Record Reconstructor

  Dashboard! In the early 2000s somewhere in Mexico, while studying for her PhD, Catherine met a fellow languages and culture student named Quent, a young gay man from Texas with a fierce love of social causes and civil rights.  Quent hailed from West Texas near the town of St David, just near the McDonald Observatory - a place where in the early 2000s being an out, vocal, and socially liberal activist wasn't an easy road to travel.  He became Catherine's treasured friend, and when she returned to the UK they exchanged letters and packages regularly, including CD's full of music each thought the other would like.  Until Quent tragically took his own life in 2007, this cultural exchange informed a significant portion of Catherine's music listening.  Somewhere, on one of those early silver compact discs with the handwritten inlays was The District Sleeps Alone Tonight , a song which stuck with Catherine, and informed a deep love of the song, and the album which sp...

Dashboard! I feel like a cut character from Garden State  in saying this, but this album changed my life.  I'm not talking grandiose, pack-your-bags-and-Eat-Pray-Love-yourself-to-another-country changed, but in the five years since it's 11th of December 2020 release date there are things I've done, experiences I have had, people I have met and communities I've watched flourish none of which would have happened for me had I not listened to this album for the first time.  I cherish those memories, those experiences, those people and in doing so, I find myself more in love, more indebted to this album which opened those doors for me. December of 2020 was not going great for me;  nine months into an ongoing pandemic lockdown I'd gone from quietly pleased about the enforced introvert time, the greater time I got to spend with Catherine, the quieter roads, the sense of orderly calm to feeling the spiral of anxiety and isolation and humdrum routine eat away at my equilibri...

  Dashboard! There are a lot of things I can do while listening to music, as a representative sample of my Bluesky thread charting every album I listened to this year above amply demonstrates.  However, critically, there's one thing I can't do while listening to music. Write. This has presented a problem over the last two weeks.  Without doubt, things have been busy and stressful - it was Catherine's birthday, which required a lot of prep and is celebrated over basically a three week period, there was an annual multi-hour quiz which required a lot of my mental writing energy and physical time, and my work is a disaster zone which has been leaving me an anxiety-and-frustration-riddled nervous wreck.  But that hasn't been the problem - short and more often was the goal, surely I could carve out an hour every few days to keep the momentum up? Probably.   But I looked at my listening stats as we approached December and I started to feel The Fear creep over me....

  Dashboard! In the world where it doesn't seem like much is going well, globally or in certain (generally work related) aspects of my life, you'll be glad to hear that I had a pretty good weekend.  We went to Manchester, stayed in a nice hotel, had a two nice meals out, spent time with the eldest niece who is terrifyingly turning sixteen in a few weeks time, and saw Lorde perform at the Manchester Arena, who put on a spectacular show which in turn provoked a lengthy conversation about music, performance, what it means to be a prodigy and the pressure you come under to produce new albums once you've established some kind of musical presence. That in turn reminded me that I needed to write about this set of albums, which I listened to one weekend a few weeks ago while playing Twilight Inscription and Regicide Legacy with my friends D and Darren. The connection might not seem obvious at first;  either between our conversation following the Lorde show and these two bands, or...

  Dashboard! Remember a few days ago when I talked about how Limp Bizkit's My Way  was linked inseparably from the world of Professional Wrestling because of the Wrestlemania XVII promo package?  Well, there's a symbiotic relationship between the world of fake grapple sports and the world of professional musicians. The power of a good entrance theme, a great entrance theme, and the way that can set a crowd on fire to see an incredibly fit man (and more recently, woman) walk through a curtain creates the kind of conditioned reaction Pavlov would be proud of.   It shouldn't be a surprise to you that I am no more immune to this kind of conditioning than anyone else.  You could probably play me anything off WWF The Music Volume 4** and I'd be instictively psyched as hell.  It wasn't until the 1990s that  it really became a thing, but what started with simple guitar riffs and hair metal wails, often penned by wrestling manager Jimmy Hart, to introduce ...