A veteran post-rock band turns in a fresh performance of a decades-old classic.

Zigging with your weblog when others are zagging.

What did we lose when music on physical media declined?

1989-1992 by Velocity Girl

Some good news came this week in the form of more Velocity Girl remastering. This time it's a compilation of non-album tracks from various places being released by Slumberland Records. The collection is called 1989-1992 and the contents are precisely what it says on the tin.

The first available track from the release is my favorite song by the band, "Forgotten…

What does a panel of "experts" think about the future of work?

Weezer comes back with a strong collaboration.

The Second Coming Was a Moonrise by Hammock

When I read that Hammock had collaborated with The Flaming Lips on their song “Chemicals Make You Small,” I was a bit shocked. Wayne Coyne and The Lips are brash, experimentally noisy, irreverent, sometimes goofy and often oversaturated. They seem to have almost the opposite of Hammock’s ethereal, slow, quiet and completive approach.

Echoes and Dust…

With Life in Small Spaces, the upcoming album from Black Marble, the project's creator, Chris Stewart, taps into one of my semi-obsessions. The album's description on its Bandcamp page has further details on the clue we are given with the album title.

It is an invitation to accept and consciously agree to a more minimal lifestyle for the sake of creative expression and freedom, and to never need…

Kevin D. Williamson writes for The Dispatch about the spectacle of setting up a UFC match on the White House lawn.

It does not matter whether you live in a trailer park or a brick ranch house or something more grand and getting grander, it is all the same: Tornado bait is tornado bait. When the Trump administration announced that it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I…

The debt Star Wars owes to its fans and commercial interests.

English Breakfast by Hoops

Despite seemingly being designed by a corporation to be mostly inoffensive, sometimes to the point of banality or worse, Coldplay launched into the world consciousness hot, with “Don’t Panic,” the song in the pole position on their debut album Parachutes. Though I feel more generosity towards Chris Martin and crew, some believe “Don’t Panic” is the band’s only good…

I’ve been on a post-punk x new wave kind of kick the last several days, after I learned Black Marble (who I blogged about last year) are going to be playing nearby in September. The algorithmn overlords recommended Castlebeat to me after the end of a listening sesh of “Bigger Than Life.” I hadn’t listened to Castlebeat in a few years, but remembered them from this fan video using footage from the…

Trying out some headphones I've been keeping an eye on.

Niko Stratis writes about the comfort of physical media and older technology.

Let us suffer no worries or troubles, we have salvation in our walkmen and their analogue batteries. Never mind the truth of these eras, the 90s and the days before and after are years often cast in imperfect light as moments in time when we were a proper society. That’s not true for all, and you only need to engage…

The opinions on AI that you find on the internet tend to fall in the extremes of the other side. Either AI is the downfall of humanity or its savior. My thoughts on the subject, as on many others, ride in the middle of the road.

In my professional life, AI has been a great equalizer. If you know the problems you are trying to solve, absent the knowledge of how to actually go about doing that, AI…

I saw Papas Fritas play during their run in the nineties at a club called Go Studios that straddled the border between Chapel Hill and Carrboro. They were an energetic live band and most impressively, had a drummer (Shivika Asthana) who sang. Purchasing their third long-player, Buildings and Grounds, was an easy decision.

The band broke up in 2000, just as they began to get commercial…

Every time I finish a novel in which I have invested a lot of time and emotion, I feel a bit unmoored. What other worlds are out there now that this one is gone? It’s like the characters in that world died and will be grieved. Some even after entering a new story.

After I wrapped up reading Demon Copperhead last weekend, I had these feelings. I almost shed tears at the end of the book. There are…

One testament to my affection for the Smiths is the fact that I desperately wanted to hate them. My girlfriend in high school sung their praises, but we weren’t totally in sync in the music department. I was turned off by what I saw as the pretentiousness of Morrissey, the over-the-top anglophilia, and the preening gay porn stars on their record covers. Once I gave a dubbed cassette of The Queen…

Olly, the developer of the Pagecord blogging software, just published a post on something I was thinking about with regards to music. I’m not buying a lot of physical media these days, but when I do, it’s usually CDs. I just went to a new record store called Hunky Dory that just opened downtown near me, but they weren’t celebrating Record Store Day. I wasn’t sure about going because I didn’t…

It takes religion to make Star Trek, Anthropic vs. the Department of War, James Talarico's Christianity, the iPod comeback, retreating to the woods, etc.

No One Is Lost by Stars

My wife and I have long been devoted to music from the band Stars. It’s hard to pick a favorite album, but I especially treasure a few of the songs on No One Is Lost. The 2014 album was recorded in a studio the band built above a gay discotheque and seems to have absorbed some of the dance vibes, if not the sexuality, through the floorboards. Stars doesn't spring the…

Shelly Ridenour penned an article for Qobuz on the stellar alternative albums from 1991. One observation that I found particularly poignant from having grown up during this period was around the change that Nirvana’s Nevermind brought to mainstream music with regard to gender dynamics.

Within a couple of months, the album was a hit, people were dressing in “grunge” flannel and, soon, hair metal…

When the Stereo Skateboards video A Visual Sound came out in 1994, many skateboarders were confused by it. With its 8mm film aesthetic, arty interludes, and post-bop jazz tunes, it didn’t look or sound like any other skate videos at the time.1 It may have featured some of the same California hot spots as videos produced by other companies, but the overall video and audio approach was very…

With the announcement on the A New Social blog that Bridgy Fed, was bringing longform to the Atmosphere, I found myself wanting to play with some of the current blogging tools running on AT Proto.1 Bridgy Fed has been helpful in syndicating my Fediverse posts from Ghost to Bluesky Unfortunately, even with the aid of a super-smart LLM, I couldn’t get the standard.site integration (which allows…

I just signed up for access to Attie, a new AI-based app from Bluesky, which allows you to shape your feed on the social network using plain language. To be honest, I wasn’t that excited about the app when it was first announced. It can be hard these days to sift through the AI hype to locate the value in some of these propositions.

Then I came across an old quote I had saved about blogging.…

We all know by now that it’s getting tougher to make a living as a musician. While tools for producing music have gotten cheaper and more accessible, the ways to make decent money as a professional in the music industry have been drying up.

Alex Marshall and Joanna Yee write for the NYT about the members of acclaimed British indie act Field Music trying to pay the bills. Despite working regular…

Last weekend, my wife and I took a much-needed short vacation to Asheville, NC, in the Great Smoky Mountains. The mountains weren't all that was smoky, though. Marijuana dispensaries were to be found almost every three shops or so downtown. Quite a few people were "taking the pot." The smell wafted here and there in a triumph over the vanquished cigarette smoke that you used to smell on city…

The subject of Christian masculinity has been hot these last few years and the NYT piece on Orthodoxy and the influx of young men to the faith have reignited interest in the Orthodox world. Religion professor Phil Dorroll writes about what masculinity looks like within the Orthodox Christian context. In short, Andrew Tate is not the model.

From American converts to the Russian…

Widowspeak has a new record coming this June and produced a video for the lead single, “If You Change.” I first heard the band when they covered Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet,” a song that never landed with me previously. Widowspeak won me over with the wistful tenderness they gave their treatment of the track.

“If You Change” is also sweet and tender with a chorus that implores, “if you…

Charlotte Cornfield is the latest musician to put out something via Durham, NC’s Merge Records. Hurts Like Hell is also the first long player by the Canadian singer/songwriter since becoming a mother. The title track, “Hurts Like Hell,” wallows in a remembered sentimentality with the advantage of looking at difficulty in the rearview mirror. We all know what it’s like to try to gain perspective…