John McKeown speaks to Adey Lobb about taking a ten-thousand day break between albums and the jet-black darkness before the dawn. All photographs by Luke Fowler

Everybody Talks About the Weather by The Yummy Fur

“I was getting to the point where I was thinking, I don’t want to be a cabaret revival band. All we were doing is playing songs we wrote 20 years ago.”

John McKeown has been leading the Yummy Fur since 1992. But, when Everybody Talks About The Weather is released on 25 September, it will have been 10,175-days since their previous album of new material. ‘Believe’ by Cher was No. 1 in the UK singles chart. Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin were presidents. And Donald Dewar was still a…

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In the early 80s, the Tory government accidentally helped fund a network of fanzines that were vital to the European musical underground. James Brown recalls a time of obsessive creativity currently having a revival

Pages from Attack On Bzag! as featured in Zine Age Kicks, courtesy of James Brown

Scrolling through instagram recently I came across an account for the Raising Hell fanzine, an A5 hardcore print zine I was close to over four decades ago. It was quite a shock, like a 20th century space-bound time capsule smashing back into earth and its content coming to life. There was the familiar energy and enthusiasm for Euro-wide hardcore punk scenes exploding over every single centimetre of white space, flyers for old gigs…

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My Heart is Dust Before Him: 21st Century Gasba from Algeria

Various Artists

A new compilation from Oran collects music that stayed home while raï went global

Various Artists – My Heart is Dust Before Him: 21st Century Gasba from Algeria by Various Artists

The word raï means opinion. Singers used to drop it into a line while they worked out what to say next, a placeholder that turned into a genre name. That detail tells you what this music was built for: improvisation, in front of people, with no script.

My Heart is Dust Before Him gathers ten tracks from Édition Ahlem, the Oran production house Abdelkader Haci founded in 1992 and has run through three decades of cassettes and CDs. The common thread…

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In an exclusive extract from Tom Hagler’s new book River of Words, the Quietus presents an archive interview between Mitchell and TV presenter Richard Skinner from the BBC’s Saturday Live back in 1983

Joni was in the middle of her world tour, having played in Japan, New Zealand and Australia. Concertgoers in Sydney reported how she’d altered the lyrics to ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ to support the campaign against the Franklin Dam. It was the country’s biggest environmental movement to date and would succeed in halting the project in Tasmania just a few months later.

In this interview with Richard Skinner, Joni says the description of her as a singer-songwriter is redundant, given everyone now wrote their own material, specifically referring to Adam…

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source https://thequietus.com/culture/books/the-coffee-house-world-joni-mitchell-at-the-bbc/

20 years ago this week, J.G. Ballard published his final novel Kingdom Come. In 2026, it feels like he was prophesying the United Kingdom of today, a country in which racism has been institutionalised and the quiet bit is now being shouted out loud. Lous Pattinson returns to the bleakest of Ballard’s late-period works and asks whether it’s too late to heed the book’s warnings

Photo by Matt Brown via Wikimedia Commons

“Violent? Here, in leafy Surrey? The consumer paradise? It’s hard to believe. Still, you can’t miss the banners and flags, the men in St George’s shirts.”

Twenty years ago, J.G. Ballard published what would be his final novel, Kingdom Come. Once a transgressive outlier of British science fiction, by the…

The post The Suburbs Dream of Violence: J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come & England’s Slide towards Fascism  appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/ballard-kingdom-come-anniversary/

The EU brought in new fees for small packages this summer, raising the cost of sending items such as vinyl and merchandise to people based around Europe

UK Music and the Association of Independent Music (AIM) have issued a joint statement calling on the UK Government to tackle new fees for exporting items to the European Union (EU).

At the start of July, the EU introduced a flat customs duty of €3 per small package which, alongside mail handling fees, has heavily increased the cost of buying products like vinyl and merchandise for fans based around Europe. These duties only applied to items valued at over €150 before the recent changes.

In their statement, UK Music chief executive Tom Kiehl and AIM deputy…

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The nine-track record is available digitally for free

Photo by Diara Sow

Loraine James has released a surprise new album, titled It’s Nothing Personal..

Comprised of nine tracks, the new record follows Detached From The Rest Of You, an album that James put out on Hyperdub earlier this year. It can be purchased digitally for free via Bandcamp, while a CD edition is also available to buy there too.

It’s Nothing Personal. leans heavily into the glitchier elements of James’ sound, folding in elements of IDM, grime, breakcore and drum & bass. You can listen to the full LP below.

It’s Nothing Personal. is out now on Warp Publishing.

It’s Nothing Personal. by Loraine James
…

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It was made in collaboration with Alan Turing biographer Andrew Hodges, and encompasses songs, spoken world, and electronic and orchestral music

Photo by Eva Pentel

Pet Shop Boys are set to release a new album next month, titled A Man From The Future and made in collaboration with Alan Turing biographer Andrew Hodges.

Spanning eight tracks, the new LP takes in electronic and orchestral music, as well as spoken word. It explores eight significant chapters in the life and death of Turing, the influential computer scientist who was arrested and prosecuted in 1952 due to archaic homophobic laws, ultimately leading to his suicide two years later.

Alongside music and lyrics by Pet Shop Boys, the album features narration by actress Juliet Stevenson, which…

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On the 50th anniversary reissue of Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia, a cult classic attempt to communicate with plants via Moog noodles, Joe Muggs selects 10 more examples of musicians plugging themselves into the green stuff

Detail from the front cover of Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia

The fields are barren, glaciers are melting, whole landscapes are burning – it’s not looking good out there, is it? It’s little wonder, given all of this, that there is a real shared cultural sense of yearning for green shoots, for a little bit of hope, for a sense that we still have some connection to and understanding of a natural world that isn’t completely out of kilter and out of control. 

It feels like the…

The post The Strange World of… Music Made By and For Plants appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/interviews/strange-world-of/music-made-for-and-by-plants-mort-garson/

It was captured across three shows that the band played at London’s Roundhouse in December 2014

Manic Street Preachers have announced a new live album, Holy Bible Live.

It centres around three shows that the band played at London’s Roundhouse in December 2014, which saw them play their classic 1994 album The Holy Bible in full for the first – and possibly last – time to mark its 20th anniversary. The recordings on The Holy Bible Live were mixed by audio engineer Dave Eringa in the months following the shows, but not released until now.

The album will be released across vinyl, CD and digital formats, while there will also be a CD and BluRay package, in which the live album is set to Kieran…

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source https://thequietus.com/news/manic-street-preachers-announce-new-live-album-holy-bible-live/