>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Okay, okay, so the title is a little more melodramatic than it needed to be. I really couldn’t resist the temptation to reference one of the first music reviews I wrote here on Nostalgia For Infinity. It felt entirely appropriate.

As the astute will have probably gathered from the above, I’m wrapping up my music reviewing. It’s been an absolute blast over the last couple of years, not only in flexing my writing muscles and thinking about ways to articulate my feelings on a ton of different records, but also in listening to some fine music, hearing some fantastic new bands (a number of whom have become firm favourites) and chatting with some great people from various bands, labels and PR companies.

At the time of writing I’ve got about 130 record reviews (albums, EPs, singles and splits) up on NFI, with a bunch more queued and about 50 more records that have been sent to me that I’ve yet to write about. And if your record is among these then don’t worry, I’ll be honouring everything I’ve been sent up until today unless I really can’t think of anything to say about it, which going by past precedent is unlikely as I am an opinionated and rambling son of a bitch. If you’re a fan of reading my record reviews, they’ll still be going up regularly (two or three a week as usual) pretty much until the end of 2011.

I won’t be accepting anything more for review, however. The submissions page has been updated to reflect this.

I have a number of reasons for hanging up my guitar-shaped novelty pen. The first, and most important, is that I want to focus my time and energy on other projects. I want to spend more time getting better at guitar and writing songs for my own band, Wrecktheplacefantasic. I also want to turn my efforts at writing elsewhere; not only a renewed focus on the younger project that is Arcadian Rhythms but also getting back into writing some fiction. Not only that, it would be nice to have more of a social life again. I’ve been hanging on in there – I do regularly enjoy a pint or four and a sprawling conversation with friends – but you’d be surprised how much of your free time music reviewing takes up. I can’t remember the last time I spent a day off from the day job that didn’t involve a few hours of writing-related activities of some kind.

A slightly more shameful reason is that I’ve increasingly found myself with a sensation that I’m beginning to repeat myself, which I suspect is the inevitable result of writing in-depth about a lot of music that faithfully follows in the footsteps of what inspired it. Now, it should be patently obvious from my prior body of writing that I am quite far from having a problem with this. I am not an innovation-or-bust critic and have always tried to engage with music on its own terms or to at least explain why I couldn’t. However, whilst I am quite comfortable with holding this opinion I’m less comfortable with repeatedly restating when I’m supposedly writing about a particular collection of music. It becomes a little dull to essentially repeat yourself, even if you do have an excellent soundtrack at the time.

Anyway, those are my reasons, and I figure I owe it to my readers and my, ahem, suppliers to explain them rather than just stop replying to emails and allow the post schedule to decline as so many blogs and review sites do.

For the record NFI itself will continue going strong (I will inevitably write about whatever I’m up to and continue to post original material here too), and I may even decide to write about records or shows that I have something in particular to say about, but they’ll be sourced by yours truly and written on my whims.

That’s it… goodbye. For now.

Yep, between June 12th and 27th I am away on holiday so if you email, leave comments etcetera expect to wait a while for a response. Especially because I’m straight back to work when I return and will be jetlagged, overworked and stressed to uberfuckery for at least a few days.

However I’ve also racked up a bunch of reviews for the entire time I’ll be away and then some so don’t worry, there’ll still be a thrice-weekly dose of my wittering on about music and records appearing here on NFI.

Take it easy!

Chock full of additives and artificial flavourings: Nostalgia For Infinity!

I’ve started posting the occasional piece on Saturdays in addition to the usual Tuesday/Thursday review schedule and Sunday link round-up. I’ve got a buffer of two months of reviews now and have decided to step up my posting schedule.

There are a few reasons for this, the first of which is that there are some records I’ve been wanting to write about but have been sitting on for a while, the second of which is that I’m being sent more material for review these days, and the third is that I’m considering posting more opinion-style pieces about this and that (e.g. the I Live Sweat highlight I did a few weeks ago).

With that said I’m pretty busy these days between the day job, writing reviews for NFI, writing for and running Arcadian Rhythms and playing in Wrecktheplacefantastic, so please forgive me if I miss a Saturday or two. Those Tuesday and Thursday reviews are going to keep on coming the foreseeable future, though, you can be sure of that.

And yes, in case anyone wasn’t aware, it is just me who writes for NFI. A one-man band if you will. Oh, and I still write about books and film occasionally, just less often these days…

As always, readers: thanks for reading!

Check this out. Pretty tragic story, if true: a woman, recently widowed, neglects her young children and lets her pet dogs starve to death because she becomes utterly obsessed with a social network-based boardgame. It says a lot to me about loneliness and isolation and heartbreak and tragedy, and whilst that’s no excuse it’s saddening that this woman apparently had so little support from friends and family.

What’s chock full of fail, which will be obvious to most anyone who has ever played a videogame, is that the Daily Hate Mail have seen fit to include a screenshot of an entirely different game for their scaremongering. Apparently the cutesy graphics of the boardgame-style Small World weren’t enough so they’ve dropped in a screenshot from Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning instead. It has a scaaaaary ork warrior in it! They’ve even added a fake source URL to make it look more convincing.

This looks like deliberate obfuscation to me. Although I suspect the excuse will turn out to be that the screenshot was intended to illustrate, uh, some other addictive online fantasy games, but someone forgot to use the right caption, and the Photoshop guy just added the same URL to all the pictures, and damn man you can’t expect someone to keep these things organised when underpaid overworked journos are shitting out a dozen articles like this every morning.

I’m going to direct link to the image they use to see if they change or delete it any time soon. Mad skillz!

UPDATE: This gets even better. Apparently there is no online version of the Small World boardgame, and yesterday the same Mail article was reportedly accompanied by screenshots from this game – which as it’s also developed as a Facebook app seems much more likely to be the game in question. Of course, given that someone has retroactively altered the article so that it appears to be about two different games entirely, the truthfulness of the entire original story could be called into question.

UPDATE 2: Kieron Gillen at Rock, Paper, Shotgun has used his journalistic powers to investigate this issue and has pretty much gotten to the bottom of it, so head over to RPS if you would like to know more. I’m leaving my original post up, complete with my correct & incorrect assumptions (the original story was written by an agency and farmed out to the Mail rather than written by a Mail writer or contractor). Thanks to everyone who has linked over here, the resultant hit count has made a dull Monday morning marginally more exciting…

Oh yes, and the Mail have removed the image from their article at the request of Games Workshop’s legal team, although the image itself is still on their servers as indicated by its continued presence above. (If it gets replaced with a picture of a cock we’ll at least know that someone on the paper’s IT team has an internet-savvy sense of humour.)

The news broke today that the Freebutt will no longer be able to operate commercially as a live music venue. Head over here to read their official statement; the gist is that they need £20,000 for the required soundproofing, which they don’t have, and the council have reduced the limiter to 95db which is too low for amplified music. They’ve shut the venue as making £20k from live acoustic music doesn’t seem feasible.

(The Penthouse above the ‘butt will be still be running, though, so do keep heading there. It’s a scrappy little bar that I’m still really fond of, and it has some cool esoteric DJ nights.)

This rapidly follows confirmation that The Providence is being sold by the Barracuda chain, quite likely to Tesco. Make of that what you will; it’s been pointed out that several other Tesco branches are about 5 minutes walk away, and there are already 11 Tesco shops in Brighton (plus there’s the one they’re considering building in Lewes Road too). I wasn’t hugely fond of the Providence as a pub but the sound was decent enough and some long-standing promoters put on a lot of shows there.

In the last month we’ve also heard news that The Engine Room has been closed. No official statements have been released as far as I’m aware, although the word on the street is that there just wasn’t enough money for some payment or another. Anyone reading this got the facts? [UPDATE: minutes after I posted this, an article popped up on the local paper's website explaining that the venue is up for sale. Balls!]

And of course earlier this year came the end of the Hobgoblin, a genuine Brighton punk rock and metal institution, which despite eking a few more months of life after its initial closure late in 2009 has been bought by another chain. They’re currently in the process of entirely revamping it; initial rumour was that it was being turned into a gastro pub (ah yes, no shortage of those in Brighton) although its new exterior paintjob does still tout “live music” as a feature. It seems unlikely that they’ll want to play host to the same D.I.Y. promoters and touring bands as in the past, though.

Several years back the Pressure Point was sold to a developer following a lack of interest from purchasers who wanted to keep it running as a venue. It’s since been converted into a hostel with a bar. The Brighton Gloucester / Barfly remains closed and unused following Barfly / MAMA’s abortive attempt to break into the local music scene around the same time. I assume they still own it and may intend to reopen it in brighter economic times.

The saddest thing is that most of the venues that have bitten the dust were the ones doing the most to support relatively unknown outfits, small touring bands, local groups and musicians and so on.

SIGNS OF LIFE

On the positive side of things the Hydrant (was the Hare & Hounds) is making a huge and laudable push into supporting local music with both a large upstairs function room for shows and regular gigs in the downstairs pub as well. Then there’s Hector’s House which seems to have picked up a lot of the punk and metal shows the Hob would once have hosted – and good on them, speaking personally it’s greatly preferable to the student drum ‘n bass crowd I remember from 5 years ago! Finally one of my current favourite venues, the Prince Albert, is also keeping on rocking – and their P.A. is one of the best I’ve heard in a small venue.

And of course there are other venues like Jam, the Greenhouse Effect, Audio and larger venues like the Concorde 2. So live music in Brighton has taken some major blows, but there are still plenty of places to go and play.

If you’re involved with a local venue, whether as an owner or a promoter, please get in touch via email or the comments below. I’d like to do a round-up of venues in a separate post in the near future, and counteract some of this bad news with a reminder of how Brighton still has a lot to offer!

The Freebutt today.

This news broke last Wednesday but I’ve been busy recently and so I’m only writing about it now! One of Brighton’s longest-running venues, the Freebutt, is under threat of closure as a result of a noise complaint and subsequent Environmental Health Office investigation. As I put it on Facebook:

Many of you will have seen this already, but so what, it’s important. The Freebutt is facing closure due to ONE noise complaint. They are doing everything they can to solve the noise problem, but the EHO and the neighbour are preventing them from doing so. For a venue with decades of history to be shut down for such a bullshit reason would be a travesty.

This summary is a bit unfair on the EHO – they’re helping, just somewhat slowly – and the neighbour – who presumably has a legitimate complaint, but they’re not helping get it resolved except in the sense of “if the venue closes, the problem goes away”.

The Freebutt is presently owned by a small group of local music fans and entrepreneurs. They’re put a lot of work into ensuring the venue is shipshape and this is the only noise complaint since they took ownership. Although since the redesign the giant pillar in the middle of the room is still a source of constant complaint, Brighton’s live music scene wouldn’t be the same without the ‘butt.

The Freebutt circa 1968.

You can read the full story from the Freebutt here. The Argus has an article covering Brighton Council’s statements and some tedious, reactionary reader comments. There’s a petition you can sign here and a Facebook group here. The MP for the area is Caroline Lucas (Green) and the city councillors can be contacted from here.

The venue’s owners sent out an update 24 hours after the news and campaign broke which you can read below the cut. » Read the rest of this entry «

Having read Alec Meer’s preview of the 2011 X-COM revamp, I am unspeakably excited. It sounds like it could be a genuinely thrilling re-imagining of the license; in his words, “it’s someone throwing money at the concept, not leaving it stranded at the pointless poles of fan-exploitation or slavish re-creation.”

The preview appears over at Gamesradar but appears to have been removed. Fortunately Google have the four pages cached here, here, here and here.

The banks have pronounced which party they want to govern us, and the Credit Rating Agencies are preparing to tell us who’s really in charge

An alliance of the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties to form a British coalition government would “almost guarantee” a credit downgrade, BNP Paribas SA said, recommending investors sell the pound against the dollar.

A cut in the rating is likely “since both parties agree that early expenditure cuts could harm the economy,” a team at BNP Paribas led by London-based Hans-Guenter Redeker wrote in a research note today. “A Labour/Liberal government is the least- liked option by markets.”

You know, I really don’t know why we bothered with an election.

I predict this will be all over the Tory media within an hour.

(via ThoughCowardsFlinch, via Lenin’s Tomb)

And attention should be paid to these people precisely why? Respectful attention should be paid to their words and analyses and opinions and self-interest for what reason? They are the greedy fools who first fucked themselves and then fucked us. Well, no thanks. They should be consigned to history, an anecdote in a high school textbook with little cocks drawn next to them by disinterested teenagers.

.
“The issue of the deficit and who pays for it is the single biggest issue in this electoral morass. There is nothing that comes close to how important this is for the City, for British capitalism, and for the future of welfare and public services in this country. It is in this light that we have to judge the available options now. No one on the left can afford to take their eye off that ball – it isn’t fundamentally about PR, though I don’t dismiss the issues underlying the demands for PR. It’s the economy, stupid. (Or, in a more marxist idiom, it’s the class war, stupid.) I hope that this is one issue on which socialists and left-liberals can agree. If we do, then perhaps I can also persuade liberals of two other things: 1) the best outcome is a government with Labour in it, however much we rightly despise their wars, their pandering to the rich, and what they have done to social democracy, because a government with Labour in it is one that has a mandate to at least limit the ferocity of any cuts; 2) it is important that the government should have a weak mandate, not a strong mandate, because a stronger government will be far more effective in imposing cuts. If those are basically correct points, then a Lab-Lib pact would probably be better than either a Con-Lib pact.”

I was at band practice last night, and opted not to stay up late following any election coverage as no one really knows what’s going on anyway. This morning I had to hurry into work whilst being accused by my landlord of taking a bottle of tomato food (I didn’t take his sodding tomato food), so it wasn’t until half nine that I finally saw the results of our glorious democratic process.

So! Initially it’s depressing, a wash of Tory blue flooding over the country, particularly here in the southeast. Frankly, I think we should cut Kent off and let it float away. Or sink. No one needs another British principality.

But, as  the last few contested seats start to come in, it’s clear that there is no Tory majority. Labour have done better than I expected but still lost a lot of seats, and the Lib Dems have hung on to most of their seats but lost a few overall (despite some impressive wins, such as Eastbourne). Despite that the Tory lead is not big enough for them to govern alone.

It seems that the Lib Dems’ success in polls and Clegg’s performance in the debates has not translated into votes or seats, just like in every other general election for the last twenty years if Private Eye are correct. This is probably as much a result of voters picking the lesser of two bloated evils as anything else. Who wants to risk letting the Tories in?

Well, the voters of Brighton Pavilion. I’m extremely pleased to see that so many people in my constituency turned out to vote for a politician like Caroline Lucas, someone who has proven herself as a South-East MEP over the last few years, who has a long history of anti-war and environmental campaigning, and who is pushing for the Green Party to straighten itself out (apparently the anti-science bullshit, for example, is being torn up by younger Green activists). It was a close race between Lucas and Nancy Platt (Labour’s new candidate to replace previous incumbent David Lepper) and the Tory candidate did better than I thought possible, but ultimately Lucas won it with a 1,300 vote lead.

Fucking awesome. Here’s hoping she, and the Green Party, do a good job of this significant opportunity for progressive/left and environmental politics. And here’s hoping that whatever coalition ends up forming to govern the country with usher through the electoral reform that is increasingly being demanded.

EDIT: Johann Hari’s Indy column from yesterday is a powerful read. I had just turned 18 when the 1997 general election that swept Labour into power took place. I was in Brentwood and Ongar at the time and voted for independent Martin Bell, who was attempting to unseat Eric Pickles. Accusations were surfacing that a locally powerful and lunatic right-wing church – the Peniel Pentacostal Church – had infiltrated the local Tory Party. I was also told at the time – by one of my sixth form schoolteachers – that the church had distributed anti-semitic literature to Brentwood residents. Anyway, my point is that I’m too young to have any real experience of living under a strong Tory government, and I’m probably unaware of just how bad that could be. Sobering stuff.