Repeatedly bewitched by Geneviève Bujold's performance in Paul Almond's 'Isabel', I was moved to write about it. "I don’t know if Isabel can climb out of the frame and save herself, but I’ll want to watch her try, over and again."
My vintage review of ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead at the Zodiac, Oxford, 2000. "Some six songs in you realise that not only is the ship going to hold together, it's going to plough triumphantly intact into the docks and split the city in half."
"It’s easy for music executives to reach for the platitudes of the moment without any genuine attempt to reckon with bias and racism. Less easy for such gatekeepers to acknowledge they’ve pioneered the self-same technologies of the surveillance state."
"The past must scream at the audience from the screen, expecting us to whoop along in a performative re-experiencing of what came before. We are dreaming ourselves, and our memories of the great stories and cinematic moments of the bygone are just implants."
A fundraising effort for shuttered music venues during lockdown. "These spaces have provided opportunities, communities and platforms for all kinds of expression. All of them deserve the chance to survive."
"The ‘corporate body’ is a way to describe so much of how our lives are organised in 2020: our fingertips constantly hovering over the logos of big brands, our choices governed by corporate logic, an increasing sense of the futility of the individual voice."
"As long as we are swept along in a vision of technology as a compulsory control on our lifestyle choices - an opt in without a realistic opt-out — then backlash remains the tokenistic moralising that some already see it as."
"A musician, an interaction designer, a bike advocate, and a museum lover walk into a design programme: two years later, our work in progress is all work for progress..."
"The great triumph of handheld technology is the lie it conceals. Ever-present and portable, it draws our attention downwards, off-wards, at right-angles to the march of life before us. As long as our heads are bent, we’re captive, placing faith in an impermanent, implied plane of living..."
"It’s the hegemony of the algorithm that counterculture should be taking aim at. What is an algorithm if not an updated version of the faceless, unaccountable cultural power that punk took on?"
"Terror-capitalism has a gun trained on you, a foot suspended above the accelerator pedal of a truck as you walk by. It’s here to let you know that you’re a target, a potential victim — that you’re unwitting collateral in the combat of ideas going on around you."