying to catch up. Five minutes later the snow was falling around me in the middle of The Hague as I looked for another car that was waiting a couple of streets away.

Entering packed clubs in this kind of daze is something I’ve gotten used to. No tea, no shots, no shower. Crumbs of sleep still guarding my eyes, a few yawns in the backseat and then let the catapult go. Stumble across a dance floor and around, behind a speaker. How I perform still seems to be something that I can’t control. Much depends on the crowd, and how they respond to a few things I try in the first thirty or forty minutes. Sometimes we sync, a direction forms between us. Other times it’s tetchy. A middle ground is found. It doesn’t totally satisfy either I sometimes think, but perhaps that is all in my own cloudy head.

Eventually the floor begins to thin and we find our talking points. I’m in a dubbier place, a place I know intimately and I’m settled. Covered in a kind of familiarity, the sleep before paying off. I find myself in this song.

Things I’ve had on fairly heavy rotation one way or another recently. Mostly very new. Swamped in fabulous new stuff as ever… rich times on THAT front at least.

But where to start with Angela Carter? Perhaps with her and her life which was a little like that of one of her fictional women. Her suffocating relationship with her mother, who didn’t let her go to the loo on her own until she was 11. Her desire to escape this heavy maternal blanket leading to a marriage at 20, to an industrial chemist called Paul Carter, “somebody who would go to Godard movies with me and on CND marches and even have sexual intercourse with me, although he insisted we should be engaged first” she later said. They moved to Bristol where he worked and she went to uni and began writing fiction. She won the Somerset Maugham Award for her third novel, Several Perceptions and took home £500. She used this prizemoney to travel with Paul to America but, sensing she had outgrown Paul and their relationship, they broke up somewhere in Texas. Paul flew home and Angela used the rest of her money to continue adventuring. She arrived in Tokyo where she spent the next two years, living alone and having two relationships with younger Japanese men.

She loved 1970s Tokyo, calling it ‘the most absolutely non-boring city in the world’, writing that arriving there was ‘like going through the looking-glass and finding out what kind of milk it is that looking-glass cats drink’. Having felt so unsexy through her younger years, (she referred to herself as a ‘lumpy, butch cow, titless and broadbeamed’ and ‘a Russian female all-in wrestler’) in Tokyo she felt exoticized and hot for the first time. She found work in a hostess bar and read and read and read. The books that followed her Tokyo years lay the seeds for a feminism that saw beyond the essentialism of the second wave pioneers. Its fluidity of vision is what makes it so much more relevant today.

The Passion of New Eve is about a man called Evelyn who is given a forced sex change by a surgeon called Mother and a reclusive goddess called Tristessa who is in fact a man. Dworkin and Greer found this offensive and problematic. Carter then published The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography which she had begun scheming in Japan where she had read Sade alongside Japanese porn comics. She saw Sade as liberating to women for not considering them breeders, but instead as collaborators in sexual pleasure. This was a riposte to obvious patriarchal norms. It opened with a sentence that states that sex is always a political act: ‘We do not go to bed in simple pairs: even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents’ lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our unique biographies – all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.’

Sade also informed The Bloody Chamber, many peoples entry point for Carter. I find her basic storytelling so compulsive, and it’s so natural that she would write not just specifically for children, but also use folk stories as threads in new weavings that explored the eroticism of growing up. This is The Bloody Chamber collection and its exploring of Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots and Bluebeard (a French tale about a wealthy man who murders his wives). One of the sexiest images that recurs in Carters writing for me is around the dripping of hot wax onto bare shoulders, and that keeps finding its way into these stories.

I adore the way she writes about and describes clothing. It reminds me of everything I love about clothes, how they age and begin to tell their own stories. How they reflect us, how they project us, how they protect us. How fabric feels agains naked skin, where it scratches, where it soothes. How different people choke themselves in certain garments or pieces of jewellery. How people give or make or mend clothes for one another. The jumper that is knitted for Melanie when she is at her lowest ebb in The Magic Toyshop. The way the satin and lace feels on the narrators chest in The Bloody Chamber. How Ma Nelson repairs and tends to Fevvers’ outfits in Nights at the Circus….

Nights at the Circus was my way in to Angela Carter. I bought it, vaguely bored, passing time in a bookshop one afternoon. I had a faint idea of her, the female of that generation, the generation of Rushdie, Barnes and Amis. I have liked bits of all those men. This was something else. It was like finding myself deep in a new forest that was somehow exquisitely familiar. It was so ambiguous. She hated being called a magical realist and that makes so much sense to a dreamer like me. Life doesn’t always make sense. If there is one place the imagination should be totally rampant its in the paintings we paint, the music we record and the books we write.

In Nights… we meet Sophie Fevvers, a woman who has swan wings that unfurl when she needs them to, which is usually when she is performing having landed a job at a theatre with a production that plays on stunts. Are these wings real, as in was she actually born with them? An American journalist in London, Jack Walker tries to investigate. He also kinda falls in love. But he doesn’t really get anywhere because, we suspect, Fevvers is gay - Ma Nelson presumably her partner - and generally unpindownable. I won’t spoil any plot here, but I have yearned and lived for books which give so much and pin down so little. They are a reflection of everything I have lived and believed in my own life. I had found a kinship with someone and they could spin into fiction so many of those lessons and thoughts.

I don’t really hate Yorgos Lanthimos that much, I loved The Favourite and The Lobster, but I do feel certain tropes of his have been inspired by something radical in Carters writing, and having found her I have less patience for where his preoccupation with style over something more profound has led him.

It’s had a grand old run - 23 years and change - been at the nexus of some London’s more interesting crossovers, and where you could find Jaded, the party that started at 5am every Sunday morning at an established club. A rarity in London. The two sides of its success have been firstly the quality of the promoters it has worked with over the years, and secondly its commitment to doing the basics well (sound, smoke, security, general gloam). Room 2 has been a particular joy to play. It’s one of the most immersive spaces in London when you find the right spot, and where I wanted to be when we did our last Can You Feel The Sun party there, listening to Sybil before and taking my cues in that room from her. Taking any of this for granted is foolish.

But we should not take clubs for granted.

- A good club is the result of a few people getting something right for a particular period of time.

- A great club is something which says something larger culturally about a moment in time. It defines something of the zeitgeist rather than just reflecting something of the times.

Beyond these two lofty categories are the spaces which are functional, which allow for potentially great nights. These are the bedrock of this culture and perhaps can outlive the first two. They can function as platforms for promoters to do something that could be defining, but the spaces themselves are canvases.

Corsica was closer to a canvas, thus its closure is sad. But whenever a space goes it’s a useful moment to say where are we at as a city? What kind of clubs are the clubs we have? Are new spaces replacing what’s being lost? Clubs will always close. I’d like to say clubs should close when the moment is right. What we need is for new clubs to be coming through often enough that do those basics well and have something else to say. We need the cycles to be cycling. The climate to be one in which opening a club is a dream we can dream.

This year hasn’t been too bad in London. Off the top of my head we have had the additions of Om and Number 90, both good additions by all accounts - I haven’t yet been. Given the tough ten years we’ve had it would be good to maintain a 2:1 ratio for a few years to redress the balance. Now they get to start anew that cycle, how long should it be? Is a great club celebrating its 25th birthday a good thing? Should these things become institutions that never really change? I’m not convinced of this. They can end up sucking the wind out of change that could be serving us all a bit more richly. They could also be protecting the things they have achieved. So, what’s ideal?

Five years to establish. Five years to burn at peak. Five years to cement and celebrate the thing.

At least that is what I would wish for were it me doing the opening. I would wish to be a place that aimed to be great. To do that you need to have a stunningly clear vision. For that programming and design has to be done in-house. An identity quickly drawn and consistently reinforced. A certain amount of bravado and ego is par for that course, and often the source of weakness over time.

When asked about favourite clubs that I’ve played (please never ask, it’s an impossible question) I sometimes say De School. The club I’ve played the most at (Panorama Bar) has sometimes been there, as have many others, but emotionally I think my truly greatest experiences have been ones in ephemeral spaces. Still, people want to know about the spaces they’ve been to or heard of. DS did all of these things, and its shortcomings were rooted in getting a great deal right and thus being blind to the things it did wrong. They could have stayed open longer but I think, on balance, I’m glad they didn’t. Maybe the best thing they ever did was to close on a high? We have many other places as evidence of who, past a certain point, don’t really stand to add anything to their achievements. From there, the only way is down.

It was important for me to use this project to make this case, but I had another reason for presenting it as a mix that I didn’t mention. I have always found club music LPs too often bore me. Even when the music is great, the structure can be insipid. There are a couple of formulas that are rarely deviated from, and often the music itself doesn’t really serve the wonderful scope that the LP format can offer. ARPO was, in essence, my first attempt at presenting a body of club tracks. I wanted to present them in a format that I think best serves club music - a mix - and to state that we need more physical DJ mixes to shape the general landscape of this media. The internet cannot do that alone. It is too shapeless. The markers, the series, the sites within are too endless. And endlessness depreciates meaning and form.

In the convo with Philip I mentioned what had happened with the cassette over the last decade or so. It has become a format that allows for a particular kind of release. It has fostered certain kinds of sounds and scenes, and that has been a great plus for music culture, in particular ambient and noisier corners of our culture. Whilst this little piece looks back, the point is to look forward and say that the CD can do the same for an aspect of DJ culture.

So, here’s that piece and yes, the album in all its forms is out October 3rd.

What is the DJ mix in 2025? Its online. Online its every form of mix: the live recording from the festival you went to, the renowned club you didn’t, the imagined space a dj wants to channel, it’s radio, podcasts, the calling card, the anniversary celebration of a magazine’s series, and we haven’t even got to a boiler room or twitch cast yet. It’s a fluid space where hierarchies are somehow inverted and reinforced at the same time. Within this vast culture there is little to distinguish between the good, the bad and the bizarre. It’s messy and never ending. The disposable nature of dance music reinforced by the interminable nature of our online world. The timeline doesn’t rewind. New day, new mix from here, there and everywhere. There’s a lot that’s been gained in this fluid flattening, and some things that are in short supply.

This is an overview, not a protest. What’s in short supply? The clue is in that observation of a flattening. Flattening culture does some good. It changes entry points and usually increases the general mass - more people can access more in whatever way they want. But what goes is a landscape that contains character. Where are the hills to the flatlands? The things that stand alone or form a little cluster of intrigue around them?

I grew up in Camden. Up until a certain moment about a decade ago, Camden Market always sold tapes bootlegged from gigs and, in the years before, tapes pilfered from promoter’s archives of various London-wide raves. Since the early 90s the CD formed a counterpoint to the under-the-counter culture of mixtapes. CDs were released in artful series. They had major licensing budgets and lavish artwork. They were complimented by vinyl editions of unmixed tracks. They formed cultural benchmarks that set the bar in respect of the DJ mix and distilled scenes and moments. Northern Exposure, Journeys By DJs, Global Underground, fabric, Balance, INCredible… the list is long of these defining mixes. They shaped the landscape.

Beyond this tape/CD situation lay the internet. Many argued over the last 20 years that the internet was best place for mixes due to the lack of format constraints. A mix could be uninterrupted for any length of time. I disagree. It’s nice we can theoretically have all 31 hours of Marco Carola’s peak performance at Sunwaves this year, but I also appreciate some focus. Some judgements made to hone in on something that cuts through the noise with precision. In many ways the CD is a perfect format for this. 74 mins to capture the element of something, a moment. In the words I used for the mix I recorded for the fabric series, ‘a polaroid of a DJ in a specific time and place.’

If you need to go deeper than one mix you can have a double pack, a triple pack or, in the case of Laurent Garnier’s Excess Luggage, a 5 CD compendium designed to capture a great DJ in his prime across the different approaches he took to his craft. The packaging provided context and stories behind the mixes. The stories contained histories of places - Detroit and Paris’s Rex Club - that were critical in the evolving of electronic music.

There was a year or two in the early 00s when CDs were usually on the covers of club culture magazines. Regularly these were people entry points to certain sounds and scenes. They were often good ones too. Some of my own highlights:

Jon Sa Trincha’s - Naked Ibiza: Salinas Beach

Timo Maas - Dirty Trancing

Osymyso - 4am Eternal (A Truly Twisted Post-Club Chill-Out Selection)

Sander Kleinenberg - Tranceglobal Airways

Roger Sanchez - The Global House Experience

A:xus - The Guidance Collection

It’s one of these CDs that Ogazon picks for her choice to highlight in this zine - DJ Lottie’s The True Sound Of… Ibiza Nights. The zine that you are reading makes the case for the CDs continued place in our landscape. In our internet dominated landscape physical formats matter. They remain something that can give shape to the amorphous. They can serve the music in a way the internet cannot, and I believe we should maintain something of it as listeners and consumers, fans who like something richer than pixels and streams. So along with Ogazon, Eris Drew looks at Mark Farina’s Seasons mix CDs that he distributed through Gramaphone in Chicago. Batu examines the crucial role CDs play in the development of Afro House, and DJ NORTHERN summons the joy of EZ’s Pure Garage mix. Then we have Shanti Celeste, Kilopatrah Jones, Darwin, Skee Mask and Parris sharing little things from their routines that keep them grounded because the rhythms that protect us are not always musical…

…October 17th

TL;DR - I’m putting on a night in a newish space in London and spreading the word through this mag and email - private ticket link here: https://ra.co/events/2235041

There are lots of things I dislike about the music scene. There are lots of things I dislike about the industry around it. Maybe one day I’ll be the person who wants to occupy myself with those. Up to now I have never found much use in being that way inclined.

The approach I have always wanted to do in my life is to think, what do I like? What’s good? What do I want to be contributing to help the things that I think are good? What doesn’t exist that should? Can I do that? Let’s beee constructive. If you wanna tear holes in things, fine, but that just hasn’t ever led me to any great places.

When it comes to the crux of the thing I do for a living - DJing - I have spent the last few years thinking about how to create nights that have a special energy to them. One that is always kinda shifting but always kinda good. One that reflects the best of the moment we are in. It’s what is behind the nights I put on with Objekt (Everything is True) in Berlin. It was also behind the night Peach and I put on in London last year (Pearls). In Berlin we organise it through Telegram, maybe occasionally posting a story about it for anyone new who wants to be involved (without going too deep the crowd are as much a part of the night as the soundsystem or the DJ, we do this together). For Pearls we decided to use WhatsApp and let people know through personal invites and then letting them add people to the group. This year I wanted to find another new venue in London and try another approach of promoting, just using emails and arpozine, and see where we get to.

So, we have a warehouse that is attached to an actual rum factory. A Martin Audio system. And hopefully a cute crowd… and me playing music all night :)

Here is a ticket link that for now remains private, but of course you have it now and so please feel free to share it with anyone that might be keen. A million thanks and hope to see some of you next month!

https://ra.co/events/2235041

I’m moving on. Before I do, I wanted to show you a couple of places that tell a story of a city that has rained everything it possibly could on me. I arrived a sapling, and I leave it a tree. A couple of days ago, in amongst the culling and sorting that goes with any move, I recorded this months radio show which serves this letter as a little companion. Consider these reflections as little windows to the lives I’ve lived here, the city I’ve loved and now leave behind.

Rose of fame Antik-Schmuck An-und Verkauf. We start in Schöneberg. My favourite shop in the city. I used to have an hours lunch break when I worked at a call centre further down Kolonnenstr. A kumpir from Tuana Feinkost Kumpir and then a rummage in Rose’s before spending 20 mins in the serenity of Alter Friedhof der Zwölf-Apostel-Gemeinde, a cemetery round the corner, would be the usual hour spent. Chainsmoking away, the lady whose shop it is (Rosie), would usually be in black, a happy chaos around her. Amongst the artful clutter of clothes, crockery, jewellery and the hazy gimcracks and gems, is a collection of cigarette cards that is unmatched. She must have more than ten thousand. Here’s a favourite she sold me.

Once common, these antique bric-a-brac spots are increasingly rare, and she has always radiated a certain closeness to death that makes this one a treasure to find still functioning. If I didn’t buy anything she’d always uncover some over-articulated golden lighter to try and tempt me with. My German would stumble as I tried to politely say I didn’t smoke quite as much as her. Indeed I don’t think I knew anyone who smoked quite as much as her. The only shop I shall truly miss.

Dirk Kogler Kohlenhandlung. The flat I lived in, that now houses my studio, is heated with the original late 19th century coal stoves. If you are economical about it you keep the fire burning all winter. Why? It uses less coal to do so, as letting it die out means the stove cools down and requires a lot more coal to get back to its best. So, before bed, stoke it and gather the ashes around the fresh coals. First thing when you awake put another brickette on, and the stove will constantly radiate the dry warm heat that makes the miserable winters bearable. It takes just over half a ton of coal to get through to April when the evenings begin to shed their icy lows and you can forget about the fires for another 6 months at least. Those blocks of sooty lumps are delivered by Dirk Kogler, and you’ll need to pay his smudgy basement a visit to arrange for his menacing 1960s lorry to deliver you what you need for next winter.

Kraut and Rüben, the female only food co-op. The first few years in this city were an exercise in frugality. €5 a day was the budget that allowed me to optimize my work/life balance and so local, organic vegetables were obviously beyond my means. But on a good day, listening to Barbara Morgernstern whilst cycling back from the Maybachufer market with an exceptionally cheap haul, I might have done well enough to allow for the occasional treat from K&R. The store was the first place in WestBerlin (1978 they began) to start bringing the vegetables grown on smaller local holdings into the city and store them in sand in the basement to sell to Kreuzbergers.

“Together with other collectives, we made regular tours to "organic farmers" and brought the vegetables, some of which we had harvested ourselves, to Berlin, where they not only had to be distributed but also stored during the winter. A common winter job, for example, was to first plant Wendland carrots in self-made sand heaps in the basement of a squat and then dig them up again for sale, or to wait at night in a bar for a truck full of potatoes to arrive for unloading.”

It made me so happy that the patriarchy could be corroded using groceries. It taught me something and was a hallmark of the city I had fallen in love with.

Nachtigall Imbiss. Food in the Hauptstadt has changed dramatically. For the better! Nachtigall Imbiss has remained undisturbed by these advancements. The only decoration is the beautiful sign. Inside it’s simple. A counter and my favourite falafals and chicken shawarma.

The city gave me a career, and that career started with two big helping hands. The first is harder to quantify as it was my friendship, a kind of brotherhood, with my dear TJ.

The second is easier to pin down. I had written a song called Vertigo. My friend Jakob played it to Torsten Pröfrock who worked at Hardwax, and he told us he would sell 100 records if we had them made. The story of how that record developed into the thing I do today is too long and too boring for now, but I always felt the deepest of debt to the record shops here. Torsten has gone and Hardwax has moved on to a new location, so here is another unchanged favourite. This one I recommend for the purchasing of new wave and kosmiche music - Heisse Scheiben.

Having become an internationally touring disc jockey I found myself having to make a great deal of travel plans. These were all conducted at the Turkish Airlines Sales Agent on Oranienstrasse. Many hours discussing routes and timetables were spent here. I sat and stared at the passing Kotti scenes of survival whilst the agents spent countless hours at the computer scheduling my impending months.

Olmo Alimentari. This newfound success meant my budgets increased, and I could buy myself delicacies. Olmo served good olives and artichokes, every pasta shape you had ever seen, and if you needed lunch a bowl of it nicely cooked in the back. I felt a kinship with the name too - it split the difference between Elmo and Ondo.

If these places are intact when you return here my dear, then something remains of a world I cherished. I hope they are and that you in turn can use them as a portal to this dear city that swept me away in my 20s, turning me into the person you know.

Much love,

JRS

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In the sleepy zones between rest, recovering over the last couple of days, I have begun to unspool my experiences of working on this thing called ROSE. ROSE is a show that I performed with Sharon Eyal’s dancers, light technicians and company over the last week at Sadler’s Wells East in London. Its genesis is a collaboration between Sharon and the label Young. Caius, who runs Young, had seen Sharon’s work and thought this would be very powerful alongside a DJ set from someone in the creative world I inhabit. His idea was to bring Sharon together with Ben UFO. Ben built the first iteration with Sharon that opened at Manchester International Festival. Last summer it was performed at New York’s Park Armoury. I was asked to replace Ben due to a period of necessary paternity leave for Ben. I had misgivings about joining, these were primarily rooted in the lack of time we had to rehearse and build a new show around my musical direction/DJing. Caius assured me that a) I’m not all that different from Ben in my tastes and Ben had connected well with Sharon, b) I’d be up to the job and c) everyone else is very good and we’d stand an excellent chance of pulling it together in a fraction of the time they’d had for the previous iterations. As persuading as that was to hear I remained concerned, but it was exciting and presented itself in my mind as the one opportunity I would have in life to map a circle between my work and my mother’s life as a student of Noa Eshkol.

Over the last weeks I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked to explain what ROSE is and I’ve generally done a terrible job. It is a show I struggle to explain. On paper it’s one thing. The experience is another. Its somehow affecting, its sum something greater than its parts. Or perhaps its parts all push each other into something greater. So what is that? I’m not going to attempt to put the thing into words here beyond the following couple of sentences, but I will recount a little about how we built it and mention a couple of the pieces of music to try and satisfy the requests for recordings, playlists and specific track identifications.

Broadly this show is a simple merging of creative disciplines - that of dance and the club DJ at this moment in time. However Sharon’s work is not straightforward. It eschews classical boundaries in dance and instead draws upon the body in a way that is total. Its controlled and expressive in equal measure. It moves dance into a very inventive space where figures create landscapes and bodies join and seperate, offsetting slow and precise movement against flowing explosions of energy. It does all the things that music does. ROSE then places Sharon’s work into both the architecture of a club and the structure of a DJ set. I had no idea really what I was working on until it was performed with the audience all around us. Suddenly the power of what we were doing began to expose itself. As far as I have understood it from the things people have tried to say to me after the shows, its connecting something in their bodies, something in how they feel dancing and giving them a kind of natural high that they haven’t experienced before just being in a club or just watching a performance. I’m sure there is a lot more to be explored here, I am not the person who can do that as I obviously feel too close to the work I think to have any perspective.

Before I started I was sent a recording of the set Ben played at the Park Armoury. There was a structure that was built around 3 pieces of music that Sharon had created dances for. One, by Koreless, has been a touring show of hers for a few years. Into The Hairy is about 45 minutes long and for ROSE she was using two shorter sections of it. Then there was a piece designed for Mormax, by Ricardo Villalobos, and another for a specific work written for ROSE by Jamie xx, called CHANTS. Caius and Mattis (who manage the piece from Young’s side,) the dancers and I all then arrived in Paris, where Sharon and her partner Gai, live. The first night we sat in Sharon’s apartment and I played her tracks I thought would work. She liked most of them.

The next morning we started in the rehearsal studio and we began to build the dances again around some of the tracks I’d played. Previously the one track she had mentioned wanting to keep was Front de Cadeaux’s Legal Illegal, but this was replaced by DJ Znobia’s U Uu. Wanting to keep something of Ben’s work we decided to keep a blend in the finale between T++’s remix of Marcel Dettmann and Surusinghe’s BAD GIRLS, albeit with the layering of Ndagga Rhythm Force’s Khadim, which I wanted to become a kind of returning theme or coda in the show. Over three days we got much of the show together musically and it felt like Sharon had built her work into the music I had thrown at the dancers in a way that gave me confidence we could pull this off. I say could because we still hadn’t seen the space we’d have to transpose it to (the set had evolved since NY), done anything in regards to light (which is utterly crucial to the thing), or even had a full run of the piece. I then headed to Glastonbury and they continued sharpening details in Paris.

We reconvened in London on the Sunday before the shows. Dress rehearsal was Wednesday, and then we had four performances, Thursday night to Sunday. Now we could access the space and start work on the lights. Three day story short; we somehow did it. That being said, the dress rehearsal was the first full run through. We did the rehearsal with Sharon holding a mic, ready to guide/interject should we make a mistake. Amazingly she didn’t have to. I had never felt this kind of pressure around a DJ set in my life. Every step and cue was timed to transitions we had agreed upon and I had an iPad next to me with a timer for me to be precise in when certain moments landed. I wanted to do the whole thing without leaning on ‘hot cues’ (if you know what they are) and just mix it as energetically as I could so, despite the preparedness, there would always remain a certain lubricity to it. There are sections where I have some freedom in what I play and how I play it, but we have to then land on segments at the same time as the dancers are counting steps, and the lights need to transition through my cues the same way each time. Much of this was down to the role played by the stage manager Roy, without whom it would have been a mess.

It is this tension between the free and the precise that is the source of so much energy. The first half is designed to unsettle the audience in certain ways. Its loud. The dancers come through the audience in a way that is unrelenting. The aim is for the audience who aren’t into it to have the freedom to leave or take a break - thankfully they do. This allows the majority to settle into the experience, sink into the darkness and find their own connection to what’s unfolding. This becomes a great strength of the show. I loved having the crowd not looking at me. I loved being able to play tracks like Glossy Bingo Stain and to see people warping themselves to a flamenco clap and harp. People slipped in and out of themselves in between puzzlement and joy, at having a spectacle presented to them that in turn swallowed them up and let them just dance.

Every night had a different feeling to it because the crowd are so paramount to the performance. On the Friday Caius barrelled towards me about ten minutes before the end and said “I think that was the best hour of my life”. That night had felt truly remarkable because up till then we had been tinkering everyday. I had initially chopped about twenty minutes from the show. On Thursday Sharon decided to add another totally new dance piece and I chopped one section and extended another. Friday was the result of all these tunings and the room seemed to take off in that second hour. Saturday and Sunday became about replicating that as best we could. That feeling that floods the room in the last ten or fifteen minutes, that is the feeling I wish could be bottled, could be released every weekend in clubs or in fields. That’s the feeling of dancing and listening and connecting to our bodies in the purest sense I can think of.

hi’s

Ichiko Aoba, Lucy Dacus, Doechii, Turnstile, Busta Rhymes, Nile Rogers, ANOHI and the Johnsons, Wetleg, Sunflower Soundsystem, the peace garden, the sound at assembly.

bye’s

The sound for the prodigy, I walked past inhaler and not good, deftones cancelling, being on at the same times as pulp, Geordie greep serving private school, I didn’t see him but rod Stewart can forever do one, as can Matty Healy. There’s probably a few more but the hi’s were overwhelming this year! <3

There is a strong thread of joy and emotional depth that I think informs the best music, club or otherwise. Music that is clearly rooted in lived experience and communicates that with some force. Music that collides things together in a way that sparks the imagination and isn’t just rooted in novelty/nostalgia (Nov/Nos… maybe I like that term 🤔). Music produced by people who have clearly spent time crafting something that ends up with their own DNA in it and isn’t just a sample pack soup de jour. The best thing is that I also feel very confident that I’m missing lots all the time and that is exciting and keeps me running to try and keep up every day.

People (journalists) say the best moments in history culturally are when New MOVEMENTS (genres) hit. I have always disagreed with this lazy take. Firstly when new genres become identifiable things often narrow. Everything is interconnected and the depth and magic of these connections is erased when we have conversations that are (eg.) on what the first X records were of Y genre. Secondly they also only ever emerge because of years of things being played with. This experimentation is where its at. Always. Usually these efforts don’t lead to something that gets properly pigeonholed (a new genre for ppl to claim etc.), but they still impact the music that gets played and made henceforth as profoundly as anything else.

My job is partly to be as sensitive and engaged with these subtleties as I can be and right now I feel good about things.

*Mostly new but obvs a few old things I’ve loved and feel like they speak to me in this present.

its Alice, in wonderland?

“We wanted to come out but didn’t know where out was.”

So ends the opening monologue in FAGGOT*S, a new adaptation of Larry Mitchell and Ned Asta’s celebrated manifesto The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions. The rewrite, by Hadrien Daigneault-Roy, updates the 1977 tract to fold in thoughts on AI and club jokes (I am a he or she, never a they - they’s are for the straight tourists who want to get in to Berghain). Hassandra brings a Grecian poise to the role and using a vocal mask plug in that is dipped in and out of, is able to swim between roles and identities with glee. The play lays out queerness in its multiplicities through a series of houses, echoing Ball culture, and sets up the forever fight against ‘Grey Men’, to reveal the Pansy Path; a yellow brick road that exists to liberate us. The Pansy Path exists beyond the torpid hems of the Grey, suited, straight world we start in. Of all the houses The House of Angel Flesh was where my heart lay, with its inner room a mattress of support and love.

The use of tech and an influencers ring-light wired up to a selfie screen on the stage echoed the performance of Dorian Gray that Sarah Snook is giving on Broadway at the moment. In that show the use of filters is used to accentuate the Dorian’s eternal youth and link Oscar Wilde’s evergreen tale to today’s world of fillers and screen deep pixel personalities. In FAGGOT*S the voice tech and screen give Hassandra the chance the move between these multiplicities with striking control, amusing notes sung in different registers, wild autotune dribbles between lines, and knowing vamps to camera light up what is a very poetic script. As good as Hassandra is the real star for me was Sascha Cowan’s GORGEOUS costume work. The entire show takes under, over and almost through a vast square of shimmering taffeta. Lacy holes give us arms, a head, a suggestive balloon. The fabric was metaphors galore and ultimately was the world that contains our multitudes. I loved it all.

Dan Friedman

Here are two photos of the same doorway/kitchen.

Its Dan Friedman’s evolving home circa the mid 80s. I first came across Friedman through the Tim Lawrence book on NY music 1980-83 where he’s mentioned in passing in connection with Club 57. He could walk between creative worlds with an ease few manage. On the one hand he worked at Pentagram design agency and was responsible for the corporate identity of Citibank. On the other he was a font of downtown cool who worked in sculpture and mentored a lot of the downtown stars (Haring, Basquiat etc etc). He continually altered his apartment radically. Apartmento mag has a bunch of pics of the work he did on his place and there is a good essay on him on Art Net. There’s a lot to love about Friedman but maybe my favourite thing is his 12 point manifesto, the “Radically Modern Agenda”. 30 years on it’s qualities remain somehow undisturbed by the passing of time and still kinda rad:

number 11 - use the new technologies, but don’t be seduced into thinking that they provide answers to fundamental questions.

is a truth that manages to be uncynical and deeply humane in the face of techno-capitalism. Maybe it’s not surprising coming a couple of points after the observation that careerism is a corner that traps us into being servants. My favourite is 8:

Engage in self restraint; accept the challenge of working with reduced expectations and diminished resources.

So liberating. So kind, both to yourself and all you share this world with. So uncentred and free from ego, self regard and opportunism! A genuine blueprint. For a better everything!

Patricia Lockwood on pee

Finally…

I’m not a fan of cartoons and rarely ever are they funny to me so god knows what was going on in my head the other day. In a twilight dream the other morning I imagined this cartoon so drew it when I woke up. I had been watching Fran Liebowitz talking about Candy Darling before bed and this is definitely giving Liebowitz energy. Twilight Dream… Are you asleep? Maybe. Are you awake? Possibly. Those in between dream states that are sometimes super vivid are twilight dreams to me.

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Spring was in full splash over the weekend in two cities I could have spent longer in. Shanghai feels like the future in so many ways, immediately the muted noise suckers your ears in its softness, muted due to at least half the vehicles being EV’s. The birds and street chatter enveloping away from the highways that slash and weave through districts. The grind of these car clogged arteries softened by the rails of hanging flower baskets that line them. This quantity of flowers planted and watered by the state a sight you would never see in Europe and god forbid the US.

“The local authorities have less power than ever.”

The global authoritarian creep has its local hue here with Beijing central command turning the screws on the city. Shanghai has long been a more tolerant city but now drugs and queer life are being targeted with a refreshed urgency and this means clubs are having to feel their way, exceedingly careful in their choices. A vogueing party the following night was cancelled. Due to the police demanding names of fellow users from anyone caught with drugs few people take those risks either. So it’s boozy. Super boozy. Shots everywhere in the club, delivered in trays of 24.

In Taipei the scene after twilight remains in thrall to ketamine and club rivalries. Sadly smaller scenes will only grow if people put those outlooks to bed and work as one. The fact that a 7 Eleven has opened above Final was adding an extra squeeze to the financial side as people nip upstairs for a beer to save a dollar or two. These pressures are not bringing the best out of people, but happily the energy in both cities inside the clubs was zippy and warm. Eyes shut and offhand gratitude hollers in certain moments. The sets were very different due to starting after contrasting previous DJs (Sulk and Hechang, both fab). The only common track for me (aside from a few unreleased bits) was maybe this one by Zisko which sounded satisfyingly chewy in both rooms.

Oh and Carrier’s Shading which I continue to struggle not to play once I’m in a certain zone. Slowdive’s recent melter Kisses felt fairy-kissed at the end of Final, it was so dark in there I hadn’t realised the warmth and energy that remained at the end.

Taipei’s National Palace Museum was open on Sunday and four hours after the club closed I found myself there, having the lightest of experiences looking at some of the Crown Jewels of Chinese ceramics. You ever felt your heart slow down and speed up as you move between cabinets with the most delicate ancient clay objects in? If not the NPM is my tip to you. It’s vast temple of a building placed in those forests of draping green that surround the city feel like a hop to a place beyond the concrete, one I resisted. Lunch called instead.

Millennium mambo

Xin, who runs Pure G in Taipei recommended this as one of his favourite Taiwanese films and yes, it’s an excellent portrait of life around the club scene in Taipei at the beginning of the 00s. Set around chain-smoking Vicky who is finding it hard to leave her wasteman, wannabe DJ boyfriend, chain-smoking Hao-Hao. We see him cueing up Art of Noise’s Mixed Metaforce at one point and he decorates his shelves with a Hooj Choons 12”. Eventually she finds some comfort under the wing of a gangster softy, chain-smoking Jack. No spoilers beyond those basics, but some general thoughts. These characters are very well played archetypes. The pathos in Vicky’s character comes from the strength of her physical technique as an actor. She shrinks into the role so to speak and we follow her in a kind of predictable sadness. The soundtrack slaps. Its built around a recurring theme* that I can only describe as shoegaze with an metronomic 808 underneath it. I loved this so much I need to play it on the radio. This motif is fleshed out with various techno bits which career between Steve Stoll like tools and in one scene something that is so ravey it creeps towards donk. The colouring is peak late 90s / millennium neons, the pacing soft, meandery and there is this cute plot device that echoed the push and pull of time on drugs where the narrator sometimes told you what was going to happen before it happened and sometimes didn’t. It’s a quintessential vibe film, canning a moment so well you are just swished back into a place, a party, a problem, a point in time viscerally and vibrantly. Much like something like Partygirl but without the racism and cringey edges. It’s dated better.

Summer Lei

So it turns out that “recurring theme” is made by Lim Giong, through whose work I discovered Summer Lei. This moment it turns out is my introduction to an artist with a lavish catalogue. So many different, spacious styles. I’m in love. How is this Mandopop? It is. Its richly alternative and almost nothing seems made for anything beyond pure expression, let alone commercial strictures. This gap in culture was essentially Sega Bodega’s TikTok where he plays Baby Shark next to a popular Middle Eastern children’s theme which sounds dazzling, its coruscating melodies rendering Baby Shark the dumb joke of a tune that it is. Anyway, Summer Lei. Swoon. Look at this album cover of just a floor and a table! It is a visual language I don’t have words for. I am currently marinating in this one which in English is titled h t t p : / / s u m m e r p l a n e t . c o m.

Xin asked who was similar in the soundtrack world over here to her. I couldn’t think of anyone. Can you?

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A real low point. Beyond the scorched earth of wars, of genocides, of corrupt meme coins and AI hallucinations, of selective amnesia, outrage, hypocrisy and rage-bait. Beyond every new low of every recent week, a human went to space and used, quite literally, The Trip Of A Lifetime to promote the tracklist on a forthcoming record. Another roll of the eyes perhaps, but also maybe time to say its ok you know, we can do better. We have lost so much physically. We get that. But here was the hard evidence of how much we have lost mentally, spiritually and (clutches pearls) in the most precious thing we have - our imaginations. Our ability to be awed, to feel wonderment and be knocked back in dazzled dreams at one another’s capacity for creation and expression... is all that truly munted? Is there a better (worse) metaphor for where this crunching capitalist omnipotence has got to than Katy Perry using space flight to deuce us?

As Hanif Abdurraquib pointed out recently, “Cruelty is one crisis that is built from several other crises and the one that I have been thinking about recently is a Deficit of Wonder, which exists not due to a lack of moments of wonder for humans to bask in, but what seems to me, like a refusal to locate and engage in wonder, a refusal to offer one’s close attention to the world. There is a level of individualism embedded in this of course, which is another interconnected crises. Treat the world like an assignment you, individually, have to get through and/or conquer, and it makes sense that you would ask a computer what you should wear with a sweater you like. It makes sense that you would turn your face away from the vastness of space to promote some songs.”

My sister was a psychology student and she got to do a module on the psychology of awe which is what I think Abdurraqib is pointing out has withered within us. Awe is a profound emotion. It connects us to our fellow humans and the place we find ourselves in. It reduces our self-focus and helps our minds be open to new ideas. It challenges us. It’s obvious why our capacity is so under threat - the world seems fucked and we exist in a perpetual place where every technology we use on a daily basis promotes individualism and pits us, sometimes subtly and sometimes blatantly, against one another. Stepping away from that and seeking out what we love in one another is a challenge to that.

I hit lucky to essentially do that for a job. I share music with an audience almost every week. Seeing people connect in clubs and connect to things that I love is in many ways the kernel of this wonder in me. But, as most of us are painfully aware, there is baggage beyond that. Industries usually suck, and music isn’t immune to that. The graft of that side of things is often distracting and dispiriting. It can chafe the mind in many ways. I also never really get to give much context to the music I play beyond the sets I play, and the sets I tend to get the most from (in this context of straight up wonderment) tend to be the venues which don’t have huge capacity. It’s a limited thing for a few people.

Most art forms are interconnected. The last album I released was an attempt to present something that drew on the ways things interconnect in me, the experiences of life that went into it could be represented in paintings, poems, an essay and the music. How to continue that and connect it to a space where I can encourage myself in this need to be astonished? How to connect something that can involve writing, music, film, photos, poems and whatever else to an old love of mine - magazines. There are days when I feel hopeless in my own capacity to do much creatively, but I can at least appreciate the things around us that are kicking me into wanting to sit at my tools again. These kicks will be here.

How also, to spend less time using platforms that are solely algorithmic, and instead use platforms in which I care very little for numbers and statistics. Yes, Substack has an app and an algorithm (and is problematic to the degree that every similar thing is), but its also built as an email platform and if you’re not seeking to make monetary profit out of it - which I’m not - those things don’t matter here. This is a privileged position where I don’t have to do to worry about that, so let’s exercise this.

Have been recently obsessed with 1980s/90s style fanclubs, those ones which involved submitting your address and, in return for a paid sub, getting postcards and other little physical treats through the year. Some were obscenely niche, a character that appeared in a single episode of a single season of Star Trek (I kid you not) could merit $10 a year and a weight of fan fiction. The Dracula one was so big it eventually turned into a whole damn library that currently houses 24,000 books “with subjects ranging from Astrology to Zymosis”. This pre-internet energy will forever be different, but there is something positive that remains in our capacity to share amongst kindred spirits. I want to put together something where I can share things I make with people who would like them, to connect physical media with what’s here. For now however I think this plan should start here and be free, maybe fortnightly, at least monthly. At a minimum we can have a space that is just dedicated to the sharing of the good rather than the endless waves of despair and snark. This intro has been too long and that’s not the style here, but I wanted to explain some things I have felt deeply recently. Be a light you wish to see, a wise lady once said me. Welcome to ARPO, A-Rhythm-Protects-One.

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