Fad Gadget Retrospective

Last week saw the London launches of the new Fad Gadget 2CD/2DVD box set issued by Mute. Watching the documentary and seeing the range of people present, FG's influence on electronic pop(ular) music was more obvious than ever. The rich selection of live performances from the early to mid eighties finally give a chance to see why these shows were so influential and talked about. The CD tracks are a fairly obvious selection of career highlights, but the demo tracks are worth listening to for an understanding of Tovey's earliest efforts. If well selected, what might be interesting now would be a remix album or some vinyl issues with contemporary artists taking on FG tracks. In any case, this collection is a useful document cementing FG's place in the history of electronic music (and of course of Mute).

Comments

4th Annual Mark Fisher Memorial Lecture 2021 recording

Thanks to all who watched the event on Friday, we all enjoyed it and were really pleased with the response, we were only sorry not to have more time for questions and discussion. Ludmilla Andrews did a great job of executing the film at great speed in lockdown conditions. My commentary for the film was written in haste over the New Year and recorded in the following week. It's a snapshot of the transition from 2020 to 2021 through the prism of Test Dept's work and Fisher's response to it.

P.C. Press and Test Dept

I've been working intensively on the publication of Total State Machine a book on the history of Test Dept, which I've co-edited with the group and Peter Webb. I've also written the introduction to the book, which contains a wealth of archival photos and documents plus tour diaries, new texts and exclusive interviews. More information on the P.C. Press website.

Ghostland review

A brief review I've published on the Goodreads site of an interesting recent book. It's relevant to a critique of hauntology that I'm currently working on ... Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country by Edward Parnell My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is a haunted and haunting book haunted by its own absences. The personal story it relates is moving and borne out of cycles of family tragedy. Yet this aspect of the book is sometimes at odds with the collective "haunted country" it seeks to describe and sometimes prevails over it. Ultimately, this is somewhat more of a personal and family memoir than a work of cultural and landscape analysis. The author's knowledge of ghostly fictions and the landscapes that have inspired them is not to be doubted. Yet oddly this knowledge sometimes promises more than it delivers. More than once, when he seems about to "grasp the nettle" and confront the dreadful "it" that animates a particular story, h...

Plural Machine

Search This Blog