Hang the DJ goes to America
To celebrate the US release of his delightfully idiosyncratic book of music lists, Hang the DJ, Angus Cargill is pulling together a series of songs and clips featuring some of his favourite American music. Today’s offering is ‘Roll on Arte’, by the incomparable Felice Brothers, and I’m sure tomorrow’s will be of an equal calibre, so if you’d like a tour of some bands and music you may not have heard before (and most definitely should) it might be worth keeping an eye on his site over the next week or two.
And if you haven’t got a copy of the book, track one down. It’s a wonderfully peculiar compilation of rants and raves about music from writers like DBC Pierre, Rick Moody and Ali Smith, and it’s not just a fascinating window into the musical likes and dislikes of a truly eclectic bunch of writers, it’s a lot of fun.
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city of tongues 
I’ve bookmarked the page and watch and listen with interest to the music appearing daily from Hang the DJ. But is it just me that finds the video clips excruciating? They seem to share a love of poor lighting and shots of landscape taken from the windows of moving cars (or band buses) combined with, the greatest crime of all, pictures of musicians playing a piece other than the music we’re actually listening to. Is this last slackness on the part of the film-makers? It must, after all, be pretty hard to sinc these things up in the editing room, but perhaps it’s deliberate, a cheap attempt to subvert the dominant paradigm.