- Taxi Kebab - You are drenched in sweat. You might be in Tunis. Or Paris. It might be 2002 or yesterday. There is an oud dripping over everything including the swimming grime of that gut rumbling electronic bass. You may have smoked enough hash to propel yourself into another dimension or it just might feel like that because you wish you had so badly. You don’t understand techno, are not even sure if this is it or just electronic. You don’t understand the lyrics whatsoever. You for a second. A minute. Are not you. You throw yourself around either that dance floor or your kitchen. The name of course wins without all the previous rambling. They call themselves “disoriental” which couldn’t be more clever or more appropriate.
- Bedouin Burger - So the recommendation engine somehow put “electronic,” “Arabic,” and “band names related to meat you eat while drunk,” and gave me Bedouin Burger which was well pleased to find and are definitely way mellower and lean on the North African folk veering into synth tip.
- While You Live, Shine - As a person who is semi-obsessed with finding particularly old, greek folk recordings, and someone who will go to the ends of the earth to try and get a book about walking the length of Florida unavailable outside of the US, or looking every freaking year for tracks to be posted by an undersold Cleveland post-punk band, I can appreciate this man’s dedication and drive to not necessarily understand the music as to be a part of it. This slow documentary takes you through this with not too many words, but through landscape, people and sound. Ploddingly astounding.
- Kebab Shop in a London bus - Words rarely escape me. They have with this. As a former, long time resident of North London, rather than try to give this words, I choose to bask in its sublime beauty in silence.
- Sparkling water
- The art of Arghavan Khosravi
- Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast - “The stories behind the world’s most recognisable and interesting sounds.”
- Being a bit lot wasted while watching The Nature Channel - Sure, northern England can be pretty and interesting but not half as when Sean Bean narrating about Yorkshire
- If you were wondering about things, as I do, like how rockabilly somehow is related to grindcore, or just what rondalla sounds like, then you need to check out the best use of a cluster diagramming ever, Every Noise.
- Listening to music in languages you are not fluent in while writing - I wonder if death metal has essentially the same function in not being distracting while writing or editing in the language in which you’re writing, but one thing for sure is that I can’t listen to hip hop, well at least in English, while writing at all.
