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"Wire contributor, semi-mythical pop svengali, erstwhile thespian, sampler troubadour and untidy kitchen user" - Owen Hatherley of Sit Down Man, You're a Bloody Tragedy

"Your songs are pretty little paths - take us somewhere nice." - Elodie Amandine Roy, Applejack Zine
"This town is too peaceful lately..." Puncturing the Silences of I Spit On Your Grave

The eerie, unsettling potential of the harmonica had, by 1978, already been well established. It’s slurred wail and reedy chords, its uncanny sound – so close in many respects to the human…
8 years ago
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Two Late Expressionist Utopias: Frau im Mond and Tabu
At the turn of 1930s, two of German expressionist cinema’s leading lights left the dark shadows of the catacombs and the back alleys in search of other worlds. Both Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau had…
8 years ago
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Misception

In my brief absence from the blogosphere, I seem to have missed the boat somewhat on Inception and meanwhile Mark K-Punk has gone and made almost exactly the point I wanted to make…
8 years ago
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All Genres Are Generic (But Some Are More Generic Than Others)

I have lost count of the number of reviews that have spoken of the new Pipettes album in terms along the lines of, “they have moved away from the individual sixties garage aesthetic of…
8 years ago
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Pipettes Album Two Released

In the first days of 2008, after three years of fairly relentless touring, The Pipettes found ourselves back in London. Three key members had decided to leave the band in order to pursue…
8 years ago
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The Future: Not Worth Paying For, Apparently

There’s an interesting feature in the latest issue of The Journalist, in-house organ of the NUJ, about the decline in fortunes of newspaper and magazine horoscope columnists. In 1988,…
8 years ago
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We Died and Never Knew

Went the Day Well, Cavalcanti’s first proper feature for Ealing Studios in 1942, is like an episode of Dad’s Army directed by Michael Haneke. Scenes of brutal horror erupting…
8 years ago
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Spielberg on a Wii : Art, Cinema and Video Games (part one)


Amidst all the brouhaha in recent months over Roger Ebert’s denunciation of the possibility of video games being considered as art forms, few seem to have asked why the eminent…
8 years ago
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Cancerous Growths : Technological Darwinisms

For over a century, the question of tomorrow has largely been a question of evolution. Under the influence more, perhaps, of Herbert Spencer than Charles Darwin, the future path of the…
8 years ago
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Sounds Like Dystopia

“It’s the year 2010 and you wake to a familiar tune playing softly. It gets you out of bed and makes you feel good. As you walk into the bathroom, your Personal Media Minder activates the…
8 years ago
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Faith on Earth is a Thing of the Past : Le Vaisseau Fantôme at the Opéra Bastille

As the Vorspiel draws to a close, the curtain rises on a vast pale room. Stage left stands a vastly proportioned door which will make dwarves of the protagonists (and giants…
8 years ago
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Synchronised Bodies

“It was amazing. I closed my eyes and I could imagine myself in a hotel room in East Berlin in 1986. Really, it was like listening to the hotel band playing disco tunes in communist Germany…
8 years ago
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Damn it, Thanet! I'm in love...


Two reports on last weekend’s delightful On Margate Sounds event, first off from the organisers themselves….


Thanks so much to everyone who joined us for On Margate Sounds last…
8 years ago
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Resisting the Happy Ones: Children of the Stones
There are a number of found objects featured significantly in HTV’s (1977) series, Children of the Stones: the engraved stone found by the poacher, Dai (“It’s mine! I found…
8 years ago
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On Margate Sounds

I shall be taking part in this event at the end of August at the Tom Thumb Theatre, at Dreamland, Margate. Yes, the same Dreamland rhapsodised in Lindsay Anderson’s short film, O…
8 years ago
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