Listening to Boxcutter's Glyphic from last year and it feels both comforting and strange to return to a style of music I stopped listening to a decade ago. It's pretty much what the kids used to call IDM but with the emphasis on the rumbling dubstep mutation of drum and bass and soulful rather than the freakish vocal samples you used to get on Plaid, Wagon Christ and u-Ziq albums. I rather lost touch with the genre when it started to get a little too silly (circa 1997's Spunk Jazz compilation), leaving the albums untouched on the shelves and moving on to old krautrock, "electric period" Miles Davis and folk instead. But it's all cyclic (so don't throw anything away kids, you'll want to hear it again in ten years time) and although it doesn't make me want to shout "wow, this is the only music I want to listen to!" this skittering, moody electronica is pleasantly exhilarating stuff. It does come dangerously close to soundtrack music for extreme skiing though.

Here's a picture of something. I like the idea of taking photographs and forgetting what they are of. The infra red filter helps, turning cloudy skies and supermarket parking lot fixtures into alien landscapes.



Also listening to tracks from the reissue of Ze's Mutant Disco from 1981. This is what the hip clubs in Leeds were playing on Saturday nights around that time, mixed in with earliest tendrils of Goth like Danse Society, UK Decay and B-Movie. It's hard to believe there could have been a time when the fishnets and hairspray crowd would happily cavort on the dancefloor to Coati Mundi's "Que Pasa/Me No Pop I" (gosh, insanely fast version on YouTube - shame the sound sucks) in between "Happy House" and "The Passenger". Very schizophrenic, you could easily break a heel switching from exuberant Latin rap to the gloomy bedsit shuffle. Or maybe I'm getting my chronology messed up.