Mark S Williamson 

folklore, facts and fables 6: three days to find out

A charming record pays tribute to cult TV archeological programme Time Team

folklore, facts and fables 6: three days to find out by mark s. williamson

Many Quietus readers will no doubt be familiar with Time Team, the archaeology programme broadcast by Channel 4 for a decade between 1994 and 2014 and recently revived online. Presented by actor Tony Robinson (a wonderful move given his role as Baldrick in historical comedy Blackadder), each episode featured a team of archaeologists racing against the clock on three day digs on sites that spanned human history in the United Kingdom, from the Neolithic to the Second World War. 

It was a simple idea that contained intense drama…

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Our final round-up from 2025 is the best from November and December, as selected by tQ’s listmas-addled staffers

Eagle-eyed tQ readers will have spotted that there was no best-of-November round-up last month, in order to make room for our Albums of the Year chart. Nevertheless, it’d be a shame to let those records that defined the final weeks of 2025 slip by without a spotlight.

Proud as we are of the main chart, we don’t view it as cast-iron; so often there are records that emerge as masterpieces just hours after we’ve submitted our ballots. Here, then, is the very best from this month and the last, as selected by tQ’s staffers, who we’ve dragged back to the coalface for one…

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EarthBall’s Outside Over There is one of this year’s best albums. Because it opens with a sample of Stewart Lee talking about pear cider, it felt only right to introduce both parties for a feature. But then a breakdown in communication led to a gloriously unexpected meditation on the nature of improvisation…

“Hello. Very nice to meet you,” someone says, on a currently black laptop screen, “Fuck.”

I am a stand-up comedian and writer, and the Canadian free-rock quintet EarthBall have sampled one of my old routines, about an advert for pear cider, at the start of their new album, Outside Over There. I already liked their work, which I think I had first read about in The Wire. I…

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Out next month, the LP is preceded by lead track ‘Crushing Realities’

Photo by Mario Bergmann

Shackleton has a new album on the way.

Marking his first solo release for AD 93, the 10-track Euphoria Bound follows last year’s collaborative record with Holy Tongue, The Tumbling Psychic Joy Of Now, for the same label. A press statement shared by the imprint said of the new record: “The approach here is more direct than recent releases, with textures that accumulate and disintegrate with renewed urgency.”

Arriving alongside the announcement of Euphoria Bound is lead track ‘Crushing Realities’, which you can listen to below.

AD 93 will release Euphoria Bound on January 30, 2026.

Euphoria Bound by Shackleton
…

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Blarke Bayer

The King In Yellow

Guitar strings are punished and reverb is smeared on My Disco guitarist Benjamin Andrews’ tribute to Robert W. Chambers’s gilded age gothic

THE KING IN YELLOW by Blarke Bayer

In an effort to familiarise myself with the inspiration for Blarke Bayer’s The King in Yellow, the proto-Lovecraftian collection of short stories of the same name by gilded age goth Robert W. Chambers, I chanced upon a YouTube explainer with the Ulysses-tier runtime of nine hours by a guy called Flawed Peacock. Initially I took this as some metatextual allusion to the ruinous obsession that surrounds Chambers’ play-within-a-story (also called ‘The King in Yellow’), though the theory was quickly dispelled after seeing that our man also has a fifteen-hour…

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From venue closures to VAT, conversations around the UK’s beleaguered nightlife sector have struck a singularly gloomy tone for more than a decade. But has that pessimism become part of the problem? Ed Gillett asks whether our eulogies for the late-night scene have outlived their usefulness.

Nightlife is dead, everyone knows it. Your favourite venues have all closed, it’s impossible to get a drink anywhere after 11pm, and even if you could it’d be prohibitively expensive. People don’t care about going out, Gen Z have stopped drinking, and the hospitality industry is on its knees: we’ll be lucky if there’s a single nightclub left open anywhere in the country by the end of the decade. From broadsheet commentary to industry reports,…

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source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/why-reports-of-the-death-of-uk-nightlife-are-greatly-exaggerated/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-reports-of-the-death-of-uk-nightlife-are-greatly-exaggerated

Fat White Family

Konk If You’re Lonely: Fat White Family Live At Konk Studios

A new live-ish album from the Fat Whites lacks the incendiary madness of their live reputation

Konk If You’re Lonely: Fat White Family Live at Konk Studios by Fat White Family

Wikipedia puts the number for the members of the Fat White Family at 16 in 14 years, but frontman Lias Saoudi’s best estimate in 2019 was that there had already been 25. Of the original six-piece lineup, only Saoudi and guitarist Adam J. Harmer remain. While people often (incorrectly) liken the band to The Fall, this is one department in which the comparison holds water.

Although the band’s early career was characterised by a revolving cast in the rhythm section,…

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Here are our favourite tracks of the past 12 months, as voted for by tQ staff, columnists and core writers

Every year, when we publish our round-up of the year’s best albums, the default reaction on social media and certain corners of Reddit – yes, I have scanned them on occasion I’m afraid – is to assume that we are being pompously obscure in our selections; merely giving ourselves a pat on the back for having the most ‘underground’ of music taste. While I assure anyone who is reading this that this is not the case and it’s the product of polling several people for their favourite records – including specialists of various scenes and genres – I also continually find…

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Artist, writer & musician unblocking prompts courtesy of Jimmy Cauty, Alan Moore, Anna Meredith, Robert Fripp &c.

Looking for a unique last minute Christmas present for an art-inclined friend who has a tendency to get becalmed mid-project? Well look no further than Northampton Art Lab’s Ambagious Tactics cards.

Made in tribute to Eno & Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies, which turn 50 this year, the cards offer over 120 interventions, maxims, commands, suggestions & tall orders all designed to gently propel the momentarily tar pit stricken creative back along the magical path. Contributors include members of the Northampton Arts Lab such as Alan Moore, film director Jim Jarmusch, composer Anna Meredith, rave situationist Jimmy Cauty and plenty of friends of tQ.

Cards…

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Not ready for Christmas just yet? Proteus and TLC23 present a night of “high femme melancholy” on Saturday 20 December

Deck the halls with boughs of “high femme melancholy” as Sacrifice Zone – the energising Susu Laroche, an artist of French/Egyptian descent & the mysterious but ineluctable Josef Kurtz – present their debut live performance at Cafe Oto on Saturday heading up a heady bill for […Things Fall Apart…]

Elsewhere on this line up ably put together by TLC23 and Proteus – promising you lucky souls an “evening of abject noise, performative action, projection” and crypto Christmas “GOTHIC” vibes – sits the wonderful Sophie Sleigh Johnson and video/performance artist Charlie Osborne. And last not least there will be DJ sets from your…

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