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No Kings - join us tomorrow, Saturday June 14
Be there or be serf.Find out more and sign up here Tomorrow, Saturday June 14, there's a protest near you - approaching 2000 across the country - with solidarity demonstrations elsewhere in the world. As the late great Sly Stone (RIP) sang
"This Is What Los Angeles Looks Like"
We took in three No Kings protests across Los Angeles on Saturday - West Hollywood, Los Feliz, and Pasadena. Here, for Vanity Fair, are Joy Press's snapshot impressions of the joyous day and the way it ran counter to the "maddeningly out-of-whack" version of life-in-LA-right-now circulated by the national and international media. The Los Feliz was insane - a
Vaporhaze
"Actively passive, losing-itself-in-the-noise" - new column by Kieran Press-Reynolds steps out of his lane to explore the "dreamy malaise" of "hazy new-gen alt-rock": bar italia, untitled halo, deer park et al.Slackerdelia part 3, only this time they don't even have the energy to capitalize their names... Slackerdelia part 3? Well obviously part 1 is Mercury
RIP Keith Dobson
RIP Keith Dobson of World Domination Enterprises, possibly the most exciting live band I have ever seen still to this day, and creators of the immortal "Asbestos Lead Asbestos".Lovely bloke and he had the gift of the gab so fun to interview.Keith - who once went as Kif Kif le Batteur - had a long history with countercultural music going back to the ebb days
"mapping the brainrot continuum"
Hasten to read - while the paywall is relaxed for 24 hours - this fascinating conversation between Kieran Press-Reynolds and Shawn Reynaldo (no relation) for the latter's substack First Floor. Kieran talks about being a Gen Z writer about music + memes + internet subcultures - or as Reynaldo puts it, "mapping the brainrot continuum". There's also some glimps
WHEN MATES MAKE BOOKS - Pat Blashill, Someday All the Adults Will Die! - The Birth of Texas Punk
Writer-photographer Pat Blashill is a very old mate. We've been friends since 1989, after working together on some stories in New York for Melody Maker - he did the artist portraits and I wrote up the interviews. One of them was Sun Ra, would you believe!Before he moved to New York, Pat was involved in Austin's punk-and-after scene, documenting the mayhem in
Calling All Pop Music Critics!
My friends Oliver Wang and Sharon Mizota are conducting a survey of music critics who currently work in America. Please participate if you fit the description and can spare a few minutes to leave some completely anonymized data. Message from Wang / Mizota below:Calling all pop music critics! Please take the Critical Minded Pop Music Critic Survey. This surve
ran through the jungle (of modern music)
Fun piece by Kieran Press-Reynolds looking at oblique strategies for digging up weird music, with a hierarchy of engagements mode from basic to ultra-obscurantist.I had to look up the word "ran-through"
Apropos of nothing
Poptimism - the debate that refuses to go away, yet never goes anywhere. Deadlocked, yet churning. The recent rechurn stirred up memories of the fierce arguments of the early 2000s - 20-plus years ago! Supposedly, during these initially amiable, soon adversarial blog back-and-forths, it was me that came up with the term "poptimist". Probably not true, in fac
Grassed Up
Here's a funny and sharply observed report by Kieran Press-Reynolds on a "no phones" event called OFFLINE, the brainchild of ex-politician / President-wannabe Andrew Yang. People pay through the nose to reconnect briefly with undistracted living-in-the-here-the-now. Cool animated graphic by the team at Rabbit Holed / Pitchfork depicts Kieran and Yang both fo
On your Marx
A couple of related pieces from Kieran Press-Reynolds:1/ A sharply observed portrait for GQ of the trio behind the popular left-wing podcast TrueAnon. The show started out with deep descents into the foulness pit of Epstein-Maxwell, but quickly diversified, becoming "an oracle of our hysterical times," K writes. "In an online slopscape dominated by far-right
it takes two to tango
Me and Kieran are going to Argentina this week for the 20th anniversary celebrations of Caja Negra, the Buenos Aires publisher who have put out nearly all of the books of mine that have been translated into Spanish. Actually it takes four to tango because the panel event we are doing on Saturday November 15 at 7pm at the Deseo Club is a quadraphonic colloquy
Reading Matters
A couple of things to read:Kieran spends a "messy evening" with Bassvictim, whose music is one of the rare things he's alerted me to that I actively enjoy, but who sound rather alarming as an interview experience. And then this mega-post from Matthew Ingram at Sick Veg which is not just something else worth reading but a gateway to an enormous number of othe
more reading matter
Had a fun chat with Lawrence of Mozart Estate / Go-Kart Mozart / Denim / Felt legend, condensed into this pithy Pitchfork Q+A Kieran on Kirkslop (it's what you think it is) for GQDid a bunch of interviews while in Argentina - this one by Romina Zanellato for Cenital is a good read (and can be easily flipped into English). Another one worth a look is Carlos P
You know the score
Son vaults ahead of father by joining the select grouping of music critics who have had diss songs aimed at them by aggrieved musicians. In this case, the wounded ones rather disingenuously claim that "this song is about the modern American music critic, not about one single person, and any resemblance between the characters in this video and any persons, li
Hauntology Parish Newsletter Yuletide Edition: Ghost Box 20th; Moon Wiring Club; Lo Five; Oneohtrix Point Never; Jean-Michel Jarre, Bernie Parmegiani, Ms. Jean Schwarz, Kilkenny Electroacoustic Lab
Sweeping up the mince pie crumbs and taking down the tinsel, while feeling distinctly one-sherry-too-many green-about-the-gills - that's yours truly the day after the party celebrating 20 Years of Ghost Box.The anniversary celebration came about when a light bulb went off above my head and I realized that I'd extravagantly commemorated twenty years of Creel
the sound of the suburbs
Really happy to have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite albums of the 21st Century so far: Suburban Tours by Rangers. For Pitchfork's Sunday Review series. It was also an opportunity to get started - possibly jumping a gun a bit, since it's only 16 years since, but why not? - on feeling nostalgic about chillwave a/k/a hypnagogic pop. The Range
"Well you know my name is Simon"
Stephen Alexander, at his always interesting and insanely prolific blog Torpedo the Ark, brightens my day, at this ever more darkening time, with a post about three Simons of roughly the same age and with certain affinities: Armitage, Critchley, Reynolds. As I note in his comments section, it was a ridiculously common name for boys born from the late '50s to
Still In A Dream - my new book, out June 18
"Still in a Dream is more than just a celebration of some enduringly wonderful music - it's a great book full stop, Reynolds' best yet. Bringing together the sugar hiccup enthusiasms of his music press youth with the harsh wisdom of his extremely online old age, it covers everything from the sensual sublimity of the Cocteau Twins to Big Black and the genesis
Books of Note
Far be it from me to encourage you to buy any music book this year that isn't called Still In A Dream.... But I concede that there are some other interesting music books out there. A couple of which I have blurbed. There's ex-Contortion Adele Bertei's No New York: A Memoir of No Wave and the Women Who Shaped the Scene. About which I offered: "Adele Bertei ri