That Music List: LIST 267

(Liechtenstein - Indietracks Festival, 26/07/2008. Pictures are author's own)

Hello again,

Trust you have all survived another abnormally hot week in most of Britain without melting, and remembered not to stare too long into the eclipse.

The Nev Clay session on 6 Music this week was predictably, reassuringly lovely, was it not? It'll be free to listed to in the expected places for a while longer, and I can't recommend you doing so enough if you missed it.

Since we spoke last week, I've accelerated the process of updating the older Lists from 2009-2018. Exactly thirty have now been so treated which means, added to this year's 31 editions (and counting), just shy of a quarter of all Lists have fully working embedded links and are otherwise as user-friendly as I can get them.

What brought on this spurt of action? Not a desperate attempt to wring further clicks out of ancient copy. Absolutely not, your honour. Rather, until going back through them all again the other week I hadn't realised just how many were in need of significant repair.

It wasn't surprising that many links from the 2009 era had broken in the intervening seventeen years. It was more surprising, however, how much the formatting of many more recent Lists had appeared to have gone awry - tiny fonts, texts in (or even highlighted in) inappropriately stinging colours, etc. At this remove, I couldn't possibly begin to identify a cause.

There's no particular logic to the order in which I'm updating stuff - it's more fun just dipping into the archive and enjoying songs for (in many cases) the first time in absolute years whilst I perform my repairs.

If I were to draw your attention to any of the latest updated Lists, however, they would be #156 (a Tim Smith tribute), #222 and #224 (a two-part 1996 special containing not actually very many of the choices in Tom Ewing's current World Cup of 1996 competition elsewhere in Cyberspace) and #231 (a Mark E Smith tribute).

***

As regards this week's additions to the TML annals? You may or may not be pleased to learn I don't have extended pieces on any of the selections this time around, but I do feel moved to recommend the following nevertheless;

New or at least not ancient stuff from Lael Neale, Arun Sood & Angeline Morrison, Kavus Torabi, Kwamé Bâ and Castle Dragon, the last-named doing a neat line in fantasy costumed metal.

An old-but-new release of a track from the vaults of the Wellington, New Zealand-based World Resources, a label given to putting out noise pop and drone tracks (think an Aotearoan take on Flying Saucer Attack's rural psychedelia) on home-recorded tapes and lathe-cut vinyl in tiny, hard to find batches. A new compilation, Fully Nowhere, attempts to bring some of the label highlights - including some previously unreleased - together at last, and my choice from it of a track by Surface of the Earth is quite deliberate, all of the songs on the compilation featuring between one or more of that pivotal act's three members.

Also on the old-but-new theme, November 89 is a newly reissued piece from Wolfgang Voigt, perhaps best known whenever featured on these pages for his dark techno/ambient vehicle Gas. It is perhaps less bucolic or hallucinogenic and more harsh than what was to come in seminal Gas releases such as Pop and Königsforst, and if anything gives off a horror soundtrack vibe, but that makes it no less fascinating an historical artefact.

Two tracks twenty years apart from Frànçois Marry, someone whose career has been followed enthusiastically in this household ever since the days of his self-published Frànçois et Luc releases at the start of the century. Frànçois's ongoing Atlas Mountains project has been a constant source of delight across ten varied, wide-eyed albums now, only the third of which - 2009's Plaine Inondable - I've ever had the pleasure to see done live, in a rightly captivated Betsey Trotwood in London. More fool me.

A quick highlight from Dawn Landes's 2009 Sweetheart Rodeo long-player as a heads-up that she plays a collector's item British gig at the Golden Hinde in London this coming Monday (the 17th). I understand I missed her play in Dresden by no more than a couple of days when I was out that way recently. Nnnnkkk.

Liechtenstein, one of the real finds of the first Indietracks I attended back in 2008, and pictured at the top of this List on that festival's very short-lived outdoor truck stage. I can't remember whether I've ever added photos of this arrangement previously, but how on earth the massed ranks of the likes of The Deirdres or Red Pony Clock squeezed onto it without any toppling off the front is something I'll live to a hundred and never not ponder. A proper stage would replace it for 2009.

The standout from the 1993 debut LP of future She Wants Revenge frontperson Justin Warfield. There's a more impressive cast list supporting this than I'd ever realised at the time - Beastie Boys and Prince Paul for starters.

A personal favourite from one-time Sub Pop act The Grifters, whose namechecking of The Colorblind James Experience in Last Man Alive came back to mind when the latter featured on last week's List.

A Long Goodbye from downtempo duo The Woodleigh Research Facility which could have counted as a belated In Loving Memory, featuring as it does the late Andrew Weatherall alongside fellow Sabres of Paradise and Sabrettes co-founder Nina Walsh.

This week's actual In Loving Memory, a John Peel-released, note-perfect pastiche of Joe Cocker that serves as a perfect reminder of the extraordinary and frequently underestimated musical talents of the recently departed Bill Oddie. Not a gibbon or black pudding to be seen.

J xx

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HEARTWORMS - Jacked (2025)