Motorpsycho

Motorpsycho´s last LP "Child of the future" (Rune Grammofon 2009) arrived by mail today, and what a package! Cool cover and inner cover, white vinyl and two sided poster! Designer: Kim Hiorthøy.
And the music? It sounds just fantastic, at least after one listening. Lots of rock references in there, but all done in the proper Motorpsycho way. Buy it in good record stores or from Rune. Only on vinyl.
Motorpsycho is: Kenneth Kapstad, Hans Magnus Ryan og Bent Sæther.

Word!

Robert Wyatt is cover boy on the new issue of "The Word"! No Wyatt tracks on the CD. In Norway in a couple of weeks if we are lucky?

Dan Rhodes

My favorite reading has always been novels, and some of them quite long too, but in these times of multitasking and doing social activities on the net (all day long), let me recommend a thin book. Very short short stories have a tendency to have neither head nor tail, but check out "Anthropology and hundred other stories" by Dan Rhodes! Here you get 100 stories, all of them 12 - 13 lines, and all of them close to perfect. They are witty, absurd and quite sad too, and are mostly about love, or lack of love (told by a man). The story "Blind" starts like this: "My girlfriend used my going blind as an excuse to start dressing sloppily".
The book was published in 2000 (my borrowed one:Canongate 2005), so you might have read it already of course. If not, you better read it.

On Twitter you may find several people who write stories of no more than 140 letters/signs. One of them is arjunbasu.

Nocturnes

Once more I have been walking around the house, looking at all the books on shelves, floors and in boxes and getting some silly ideas : Get rid of lots of old books! Don´t buy new books (at least only the ones you really need)!
Yeah, sure. I ended up reading in old books, and even ordered some new ones from Amazon too. Weak person indeed!
One of the books that will fill up my house even more is Kazuo Ishiguro´s "Nocturnes". I liked Ishiguro´s first books very much, but I seem to have forgotten the poor guy. But this summer I read a piece by Magnus Eriksson in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, and he seems to like Ishiguro´s short story collection "Nocturnes" very much, and he even recognizes some Canterbury references in there.

Eriksson is a Robert Wyatt fan (I bet on it) and sees connections between Charles Mingus and Wyatt, and even between Frank Sinatra´s recordings from the 50s and Wyatt´s versions of ”I’m a Believer” and ”Yesterday Man”. Did you ever get the same ideas?

If i like the book, I just might come back to it in this blog.

Shouting in a bucket blues

I don´t think I have posted this Kevin Ayers video earlier, so it´s about time. Great music, great vocal, great hair! And don´t forget to buy "Songs for insane times".

Antony

Pitchfork recently did an in-depth profile on Antony that should be proper reading for people who have tickets to see him on his tour (and verybody else too). Antony and the Johnsons will perform on the roof of the Oslo Opera House Sunday 9 August, as part of the Oslo Jazz Festival.
Antony and the Johnsons just released a cover of Beyonce´s "Crazy in love" , and if the Oslo audience will experience something close to what we see on the video with Amsterdam´s Metropole Orkest, I might get just a little bit envious.

Hatfield and the North reissued

Two of the Canterbury rock´s central albums are reissued by Cherry Red/Esoteric these days, that is Hatfield and the North´s first album "Hatfield and the North" (1973) (Robert Wyatt sings on the track "Calyx") and "The Rotters´Club" (1975).
The reissued first album also contains the band´s first 7" "Let's Eat Real Soon"/"Fitter Stoke Has A Bath", and some stuff from the Virgin V sampler (1975) (never been on CD before) (not sure about this, see Amazon). The five bonus tracks on "The Rotters´ Club" have been on CD on a previous edition. And I hope the sound is great, and the printed material fantastic.
Hatfield and the North is Richard Sinclair, Dave Stewart, Phil Miller and Pip Pyle.
I got the news (and stole some info) from the DownTown Music Gallery newsletter.