Midweek Beats + Pieces vol.20

Ros Bandt, Mixcloud, David Keenan, Velocity Press, etc

Hello ello llo lo o. I hope you’re all keeping well out there. I’m a bit under the weather at the moment, so this week’s newsletter will be reasonably short and sweet. As always, thank you for taking the time out of your day to read it. This week’s photos were shot with Portra 400 film on a Nikon F60 camera and developed/scanned by Splendid in Wellington.

WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING:

For my first major feature story of the year, I profiled the award-winning Australian sound artist, composer, musician, researcher, and scholar Dr. Ros Bandt and LIME (Live Improvised Music Event) for Bandcamp Daily. Their 1983 album Soft & Fragile was recently reissued by the good people at Efficient Space in Melbourne. You can read more here.

On Sunday, I jumped on the Numark Mixstream Pro and selected + mixed one hour of dreamy/breezy lazy weekend songs from Alex Ho, Cassandra Jenkins, Eiko Ishibashi, DJ Python, Pink & White Terraces, Helado Negro, Ruby Solly, Erika de Casier and some other great music makers. You can listen to it on my Mixcloud page here.

Audio Culture has just published a three-part history of Radio Active 88.6 FM, a stalwart of independent radio in Wellington, New Zealand. Along with around forty-five other past and present station employees and DJs, I answered some questions, and a few of my answers made it into the final story as quotes. Check it out here.

MORE:

If you like music, fiction, and lyrical prose, the Scottish writer David Keenan novel Xstabeth is a rather good time. The edition I purchased came packaged as a flipbook, with a shorter story, The Towers The Fields The Transmitters, which serves, in a sense, as a prequel to Xstabeth. My main recommendation is: read them both. More details here.

Velocity Press has an interesting looking new title coming out in March, Dreaming in Yellow: The Story of The DiY Sound System, by Harry Harrison. The elevator pitch is a warts-and-all account of the DiY collective’s wild journey from the early acid house scene to DJ collective, sound system and record label. It’s also an autobiographical account of the nineties Free Party/festival movement, which is something that really deserves a lot more coverage. More details here.

For Al Jazeera English, Nyshka Chandran looks at how power purchase agreements that ensure “coal lock-in” for decades are complicating Southeast Asia’s transition away from fossil fuels. Read more here.

FIN.