Anyone interested in a Durutti Column mp3 week around here besides me? On a one track per day base.

It's Leonard Cohen's 70's birthday today. The Guardian has collected 70 fact(oid)s about him.

Why did nobody tell me that there is a new Giant Sand album out? I loved Howe's last jazzy solo piano album Ogle Some Piano which only came out in spring. Unfortunately I didn't listen enough to it. Is All Over...the Map (nice pun) was produced by John Parish and Howe. Vic Chesnutt sings on one track. Neither John Convertino nor Joey Burns appear on the album. They seem to have left Giant Sand for good. Calexico is a safer source of income I suppose. Apparently there is lots of distorted guitar noise on the new album. Pf compare it to Center of the Universe. One of Giant Sand's highlights in terms of rockin out. I am quite excited. Metacritic link to reviews.

Please go over to Spoilt Victorian Child for some Joy Division goodness. A great Galaxie 500 cover of Ceremony amongst others.

i don't think a smoker can stop smoking. of course he can stop in this life. but he will start again in the next one (i had this idea when reading in tom liwa's last newsletter that he didn't smoke for the last 13 months).

p.s. so i was right thinking that he had stopped smoking at the concert last year.

The Throwing Muses The Real Ramona didn't age well. It was so much better in memory. Now it is too energetic in a bad way. Too unfocussed. Kristin Hersh's voice is so much inferior to Tanya Donnelly's. One of those records I didn't buy because a friend did. I taped it from him. Sometimes it is not a good idea to try to stir up memories. Or didn't I age well?

The Pale Saints In Ribbons on the other hand is maybe even better than it used to be in 1992. The dreamy variant of shoegazing. The singer can't sing (too thin a voice) but that was a necessary ingredient of shoegazing (see Ride, see Catherine Wheel and even My Bloody Valentine). As if the thick texture of the music wouldn't allow for a masculine voice. Only girls' voices fit. Belinda Butcher, the girl from Lush, Rachel Goswell from Slowdive, Liz Fraser who was the grand-mother of shoegazing. This was the music which seduced me into the realm of indierock. Very hard to resist for a man like me.

p.s. i have to find out who is the girl singing occasionally on in ribbons.

What does the squirrel do in our apple tree in the morning?

last night I had this weird idea (on a kind of mortality again): Imagine you listen to some music you love and you know it will be the last time. The music will disappear, dissolve after your listen. The only way to conserve any lasting memory of the music would be to write about it. I think this should be the idea behind any decent music criticism. To try to create something which can maybe evoke the music you wrote about. Something which could stand for itself even if the music would be lost forever.

I haven't written a lot on music recently not because I didn't listen to any great music. It's more the opposite. I felt too insignificant to write about all those phantastic bands on my stereo. Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis, The Durutti Column, The Smiths, Kings of Convenience, Pale Saints to name a few. I am in the speechless and in awe state when it comes to music right now.