PicoBlog

While writing Foreign Skies, I knew that there was at least one goal I wanted to accomplish. I had actually encountered a couple of historical, Great War-themed albums before but had noticed that most of them focused heavily or exclusively on suffering and death. But actually reading war diaries, poetry, and various accounts it seemed to me that the actual experience of the First World War was not being fully captured.

This band has always had a guiding principle: be punk, be edgy, be loud… but never disrespect the folk traditions you’re drawing from. In our humble, elitist, gatekeepery-than-thou opinion, just a few too many bands in folk-punk reduce the folk traditions they work with to stereotypes or gimmicks. It’s certainly not everyone, and it may have improved in the last 8-10 years or so, but it’s there. This, by the way, is why we’ve always recruited top-notch folk players; Seamus O’Flanahan, The Dread Pirate Druzil, Wormley Wangersnitch, Aled from Smokey Bastard and our newest mandolin player “Steve”… all are masters at their instruments.

this little melody has been kicking around in my head for a good while. Lane and I first sang it together almost 9 years ago, before the wedding of some good friends… LYRICS I wanna wake up early in the morning and see you are good you are goooooooooooood I wanna work in the heat of the day and say you are good you are goooooooooooood I wanna stay up late in the evening

For the few (including this writer) who knew precious little about Tandyn Almer, that may be all you need to know: Right away, we’re now aware that he had enough of a precious musical cache that The Beach Boys’ tonal architect would eagerly invite him into his creative universe, and not be threatened by his gift or jealous of it. Seemingly, nothing online describes Almer with anything other than phrases like, “pop music’s enigmatic songwriting genius.

Greetings — if you’re new to this Substack, thanks very much for coming on board. As of now at least, as was the case with the old Dark Forces Swing blog, there’s no particular format or frequency to the newsletter. I’m simply using this as a space to delve into anything that interests me, and this time around, that’s the early discography of Sonny Sharrock. There are currently three parts to this ongoing deep dive — the piece below, where I discuss the strange duality of the early Sonny canon, divided neatly between free-jazz sessions and something like their polar opposite, his extensive work alongside the funky flute player Herbie Mann.

Over the last few days, you probably saw a bunch of enthusiastic news reports and tweets about a new Google Deepmind paper on math, like this at The Guardian: and this § Well, yes, and no. Google DeepMind, along with the mathematician Jordan Ellenberg really did use some AI to help solve a math problem, in a very clever paper that is worth reading, on how to use “program search with large language models” (as the accurate and not at all hypey title explains).

When I was a little girl, I used to wake up early in my suburban bedroom with its avocado green and harvest gold color scheme, make my bed, and quietly slip outside to feed the birds. I’d get a few pieces of bread from the kitchen, crumble them up, go outside, and begin tossing crumbs into the street. I would stand in the cool, empty early morning street in my little plaid pants, communing with a flock of crows flapping and cackling at my feet.

I’d been thinking about soufflés lately, especially since my husband’s birthday was coming up and I wanted to make one to celebrate. On a past birthday in Paris, my friend Amy, who lives there, suggested we go to Le Soufflé to mark the occasion (this … ncG1vNJzZmismJa7rMXOrqakZqOqr7TAwJyiZ5ufonyxe9KorJ%2BenJp6o7jOoA%3D%3D

Music, Movies, Books...the good stuff! This is also the home now to Off The Tracks - a full archive of 11,000 posts on pop culture By Simon Sweetman · Hundreds of paid subscribersNo thanks“Simon reminds me of the guy you used to find behind the counter of a Record store. A knowledgeable musicologist who has dug deeper into the crate and found absolute gold.” “Sweetman” ncG1vNJzZmirmaK8r7%2FWnpytpZGje7TBwayrmpubY7CwuY4%3D