Smashbomb

"My friend Al played it to me when we were living together. It's a box set of all four of his releases at that time. It's super bleak and I don't know what it says about my mental state then, but for a long time it was the record I would fall asleep to, particularly on tour. There's something microscopic about the sound, but it's like a musical optical illusion - it can sound vast and oceanic or it can sound quite narrow. He's done something fascinating with the sonics so that it works on two dimensions. It's also just heartbreaking - there's one piece called 'Orgone Donor' with musical saw and violin over granular drones; a matt finish with these aching, twisted sliding harmonies. Like the soundtrack to the end of days. As though you're sliding into a black hole."

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Kudos

Stephen Morris recommended Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem in Music (curated)

"This is the easily the best album of the last 10 years. I saw him recently, in London with Hot Chip, and it was absolutely fucking brilliant. James Murphy can do no wrong, and being an unlikely front man shouldn’t be any reason to stop you from being one. He just makes me think "I wish I’d thought of that. I wish I’d written that song." It can be hard to mix dance and alternative rock, but he does it brilliantly. I see a connection between what we did as New Order and what he does. The sad thing is, we were playing a tour in France with New Order and LCD were there, and they were all there on laptops. I saw them and thought, 'Should I go over and say I think you’re fucking brilliant?' And I decided: no."

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Kudos

John Berendt recommended Exquisite Corpse in Books (curated)

"Call it Extreme Southern Gothic, New Orleans division. The protagonists of this dark French Quarter novel are knee-deep in murder, torture, sex and cannibalism. The story is unabashedly grim (or as Brite himself puts it, “twisted, horrific”), but Brite’s prose is crystal clear, and his literate tone is sufficiently wry and ironic that it creates a sort of safety zone in which readers not normally drawn to this sort of stuff (myself included) can take refuge while they read. But even arm’s-length readers are apt to find themselves being drawn further and further into the story—seduced in spite of the themselves. Material that would be merely sick, disgusting, and unreadable in the hands of a lesser writer is, with Brite at the controls, surprisingly erotic and captivating. It’s a tour de force, in a literary category all by itself."

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Kudos