Took some time out to see the mighty jon bibrough playing in hoxton last night. It was a good session, made infinitely better by the heady combination of brooklyn beer, edgy sampling and a really indepth discussion about the relative merits of kraut rock and 80’s jazz fusion.

One day disco jesus and that man quaid will get together and make the most amazing/ridiculously obscure track and the world will be returned (for approx 9 minutes) to a warehouse in new york in 1979 populated entirely by middle-aged german men with moustaches and a no tops on.

It’ll be heavy (and left)

But mainly left.

We’re deep into the long promised (ever postponed) site update, which is hopefully going to be triumphantly revealed over the weekend or sometime early next week.

It’s both a joyous and a frustrating experience.

Joyous cause it forces you to sit down and work out where you’re at and where you want to go.

Frustrating cause it takes ages to get it how you want, and it distracts you from the writing and the things that make you do it in the first place.

Anyway-whilst I chisel away at html and php I tend to listen to music like this.

Artfully compiled and mixed on the sun-kissed shores of southern spain.

A selection of celestial soul from firemusic heavyweight Man From Atlantis.

Man From Atlantis-Odyssey

About halfway through my signed copy of william gibson’s excellent spook country, I stumbled across this amazing conversation between two of the characters, an ex-member of a band called The Curfew and her mysterious new employer;

“In the early 1920’s,” Bigend said, “there were still some people in this country who hadn’t yet heard recorded music. Not many, but a few. That’s less than a hundred years ago. Your career as a ‘recording artist’-making the quote with his hands-”took place toward the end of a technological window that lasted less than a hundred years, a window during which consumers of recorded music lacked the means of producing what they consumed. They could buy recordings, but they couldn’t reproduce them. The Curfew came in as that monopoly on the means of production was starting to erode. Prior to that monopoly, musicians were paid for performing, published and sold sheet music, or had patrons. The pop star as we knew her”-and here he bowed slightly, in her direction-”was actually an artifact of preubiquitious media”

Now when I say amazing I actually mean ‘very similar to something I wrote‘. So similar infact that I have started to wonder if I had actually read this bit somewhere before, forgotten all about it, then regurgitated as my own work.

Either that or me and Will are ‘on the same wavelength’ in this small way-something far too amazing to contemplate.

I would imagine that any kind of ‘original thought’ gets harder and harder with the massive movements of information in (and out) of our minds every day. The real gift it seems, is to connect seemingly disparate threads and make sense of it a little.

Something Mr. Gibson does awfully well.

Sabres of Paradise-Wilmot

ok, it’s getting boring.

how tired i am.

how busy i am.

and now too busy to post or listen to music. not much longer now.

in the meantime, keep tuning in.

great lake swimmers - i will never see the sun

another week nearly over and i was determined not to let you off without a little something for you weekend.

while i do spend a lot of time listening to what might be termed airy-fairy acoustic music, every so often a little crashing cymbal and thuddering bass drum gets into my day and puffs up my chest.

admittedly i was attracted to this track by its title (who says i think too highly of my intended?) but the resulting download of a band i’ve sort of been purposefully ignoring in the whole pitchfork breaking bands saga is the sort of white stripes meets the walkmen-esque garage-noise it’s sometimes good to end a week with.

a little stomp stomp crash for a saturday night.

cold war kids - saint john

pic via

So we’ve made it to friday.

Thankfully, now it’s time to put all that work stuff on the back burner for 60 hours or so and concentrate on the more important things in life. When I say ‘important things’ I’m thinking specifically of chilled beer/bacon and eggs for breakers/borderline inpropriaty/chelsea getting spanked 6-0 and ashley cole leaving the pitch at half time weeping because he’s getting booed by his own supporters/etc etc

You should definitely make time to read stephen fry’s wonder-blog (via df), if not for the incredibly crafted prose then for the ode to all things technological (which coincidently provides a nice counterpoint to yesterday’s thrift post) and try and find time to appreciate all the good stuff you have-amongst the constant noise of city life.

Till next week.

Here’s some funk.

(peace to chidi)

MacAttack-Art of drums

photo via

In a week of deepening financial gloom, the announcement of the UK iphone launch seemed more a reminder of how quickly the perceptions of things can change than the bright glimpse of technological utopia promised in january. Maybe it’s me, preoccupied as I am by house hunting and wedding planning, but money just doesn’t seem to stretch that far in London these days, everyone seems to have money-but none of it seems belongs top them.

It’s not that I don’t love beautiful things, or have suddenly become immune to the sensual delights that good food/clothes/geeky shit can bring, it just seems to me that these things have moved from the periphery of life to become an unhealthy focus. Just look at the aimless losers, spending all day arguing over technology brands on blogs and forums- like that shit means anything.

What happened to buying things for the function, with form an intrinsic, but secondary, factor ?

And I love Apple-I love (some) of what it represents-it’s unrelenting quest for usability and greater interaction between software and hardware.

But I don’t need it.

And thrift has been replaced in our culture (so poorly) with the needless excess of disposable fashion and landfill consumerism. It will make us better people if we can live within our means, better able to deal with the storms that this week’s financial upheavals may well be the start of.

And that iphone won’t tempt me (too much) in November (hopefully), and one day when it’s comes free with my contract it will be both beautiful and practical and, most important of all, bring me a greater, deeper joy.

Gil Scott Heron-Madison Avenue

its turned chilly again here. not that it really got hot this year. walking home in a borrowed sweater with the hood pulled tight around my face i notice i’m crunching through brown leaves. i don’t remember them falling. perhaps last night’s fireworks left me with a november cordite memory.

still, this turn in the weather; turn in the season feels like the start of comfortable twilight for this year.

as blankets unfurl over bedspreads then; as cocoa steam curls me to sleep, some music to dream to… my log cabin in the mountains feels closer than ever. the dog’s in the yard and kids by the hearth not so much a distant idyll any longer. a crunch of tyres on gravel track, squeals as children run to meet the man we all four adore. and what’s on the set? fleet foxes.

we’ve j.tillman to thank for these guys. for introducing us to their manager, the utterly beautiful and delightfully talented aja. fleet foxes shouldn’t be able to sound like they do, since by all accounts these songs have been basking in the low evening sun in southern california for the past forty years.

fleet foxes are the all enveloping harmonies of crosby stills and nash, the soporific, rolling timpani of sunflower-era beach boys and that late winter sunshine which fractures into swollen beads of light on a camera’s lens. they’re northern european folk stories, snow shoes and moonshine. they’re heart broken times-a-changing, the music that robertson, manuel, hudson, danko and helm didn’t get onto acetate and a book of british birds.

i’m more than a little bit in love with this band and it won’t be long till you are too. go listen to more on their myspace page until they release a record for you to chart a new period of your life by.

Fleet Foxes-white winter hymnal

(pic via)

So everything is kind of moving in slow motion today (which is very nice)

After last weeks horrendous mix of estate agents, spreadsheets and endless to-do lists it feels a slighty break in the busy autumn ahead.

It was a weekend of strange encounters and brief journeys into other people’s lives. Who knew friday we’d end up chatting prince with Rem Koolhaus ?(he’s a fan btw-but I think all dutch people are, right?) and by sunday I’d be staying up to 4 in the morning to catch one of the purple maestros penultimate after shows (for free).

Much as my main motivation right now is to do with creating a home and things staying the same for awhile,  I guess you always need to be looking for ways to take on fresh perspectives (and the challenges they bring)-otherwise you just go stale.

Anyway, it’s starting to sound like I really need an early night. (which I do)

This might help.

Ramsey Lewis-Crescent Moon

the horse latitudes are looking for a new home at the moment; a real, four solid walls and well appointed roof terrace type home.

when we do find it however hopefully the moving process won’t be quite as traumatic as swapping servers (i’m not sure jak could cope with that). and while the all new hl towers’s precise location and number of bedrooms has yet to be decided the fact that we’re moving out of familiar digs into some place is becoming more real by the second.

when horse latitudes moved virtual house late last month we left a fair amount behind which means we get to repost our favourites from the last year. no surprise i’m going for a j.tillman re-uppage then.

i stumbled across josh’s music on gorilla vs bear last march and snapped up a first run of long may you run j.tillman. since then he’s put out two new records, answered our questions, come out for a beer, dedicated a song to us and even trusted his utterly gorgeous girlfriend to us for a night out in london. turns out, he’s as lovely a man as his voice is honeyed.

every time i’ve posted on him it’s been a struggle to choose one single track so i’m taking a revisionist stance by posting something i’ve not shared before but keeping the home theme alive.

as you know, we’re all for sharing music and the inevitable creation of the less industry more music-led music industry but do please go out and buy his music. from the utterly beautiful album, minor works

j.tillman - crooked roof

and read more of my unabashed tillmusings here:

joshua its not my fault

horse latitudes *loves* j.tillman
it’s popular with the disco dancers

i’ll tell you how the darkness feels

out of the strong came forth sweetness

while i’d like to think i’m unpredictable and kinda hard to read, two things this weekend proved that absolutely wasn’t the case.

jak’s friday post pre-empted by a few short hours me mooching round a marylebone bookstore with a copy of updike’s ‘the women who got away’ in my hand which i’d picked up because i loved the cover but put down again because i wanted all the books in that series since they were all so well designed.

and over organic chorizo & butterbean soup (feel free to roll your eyes right now) at work an engineer who knows his stuff mentioned a band i might like. often, i approach recommendations begrudgingly, which has a little to do with my own personal brand of competitive, search & destroy new music hunting as much as it does to do with years of disappointment and mild disgust at the idea that your friend’s had your taste sooo wrong.

which brings me to the heavy (and how jules really didn’t get me wrong at all).

pah.

headnodding rhythmic hooks, fuzzed out brass sections, led zep-esque waves of sound and with the filthiest recorded drum sounds i’ve heard since ?uestlove, the heavy’s debut album ‘great vengeance & furious fire’ drops on bonfire night on ninjatunes counter imprint. they’re playing a week of pan-london gigs later this month (see their myspace for details) and i can only imagine how huge they sound, not that i’m planning to imagine it as i’ll be there.

with only one seven inch under their belt (not that impressive i know…) here’s a sample of what they’re due to drop later this year.

the heavy - coleen