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Sofia Kourtesis – DJ Kicks

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What does it sound like?:

Sofia Kourtesis has been a fast-rising star of the last few years as a producer and DJ. Her album Madres was high on my top albums list for 2023, with its mix of beats and hazy warm melodies creating something elusive and fragile as well as rhythmically hypnotic.

Now, after a series of mixtapes for platforms like Resident Advisor comes her first big-series DJ mix release on – gasp – physical format. Overall it cleaves to the general mix arc – we start with a beatless intro track, here temple bells from Jon Hopkins, and gradually warm up with some relaxed and downtempo tracks from Aphex Twin and Daphi (aka Caribou). Kourtesis has, as is customary with DJ Kicks, a few self-penned tracks scattered throughout – first up is It’s You is in the relaxed warm-up section, leading to some house-flavoured tracks from Myd, Axel Bowman etc (no me neither). Her next self-penned track, Texas Changing, takes things up another gear. This is what I love about her work – rhythmic while never losing sight of a melody. Joy look Up Now introduces a seventies disco sample-based track with a wicked mid-track stuttery » Continue Reading.

You handled that brilliantly Melvin

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Along with Andrew’s newsnight interview, new Coke and Farage’s Ipswich Town stadium tour, this year’s Wireless Festival appears destined for the ‘Crisis management module’ of future PR Courses. As far as I can see it went a bit like this: Book possibly the most controversial artist in the world to headline at a time of massively increased sensitivity around anti-semitism. ‘Consult with stakeholders about the decision’ – including your headline sponsor. But did you perhaps not consult enough Melvin? Announce artist and headline sponsor promptly withdraws. Cue other sponsors heading for the exits. Defend decision asking people for ‘forgiveness’ for someone who sold Nazi t-shirts etc until a couple of months ago, and reach out to offended community. Said offended community refuse to meet said artist (maybe that consultation thing again) and ask government to stop him entering UK. Government stops him entering UK. Festival cancelled.

System 7

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Venue:

Castle and Falcon, Birmingham

Date: 04/04/2026

The Castle and Falcon is surely the best place in Birmingham to see a band that draws a straight line from the crustie/hippie/Castlemorton days of early rave scene, as it most closely resembles our clubbing days at the Co-Op Hall down the Cowley Rooad (now the 02 Oxford and presumably cleaned up from the late eighties when we saw such bands as Gaye Bykers, Senser, 1000 Yard Stare and early basic rave nights with luminaries such as DJ Remould).

The band consists of your chemistry teacher who knows how to cook up MDMA but is just too nice a guy (Steve Hillage) to do so, and Rive Gauche Parisienne chic grandma Miquette Giraudy, just back from a cameo alongside Juliette Binoche in Michael Haneke’s latest.

I’m not a S7 uberfan, and know 777 and their stuff with Rovio and that’s about it. But it matters not. One track blends into each other in a continuous mix built around one to the floor techno drums, sequenced bass lines, and long looping textures either from keyboards or Hillage’s guitar or both. Some tracks are a bit quicker, some a bit floatier, but there’s a » Continue Reading.

CD Swap Back Once Again – Your Reviews here please

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How is everyone getting on then? As the world goes to hell in a handbasket and filling up your car now needs a mortgage, what better time to listen to stay in and do some ‘active listening’ as they ask you to demonstrate in job interviews I am assured by the youngers. In an ideal world you’ve had all your CDs/dropbox drops and posted yours so we can move onto the reviewening phase. Take this as a gentle reminder to get a shift on if this is not the case.

Each group gets their handles in a comment, so post all reviews and sub-comments under that comment. Should be clear. Post reviews here and not the original swap post. We’ll remind everyone with a deadline before the track reveals so post your track listings and any liner notes to @kid-dynamite and myself. Let the reviewening begin!

CDSwap the official launch post: Back once again for the renegade masters!

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We are back back back baby after a hefty come on by @salwarpe. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, so the rules below are pretty much as before, with a heavier slant towards your virtual CD mix dropboxed as well as physical CDs via post.

That all important theme: Back Again, returns, reunions, re-appearances, the backstroke, back scratches, back of a length etc etc.. Should be enough wiggle room there for you all we hope.

For those signing up for the first time your partners in listening crime are looking for discoveries: nuggets, obscurities and the rarely heard. The QI Klaxon would go off for (for example) Back for Good, Back on the Block, Back In Black, Return of the Mac and so on.

1 Sign up by the closing date of a week from today (22.2.26) by just letting us know in the comments to this post if you’ve not done so before. Those @below are already on the spreadsheet so are in but you can still join! 2 We will then pair everyone up with two other people – you compile a CD or dropbox/wetransfer etc set of mp3s) and post » Continue Reading.

Your 2026 listening projects

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I’m almost at the end of 1000 albums to listen to, and am embarking on another big listening project to provide a different approach to what to listen to, alongside new stuff and my playlists and albums.

In previous years I’ve worked through the complete catalogues of Prince and Dylan. No need to work through The Fall’s mighty oeuvre consciously as I do that out of pure pleasure!

So 2026 is amongst other things for me the year of the symphony.

I’m working through an arbitrary ‘A list’ taking Mozart as a rough starting point and Mahler as a rough end point. Yes there are many great ones before and after, but this does mean not listening to Haydn’s 104 symphonies just yet. Maybe Haydn in 2027. Mozart’s 41 I might also cherry pick. But (deep breath) Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, Glinka, Franck, Smetana, Dvorak, Borodin, Bizet, Sibelius, Tchiakovsky, Greig, Rimsky-Korsakov, Elgar, Debussy, Strauss etc.

So who is resolving to listen to all the Jazz Messengers studio albums (47) or the 170 odd Buckethead albums listed on Spotify, a mere taster of his complete works?

Maybe you’re just gong to listen to » Continue Reading.

A Voyage Round My Father…in a hundred CDs

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moseleymoles on Music and your parents

There you go.

My brother put a large plastic crate on the front room floor, containing about a hundred CDs. The process of clearing out my parents’ house ground endlessly on, as we worked through almost sixty years of books, papers, clothes, china…my dad in particular grew up in a small terraced house during the war and the rationing after. Part of the great post-war leap in social mobility, he and mum bought a large Elizabethan house in the middle of the Peak District and that was where they stayed for the next sixty years. They never threw anything away, and had enough tinned tomatoes stored up to last me out as well as them.

By the time I could talk to dad about music his taste was strictly classical and jazz. He would chunter at the kitchen table as I did my homework to cassettes of The Police or The Jam. Truth be told one of my earliest memories at the end of the sixties, in our previous house, involves his music taste. I can remember crawling under his enormous Grundtvig stereo system mounted coffin style in a large wooden cabinet, and » Continue Reading.

Germany tells Europe what to do…again

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So Israel are still in, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium and Slovenia are out. I’m talking about political hot potato Eurovision which has come up with a fudge that pleases nobody, except Germany and Israel it would seem.

Rather than vote on whether Israel would participate the EBU asked members to vote on accepting tightened voting rules, after the clearly highly organised Israeli block voting almost saw them win last year. Tied to this vote was accepting Israel’s participation.

My son, a big Germany and Eurovision person, we all have German as well as UK citizenship, says that Germany bankrolls Eurovision and if they had pulled their participation and funding the other countries would have had to stump up a lot more cash to keep the thing going. The EBU have gone with the biggest kid on the block who threatened to take their ball and run away if Israel were excluded.

So where from here? At least four countries have withdrawn, and others seem pretty sure to follow. Israel’s vote will, no matter where they end up, be assumed to be suspect. I should say vote organising/rigging is a long and honourable Eurovision tradition and Israel’s last year was not » Continue Reading.

Pains of Being Pure at Heart

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Venue:

Metronome Nottingham

Date: 18/11/2025

All songs are time machines, capturing the moment they were written, the recording session, the day the record came out, the day you first heard the single and went ‘who is that?’ So when bands reform after a substantial hiatus there’s an element of time travel for both band and audience – what are we playing now? How do they look and sound fifteen years afterwards? The Oasis fervour is in large part a desire to travel – for half a day at least – thirty years backwards to the mid-nineties.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart haven’t been away for that long – six years. So it’s possibly a continuation after a hiatus rather than the full getting back together deal. The band, original drummer apart, are all present and correct.

Frontman and songwriter Kip Burman, now I am guessing in his early forties, is revisiting on this tour the POBPAH self-titled debut, now sixteen years old. The songs are, as the band’s name and the b & w photo on the cover of two teenage girls suggest, centred on teenage love, first crushes, the weekend, and other distinctly youthful themes. » Continue Reading.

Au Pairs reunion! Er…sort of…not really..gosh this is messy

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The Au Pairs were, along with Gang of Four, perhaps the ultimate ‘NME band’ of the early eighties when I started reading. Never far from a benefit gig, strident in intra-band equality, writers (ah..more later) of catchy songs with incendiary lyrics about hot-button topics from Northern Ireland to domestic violence. Playing With A Different Sex (what a cover photo) was brilliant. Second album less so. And so they who burn brightest burn briefest. I was delighted to pick up their career-spanning double CD a decade or so ago. FF to yesterday – am off to see Pains of Being Pure At Heart in Nottingham at the Metronome on a brief reunion tour. Checking the venue website I see that the ‘Au Pairs’ are playing an anniversary tour of PWADS. How come I heard nothing about this? The detail on the Metronome site starts to explain things ‘Lesley and three new members’. Oh that’s a bit different.

A brief google brought this corking article (in comments) to light which explains everything, including Lesley’s strident denial of how she pronounces ‘deer’. It is well worth five minutes of your time and tells a somewhat sad story. You must scroll down to the » Continue Reading.

Prophet Song

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Author:Paul Lynch

It takes something very special for me to write a review of a novel. I read a lot, and as this is at heart not a literary forum, I generally keep my thoughts on the latest Patricia Lockwood (unreadable) or Cormac McCarthy (chewy, a lot of physics) to myself. Occasionally however a novel comes along so remarkable that I just want everybody to read it. Of Lynch’s previous novels I’d read Beyond The Sea, a tale of poverty and survival at sea in South America and admired his prose without feeling that engaged by the subject matter. I couldn’t shake the thought that at heart this was constructed and planned – a series of aesthetic choices rather than necessary.

A Prophet Song is a world away. This is something Lynch has put everything into, a story he absolutely has to tell. Though published in 2023, its relevance has – awfully – only grown over the last two years. His story is set in contemporary Ireland, in which a set of political circumstances have brought into power a far-right party, and from the perspective of a professional middle-class Dublin family the novel charts a country’s descent into civil » Continue Reading.

Cabs Klaxon!

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Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson heading out on a ‘final tour;.

Absolutely on my list of post-punk legends I’ve not seen and need to:

https://thequietus.com/news/cabaret-voltaire-announce-final-uk-tour/

Birmingham date hurrah.

Bogies In The Sun – playground versions of pop songs

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This thread may fall flat on its arse, or someone point out a thread from six years on the same topic. Coming across a reference to Terry Jacks number one of 1974 in a novel, and being aged nine at the time, I was the perfect age to run around the playground singing this version: We had joy We had fun We flicked bogies in the sun But the sun was too hot And the bogies turned to snot. Your playground versions of pop songs (not hymns, Mrs Moles tried to interpolate We three kings of Orient Are/One on a bicycle one on a car etc into the discussion). It’s actually quite hard to google which is a good sign for a thread, but I did come up with a cracker based on Hermann’s Hermits Sunshine Girl which is in the comments.

We Want The Funk – another superb BBC Music Doc

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Lurking on the iplayer is the soul brother to the super disco series of documentaries: We Want The Funk. We finally got round to watching this on Friday and it’s a treat. Actually the first 15 minutes are skippable, as we get the background funk grew from in the early sixties music such as Motown that was about fitting in. By the end of the sixties with the rise of black power people were less interested in fitting in. Enter James Brown, rightly put front and centre as funk ground zero, with Say It Loud. From here we get some awesome clips of JB sweating and hollering, the psychedelia of Sly Stone – and the still bonkers sound and sight of George Clinton and Funkadelic. Someone watching the Parliaments in the late sixties recounts how the first three nights were normal soul music. Night four George went to the bathroom and came out with his hair frizzed out and wearing a nappy. There’s Bowie’s Thin Ginger Haired Duke appearance on Soultrain and the descent of the mothership at a Funkadelic gig. David Byrne of course crops up with his take on the skew wiff funking of Talking Heads. Burning Down » Continue Reading.

Doves

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Venue:

Moseley Folk Festival

Date: 31/08/2025

There are bands that you feel are ‘yours’ and Doves are definitely that. While I can’t say I was in on The Cedar Room on release day in 2000, I had signed up to their brand of Northern Windswept Romanticism © by There Goes The Fear and The Last Broadcast saw them top the UK charts. The first time I saw them live was at the late lamented V Festival, one of the first we took ourselves post-kids with two under three in tow, to. We saw about 10 minutes of several bands in between worrying about eldest wanding off never to be seen again, but on the second stage I can vividly remember an intense version of Pounding. By the time Kingdom of Rust came out in 2009 we had babysitters sorted and saw them at the Academy, a truly great gig. And that was it until this year. There was a hiatus for solo albums, then COVID, then a new albumThe Universal Want. I had tickets for the tour in 2021, only for it to be cancelled in sad circumstances, as bassist and lead vocalist Jimi Goodwin’s mental health prevented him » Continue Reading.

Ain’t there one damn youtube clip that can make me break down and smile

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My eldest apropros of nothing sent me an utterly brilliant youtube clip of (presumably) Dutch local TV in which an old man demonstrates how to park a car 58 inches wide in a garage 60 inches wide. While very funny it also harks back to a vanished golden age of ‘Fenton’ and other clips before memefication, conspiracy nutters, Mark Goldbridge shouting, and all the other stuff that youtube now consists of. So please post your old-school youtube faves (Fenton, Old Man Parks Car and any others I can remember in the comments). No Downfall or other memes, I’m after the OG clips to bring a smile to all our faces in a troubled world. Two minutes or less (again the original youtube spirit).

Have we heard the last of them? Leave your legacy here pls

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The presence of Morrissey in the have we heard the last of them? thread prompted the thought ‘I hope so’. The interest in the unreleased album whose title track is described as about the 2017 Manchester Arena bombings, which Morrissey described as “England’s 9/11′ can only be that of curious bystanders at an ongoing bin fire. Does anyone apart form Morrissey believe it’s ‘the best album of his career’ – ie better than Vauxhall and I or Your Arsenal.

Second entrant: Primal Scream. Leave me with my Screamadelica and Don’t Give Out.. memories Bobby please. I’ve not heard the latest for these reasons but Chaosmosis was pretty mediocre.

Your entrants for those you would quite happily see resting on their laurels. The Rolling Stones would also come to mind. No return to form for me, I thought Hackneyed Diamonds pretty embarrassing.

Haim – I Quit

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What does it sound like?:

Four albums in and Haim have long since left their starting point of Fleetwood Mac 80s sunkissed harmonies, gated drums and a reverb-heavy sound (I re-played If I Could Change Your Mind and Don’t Save Me from their debut just to be sure, yup still there).

This album’s heaviest samples are a lifting of The Edge’s scuzzy guitar line from mid-90s U2 track Numb and George Michael’s backing vocalists from Freedom ‘90 (ok not that far from the tree). The latter is on album opener Gone, sitting on top of a shuffling acoustic guitar line that recalls nothing so much as Let It Bleed-era Stones complete with Mick Taylor-esque blues shredding. It sets out the tone for this album which sees several tracks (most notably Blood on the Streets) draw heavily from the late sixties early seventies sound.

I’ve listened to this album a good number of times. It’s both very varied – in say a way a Taylor Swift album isn’t – and very consistent – like the best of Swift, while still being unabashedly a series of succinct three minute poppers. Here’s some highlights:

Opener Relationships – we start with » Continue Reading.

Reach for the Stars: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Last Party

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Author:Michael Cragg

What music were you listening to in 1996? I am guessing it was much more likely to be the petering out of Britpop, big beat from the Chemicals or Fat Boy Slim, being scared by Firestarter on TOTP, or the last ‘peak’ album from REM – New Adventures…

Well if you were ten then the seismic events of the year were the break up of Take That, the biggest pop band of the decade, and the seismic rise of the Spice Girls who did what the Takers could not and became a global phenomenon.

From these events this marvellous book tells the story of the last golden age of UK pop. I mean pop pop, not bands who were poppy but bands put together from stage school graduates through ads in the back of The Stage. Bands where an appearance on CD:UK and being one of the 20 singles added each week to the Woollies CD singles racks were the route to success rather than the toilet circuit. Manufactured, cynical and (this book would argue) consistent producers of brilliant music.

The story of the Spice Girls, while not perhaps the Beatles, is well-thumbed. Those of Steps, 5ive » Continue Reading.

Wimbledon round up thread

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In between work and graduations I’ve managed to see a fair bit of Wimbledon over the last fortnight. It’s been a pretty good one, while following a pattern that the Slams have been in for the past three years: Alcaraz, Sinner or Djokovik (of which more later) for the mens, while chaos and upsets reign in the womens.

The Brits had a fair showing without the key hopes (Draper and Radecanu) looking like they could go particularly deep. Draper doesn’t appear like someone who plays effortlessly, shall we say, and after going deep in the French and Australians, plus some tour finals, he looked tired. Radecanu is still finding her way back, and in the first couple of rounds showed glimpses of her power. I think the top ten and a tour title are reasonable goals for her the next few years. Norrie and Kartal provided some early entertainment, and the sheer number of Brits in the first few rounds was encouraging.

The women’s draw saw seed after seed tumble, from Gauff and Rybakina to Sabalenka in the semis in which (let’s remember) Ansimova played out of her skin to create enough pressure to force Sabalenka’s jitters to emerge. » Continue Reading.

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning

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Year: 2025 Director: Christopher McQuarrie

And so we arrive at the End Of A Major Film Franchise, now traditionally requiring a two-parter finale of bottom-numbing length. And so it is with MI8 and its just shy of 3 hours run-time. We saw it on a Sunday afternoon which seems about the right time, and on the big screen which is definitely the right place.

The plot, as is also traditional in MI films is both convoluted and nonsensical. Malware baddie The Entity is now taking control of all the world’s nukes to create some sort of Matrix-style nuclear post apocalypse world to rule over, where Mcafee and Norton are but a distant memory and there are no pesky humans to turn things off and on again. To combat it Tom must get into the sunken sub that started it all in the predecessor with his special key, and take a portable hard-drive together with another piece of code while avoiding the Russians who also…and returning Entity’s Representative on Earth Gabriel…before his own government…oh god this really does make no sense.

What’s great about this film, as with all the MIs is the set-piece stunt action sequences delivered through practical » Continue Reading.

ATM – hacked ebay account

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Mid-morning I received a text from the bank about a suspicious set of purchases on my credit card from my ebay account. I rang them back, and they cancelled three transactions of escalating value – a classic fraudster tactic – made from ebay today. I have two-factor authentication enabled, so to access ebay they must have hacked my gmail as well as they didn’t sent texts to my phone when buying, presumably counting on someone not checking their emails as often. Password changed on my email, and ebay. Ebay themselves don’t want to know it would appear as that is all they suggest doing. Bank are issuing new credit card and I’ve stopped all ebay transactions with them until I feel everything is safe again. Anything else I should be doing from those with a bit more knowledge of this.

Your instrumentals by people who sing please

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A minor but real pleasure is the discovery of an instrumental in a band or singer’s catalogue where singing is an integral part of their sound (ie most rock and pop Mogwai notwithstanding). Often an oddity – Flying and 12-Bar Original are probably two of the more obscure Beatles tracks, never mind the even more buried Cayenne and Cry For A Shadow. So, your instrumental tracks – not instrumental versions of a track that has a vocal version, or a 30-second intro – from artists not known for them. I’ve put one of my very favourite ones from Teenage Fanclub in the comments, as listening to Bandwagonesque again occasioned this thought. Done a brief check of previous posts but if there’s one someone else did please repost.

Five days with Peat – an Islay visit

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moseleymoles on Visiting Islay, home of nine whisky distilleries

I know that whisky and in particular single malts are a frequent topic of discussion here, so I thought some reflections on a five-day stay on Islay earlier this week might interest a few. Various discussions and a life celebration led me and Ms Moles to book an air b and b just outside Port Ellen for a short stay earlier this week.

One of the attractions of Islay is that you get nine – nine! – top-notch distilleries within less than an hour of each other. Four (Laphroig, Lagavulin, Ardbeg and the recently-opened Port Ellen distillery, are within hiking distance of Port Ellen. Ardnahoe, Bowmore, Bruichladdich, Bunnahabhain, Caol Illa and Kichoman complete the set. We booked three distillery tours in advance, the Calmac Ferry from Kennacraig to Port Ellen and off we went in the car.

Our accommodation was a mile outside Port Ellen, so at the last minute we added two days of e-bike hire. This proved to be a godsend. Mrs Moles has less appetite for the lengthy hike than I do, but was very happy e-biking around the island.

Our first booked tour was Laphroig, the » Continue Reading.

Your cultural challenges

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Spurred on by the recent podcast thread I have added two significant to-do’s to my long cultural list: catching up the 175 episodes so far of Andrew Hickey’s A History of Rock and Roll in 500 songs, and playing along with Jocelyn Duchesne’s comprehensive (5,110 so far) Spotify playlist of every track Hickey refers to. That’s a couple of years at two podcasts a week.

So what are your substantial cultural challenges this year? We have 86.95% of the year left so plenty of time to get that seven-series box-set done.

Amongst mine are:

Finish the 1001 albums to hear before your die generator – up to 920 so 80 to go.

Reads: Two more of Patrick O’Briens Aubrey and Maturin series. I am rationing them to two a year, unlike a friend who read them all in 18 months once I introduced her to them! I should finish in 2032.

Continue my first to last read throughs of Ballard (up to Cocaine Nights), Coupland (All Families are Psychotic) and contemplate starting another go through all of Philip K Dick’s sci-fi novels. Hopefully nearer finishes than 2032 (not the Dick, about 32 novels there though most very » Continue Reading.