So I’m just listening to Chris McGregor and the Brotherhood of Breath, writing an email to a musician, asking rhetorical questions, and suddenly the whole pattern of something new I want to write just spins itself around in my head and - delicate fanfare please, played on a silver trumpet - there it is, there, symmetrical as a snowflake, this idea. I love it when that happens. I try not to breathe on it too hard and melt it.

I’d forgotten that after that McGregor track comes the Matthew Dear one, and I’d forgotten that I really liked it, and now I’ve just remembered. The Matthew Dear track is called ‘Tide’. It’s got these bubbly filtered beats, like tampered with hand-drums of some kinds, and a chorus that says “I don’t care about you anymore.” It clunks like shoes on a wooden floor and it sounds crafted with real hands, but it’s got this bass that you couldn’t not dance to. It’s superior yet startlingly THERE. Instinctive electronic music without any of those pointers to instinctiveness that often needle me, those little too-conscious touches of humanity in electronica (to wit. guitars + glitches = NO, unless it’s like Matt Elliott, Leafcutter John, Capitol K, or someone else good I forgot, and banjos + beats = BEWARE*, as I think I said to someone at the Adem show, almost retching with discontent ) can sound so false and cheap and dull and WRONG. But this Matthew Dear song is a pop song, a breakup song. Its human touch is nothing obvious you could put in a press release and call ‘eclectic’. It’s more that sense of presence and absence combined that characterises the finest pop music. Matthew Dear. Anyone got any more?

In other news (oh man, we have to stop saying ‘in other news’; it’s infecting every blog in the country. I stole it off an American friend and I wish I hadn’t - soon it’ll have an abbreviation, like ‘lol’, and then I won’t mind so much), the ‘new’ Smile is freaking me out, like in the wrong way. Not least because Brian sounds like Wesley Willis. Ack. NO. Leave me to my bootlegs and my Beach Boys problem and take your sleevenotes with you.

Coh, on the other hand, sounds like none other than himself and to that I raise a bottle of cheap Efes beer and prop my eyes open for another night’s frenetic writing…”one: counted my blessings, two: counted my wrinkles….ten: pretended to be Icarus and burnt my hand on the stove…“

*(Please note Leafcutter John’s ‘Mandolin Work’ is awesome and is not what it being written of here.)