When was the last good really slowed down and sad cover version of an otherwise upbeat pop or show tune? Genuine question.

Think I’ve seen Malfi in more versions than any other play. It’s a fantastically weird play with some great, subtle dialogue & even (sort of) werewolves…

Not sure about the philology, scholarship, academic credibility etc etc but been dipping into this for reasons & it’s a wild ride that you just want to be true… John M. Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

I think someone already did Soylent Green, didn’t they?

Got it for Christmas - it fairly rips along.

I also finished Plur1bus. Fantastic TV, maybe the best of the year (although Dying For Sex runs close). Complex, funny, hugely original (the concept but also the very personal way it's presented). Gilligan is an all-timer. Rhea Seehorn is the best - again -  and every shot is beautiful - again 1/2

Well read all kinds of books in 2025 but 3 of them were near-future climate change novels - Markeley’s The Deluge remained my favourite but KSR’s Ministry was full of good ideas, even if some of them involved the blockchain & loved the historical bits of his Antarctica

Bought this at a Notting Hill Record and Tape exchange when I was 17 & then took it back to my mate’s older brother’s Stockwell squat & the bigger boys WERE genuinely disturbed when I put it on, really loud, and started to tentatively dance around to Solar Lodge…may just have been my dancing, though

Definitely trying to make CDs cool again: Decius, Agriculture, Rattle & Swans

And, yes, the Fotonovel is the highest form of Art.

Very grateful for all my gifts this year but my sentimental old soul is particularly pleased with the Close Encounters of the Third Kind fotonovel which I had but lost on a bus circa 1979.

I’d give double to read Mark’s take on an AI version of Mark Fisher’s thoughts on Stranger Things.

Always feel that I’m slightly done with Kind of Blue, have heard it too many times, it’s become almost parodic in its excellence. But then I put it on. And now it’s a Christmas album.

Yes, LOTS of films / books COULD be shorter / lose 20 mins but you could also just wait for the Wikipedia summary or get a mate to tell you the best parts… and what essence might you miss if you don’t just let the authors / filmmakers take you away for a while? We don’t all need to be editors…

This year (again - I think the last time was 2022) I’ve gone for Scott Walker’s MOST Christmassy album, Soused m.youtube.com/watch?v=RaIs...

Thank God we don’t play the USA at many sports - these must easily be the two worst national anthems… and, no, of course I’m not up watching this silly AI fight; I just happen to be up and Netflix happens to be on….

Now listening to Johny Brown’s (from The Band of Holy Joy) Bad Punk show on Resonance FM player.resonancefm.com - some REEL on it, I think and some Farmer Glitch but don’t let that put you off because whatever is playing right now is 🔥🔥🔥

Séance! Writhing w. @mikeparadinas.bsky.social Tim Hill @btlabel.bsky.social @rapideyeelectro.bsky.social @crew.social.gravitons.org.ap.brid.gy @smackmusic.bsky.social @chocolatemonk.co.uk @agneshaus.bsky.social William Carlos Whitten & Diana Crush @iheartnoise.bsky.social &c Hear bit.ly/44nAPys

Would be good. I think it’s actually worth a PhD or something on how ugly / beautiful design played a significant part of our love and attention to theoretically mundane analogue media cf. mixtapes on cassettes etc

Had a dream once where Nurse With Wound were in big trouble because of uncleared Brotherhood of Breath samples.

Pasolini’s Salo. It’s, I think, an objectively great & important film but I can’t ever see me watching it again.

"She’s the counterforce. Wittgenstein’s ghost at a cocktail party. Quiet, precise, dangerous because she doesn’t need to explain herself. She’s the one who knows the rules and knows when to break them."

The Chambers Brothers People Get Ready is a Christmas song. Voice of Bill Nighy character in Love Actually: people get ready (for Christmas) m.youtube.com/watch?v=a_tf...

I did a sort of review of the splendid new Possession box set on @secondsightfilms.bsky.social

Digging through some of the more obscure Marc Almond releases - Snake Chamer with Brian Reitzell is a tune! m.youtube.com/watch?v=hsID...

Einsturzende Neubauten, depending on when the venue was built

I generally say let people have their fun but not when it comes to Sp*tify. I know, I know, pick your battles, but I hate it with a passion normally reserved for infectious diseases

A great place to hang out. Our own @farmerglitch.bsky.social will be bringing some strange portable farm-based electronics & wandering around, annoying people.

I think I forgot to promote this when it was actually released so here I am promoting it now - a beautifully recorded version of our Kosmische Disco & Brown Acid Techno live set

It’s Scott Walker season and I’ll be taking no further questions on this subject

Giving myself a break from climate-change horror by reading Robert McCammon’s nuclear apocalypse horror Swan Song

Always the best End of Year list if only because there’s just enough: 1) records I recognise & love, 2) records I haven’t heard, 3) records I didn’t like at all 4) missing records that make me sad & angry & 5) records I think are definitely made up but haven’t yet had the time to Google.

It’s 5am & Diamanda Galas’s Plague Mass makes more sense every year we live on this cursed planet. m.youtube.com/watch?v=4AiM...

“Odetta, I understand the strange ambivalence you feel about Bandcamp Friday but is there a BETTER way to support artists & absolve your bourgeoisie self-hatred about your Spotify use?” https://eastvillevending.bandcamp.com/album/musicke-for-psychedelic-duelling-vol-3-the-loplop-pit

A lot seems to have been crammed into those years between Art Angels & now.

Whole thread is interesting but the need to take an impossibly coherent ‘side’ in all things is one of the worst side effects of social media - EVERYTHING and EVERYONE worth talking about is complex and messy and grey and shifting & sometimes annoying & often funny & deeply depressing etc etc

Watching Scrubbers (1982). Remember seeing this in the video shop but never got around to getting it out. It’s quite good. Here’s the dance scene recut with Honey Bane’s (she acts in it) Mass Production m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr3Z...

Kilroy was here (aliens use Base 4)

Some Thanksgiving traditions are worth more now than ever www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLSv...

FKA Twigs’s Water Me just came on in the car & I’d forgotten what a beautiful, sad, alien-sounding song it was. The Arca production is devastatingly weird but very simple. I remember writing about it when it was released & thinking they were going to change everything. m.youtube.com/watch?v=kFtM...

A “You’ve Got Mail” remake set on Bandcamp Friday where Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are rival noise artists who accidentally buy each others’s tape because they both released under a new alias.

“These days, if you show indifference or outright hostility to established codes of conduct you can be thrown in jail, these days.”

You’ve been kidnapped. The characters from the last TV show you watched are trying to rescue you. Who’s coming to save you?

Sleazy’s great passion project Desertshore perhaps never fully saw the light of day in the way he’d intended (cf. Balance and The Ape of Naples) but I still return to it often - would have loved to see what him and Balance et al would have made of it m.youtube.com/watch?v=wgQJ...

Half way through this & really enjoying it. It’s not exactly a page turner in the conventional sense but the chapters are short so you find yourself, er, turning the pages… it’s my before bed book so I only manage about 40 pages a night but there’s a lot to think about in every page

I realise that my teenage self probably didn’t altogether understand or comprehend the complexities of what Dennis Potter was attempting to do with objectification and the male gaze and probably Sartre’s ‘The Look’ but I think I got SOMETHING out of watching Blackeyes in 1989…

Watching this again for a thing & it’s better (and more blue) than ever. Unbelievable work from everyone involved. I guess I saw it first circa 1990 but it must have been utterly perplexing in 1981

Can still really remember how electrifyingly excited very little me was when I realised there was going to be a TV show based on The Book Tower where Doctor Who would review kids books… #DoctorWho #books

One of my favourite books