Record Reconstructor

  This week:  When the other shoe drops, bad bosses and good bosses, and a little post-rock taster as a treat. I get nervous when things go well for extended periods of time.  I have a hard time trusting the ongoing passage of days where I am not wrestling with some personal existential crisis, and the longer that goes without disruption the more nervous I get - Catherine and I will have been together for 18 years in two months time, and I still wonder if one day she'll just be gone, either through tragedy or some irreconcilable difference, and what I'd do if that ever happened.  In my lived experience, the other shoe always drops, good times never last, and the best thing you can do when they are with you is enjoy them to the fullest, and keep an eye on the horizon for the oncoming storm. It's been over a year now really since anything truly anxiety-inducing has happened inside my personal life*, and because I had our holiday to Australia firmly in my sights, I miss...

  Dashboard! I've been trying to think about the best way to approach talking about Radiohead, and I've settled on this after three days of false starts.  Radiohead are amongst my favourite bands of all time, a group of musical performers whose twenty year career provided a contemplative soundtrack to my own path through adulthood.  There's a point I recognise in my life when my reading habits moved outside of the range of the Fantasy and Sci-Fi and comedic* novels I'd consumed voraciously in my youth and I started reading what I guess I'd consider 'serious literature' of my own choice, for - if not fun exactly - the intellectual stimulation, the prompt to think, to draw your own conclusions, to engage with the text on a level deeper than just what could be seen on the surface.  In the realm of music, I thought such pieces existed also, but assumed they existed in genres both dusty and inaccessible;  Opera, freeform Jazz, modern Classical**.   My exper...

  Dashboard! I wrote these words in February of this year and when I wrote them, I was half convinced that we would never make it there. When I say we'd never make it there, it's a line that covers a multitude of outcomes.  I might have given up, abandoned this project as too time consuming, too self indulgent even for my own wildly inflated sense of the value of my own thoughts, simply been too lazy to pick it up and let it slowly wither away and die a quiet, peaceful death.  I, personally, might not have made it.  I look at the date of birth on my driving license and I think of all the people who never made it as far as I did in life;  death is cruel and it cares nothing about the dreams or goals or stupid internet projects of who it claims.  But what I really feared was that none of us would make it to August, that our self-inflicted social apocalypse would have claimed us all already, that the madness that rages throughout the geopolitical spectrum woul...

  This week: Music from the great land of Australia God, I'm so tired.   It's not jetlag any more; at least, I am pretty sure I am mostly back on UK time.  Instead, I've been dealing with sleeplessness generated by my cracked tooth, for which I now have a scheduled extraction next week, and facing into the reality of the job I have been working at for the last five years rapidly transforming into a place I no longer want to be a part of.  It's difficult - not only do I like most of my colleagues, I enjoy the work, have a team I like and want to support, and the circumstances of my employment are very comfortable for me.  I really don't want to give those things up, especially in the face of the fact that the business itself should be fundamentally viable and profitable.  Part of me worries that I am in my feelings, that this is another period of change and uncertainty that I just need to power through to get to an oasis of calm on the other side. ...

  This Week:  What I Did On My Summer Vacation Part One Bad news for the haters. Not only did I make it through my incredible summer vacation to Australia, I also somehow managed to listen to forty eight different albums in the course of the leadup to, enjoying of, and returning from our wonderful trip, meaning I am still maintaining a healthy average albums-per-day of just over 3 (though this week, with jetlag and chaos at work and my stubborn broken tooth playing up again, my album listening has been way down).  I've also given myself a huge task to catch up on trying to write something about every single one of those albums, so my goal over the next few days is to get all 48 of those albums covered, divided into two parts (this being the first) and also then catch up and write the 700th album blog post I ran out of time to do before we went away.  When I have those in the bag, I'll feel ready to start adding albums to be "to write about" list again. So, this is pa...