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This is worth noting even though it’s nearly over, a short presentation of sound recordings by Chris Watson at the alt.gallery, Newcastle. Watson was a founder member of one of my favourite groups of the post-punk era, Cabaret Voltaire. He left CV in 1981 and shortly thereafter formed The Hafler Trio, an experimental audio outfit [...]

Harmonia somewhere in the 1970s: Michael Rother, Moebius, Roedelius.
Continuing the occasional { feuilleton } series exploring the byways of musical culture, this month it’s the turn of German group Cluster, prompted by their current US tour. News of their re-emergence sent me back to the albums and I’ve been listening to little else for [...]

A follow-up to last year’s list. Seeing as Joy Division are very much in the news at the moment with the release of Control and the re-issue of the albums, I thought a post-punk theme would be appropriate. The period which immediately followed punk in the late Seventies saw a lot of doom being imported [...]

I spent much of the summer of 1983 playing games on a very primitive ZX Spectrum computer while listening to the first couple of Street Sounds Electro compilations. Those mix albums were among the best releases that year and remain highly sought after, seeing as they’ve never been reissued on CD.

The musical reputation of the [...]

Chrome: Firebomb single (1982).
I seem to have spent the past twenty-five years introducing people to Chrome. The world remains stubbornly resistant to their splendour, so here we go again…
Chrome were a San Francisco rock band born in the mid-Seventies, primary members Damon Edge and Helios Creed, ostensibly part of the punk thing but [...]

No, not the school of Japanese architecture, we’re concerning ourselves here with a UK band from the early 1980s. There’s still a number of important albums from this period that remain caught in a curious limbo between the end of the time when vinyl was the prime carrier for new music and the start of [...]

The event booklet, designed by Neville Brody.
William Burroughs’ reading in the city of Manchester took place on the 4th of October, 1982, at Factory Records’ Haçienda club, as part of the Manchester “edition” of The Final Academy, a Burroughs-themed art event put together by Psychic TV (Genesis P Orridge & Peter Christopherson) and others. A [...]

(left) “Mechanical Head (Spirit of Our Age)” by Raoul Hausmann.
‘Dada’ at MoMA: The Moment When Artists Took Over the Asylum
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: June 16, 2006
NOW is as good a time as any for a big museum to take another crack at Dada, which arose in the poisoned climate of World War I, when governments were [...]