This is it, isn't it?
(Anymore now)
Hello hello hello… Not quite the last communiqué of the year, as I’ll do a 2025 roundup at some point, but got the sense of winding down. I’m having a gorgeous couple of days in a rainy London, really refreshes the spirit to be surrounded by people and noise and food from all over the world and all that stuff. Here’s a couple of playlists, one just straight up vibesy, the other a little bit more emotionally punchy, but both seasonable and good.
I’m going to put my special things right up top. First this on SOFT MUSIC.
Then this one, on LITTLE ROOMS. They’re related.
My album of the year and related thoughts to the previous two links
.We all need Autechre on the guitar, it’s 100% soft music, small rooms, yada yada.
Been thinking a lot lately about music that is the platonic ideal of this, that or the other - and this from 2009 is the platonic ideal of “driving at night”.
I’d been running out of science podcasts so I mentioned on BlueSky that I was having a shitty time on this front and someone really came good with THIS. Im normally allergic to American Broadcasting Voices, but 80 minutes just on the question of what causality is? I’m there like Lionel Blair.
I have my mum to thank for this one: the BBC’s Miniature Workshop is another to add to my list of comfort watching programmes which are also absolutely hammer and tongs WOKE PROPAGANDA. Things like Sort Your Life Out With Stacey Solomon and Repair Shop are so - as my online friend Dan Orton puts it - “normie coded” that they can put untold queer, neurodivergent, refugee, abnormal family structure, feminist etc etc stories right at the heart of prime time viewing and make it make sense. And Miniature Workshop is absolutely SHAMELESS in showcasing socialist and trade union history, overcoming racism and all the rest. And it’s LOVELY with it.
More tremendous science - and I hope you’re ready for impossible infinities….
Craft. It’s all about craft. There are people who nerd out about musicianship and instruments purely for the sake of complicating their life, they’re the ones who get success then end up disappearing into their own home studios spending more time getting the right cable arrangements than they do jamming, and you can see them diminishing as creative forces as they do.
Then there are those who have the GREATEST success, but are still about the very basics of what they do and why they do it. There aren’t many people on this earth with as great an influence on why the modern world sounds like it does as Steve Cropper, but here he is, at almost 80, still visibly full of fun and in love with the guitar and with playing the guitar.
What a dude. And what an emblem, too, through all his work, his pride in being part of - as Booker T put it - the Melting Pot, for an America that sometimes feels lost, but is still there... somewhere.
RIP, but what a legacy.
Despite my reverence to Cropper, one of the people at the heart of the American Dream I’m less sentimental about the world’s potential waking from that dream than this article is. BUT it is tremendous writing nonetheless and its main points are well worth considering.
I spend an unconscionable amount of time wondering about how you can document subcultures that by their nature are build on untold duration, hyper socialisation and nonsensical internal communication. Maybe this is the only way to do it.
I posted this last time but forgot the link! So here you are again, The Wascal, with something pretty close to my ideal version of heads-down, go-all-night dancing techno.
And there we go… back to you with some - hopefully more coherent - end of year stuff shortly but enjoy this lot for now, and know that you are appreciated.