Music For Your Tape Recorder

This time last year I was quite excited about La Roux. Here was a band I thought was going to finish what Yazoo started. But the voice and the bleeping began to grate. Music in the early eighties sounded like that because of hardware limitations. Consider these words from All Music Guide on Simple Minds' second album: "It's where [they] ventured beyond the ability to mimic their influences and began to manipulate them." I hope their next effort will endear itself more, but I'll probably forget to check up - which is why it took me till May to find Fujiya & Miyagi's Lightbulbs disappointing. Unfortunately life is too short to spend it listening to stuff again in the hope you might appreciate it second time round.

Only with a band as good as Boards of Canada would I do that. Having devoured Twoism, Music Has The Right to Children and Geogaddi last year, I started searching for In A Beautiful Place..., The Campfire Headphase, and Trans Canada Highway, which were not included in the set I procured (Bought them all since). When I came across Macquarie Ridge, I swore I had heard it before. I listened to it endlessly, trying to remember when I thought I had heard it, before realising it had actually overwritten a memory of hearing Kelly Watch the Stars on a school trip in 1998. That is the genius of BoC.

Last year Dalek i was my now-out-of-print-good-band-your-parents-shunned of 2008. This year it's The Passions. Bet they could only remember through Ashes to Ashes.

Communication Let Me Down

Beginning, Kenneth Noland, 1958

Though I wouldn't consider this blog to be in the same league as Doctorvee's, it seems many bloggers are facing the same issues.

The post rate here and elsewhere is down. In the early days it's probably true the deluge of posts each consisted of 500 words or less. Occasionally I would post some grand interpretation or theory, until gradually great 2000 word essays felt expected. Writing multiple 100 word entries, even if it is a legitimate non-twitter-esque post, feels like cheating . I've tried Twitter and found 140 characters only suited to celebrities talking about a cloud they saw an hour ago, or more interestingly (links to) breaking news.