Sherwood Mod

Been meaning to blip this little feller for a while - he amuses me and Hector most days on our way back from the park...

Nearly finished 'Future Days', David Stubbs' new book on krautrock and I wholeheartedly recommend it. It's probably the best music book I've read since Rob Young's 'Electric Eden', though I think it's probably less likely to inspire a whole lot of new listening. I checked out a fair bit of stuff via youtube as I went along and I find that most of my prejudices remain intact: a lot of the psychedelic 'freak-out' and musique concrete stuff, like Amon Duul or Faust, I can largely take or leave (with apologies to Mr. Cope), whereas it's the motorik and early-ambient bands, like Neu or Cluster, that still seem more interesting. Can, of course, stand apart. I first came across them as a student when a French friend gave me a C90 whose only labelling was the word CAN written on the side of the tape with a permanent marker - it was only later that I found out that the weird but wonderful contents consisted of the 'Monster Movie' and 'Future Days' albums (still my favourites, I think.) Anyway, I'm digressing but the writing in Stubbs' book is great and his enthusiasm is infectious. For example, here's what he has to say about Blixa Bargeld in his Einstursende Neubaten days:

...of all the weeds in human shape that sprang up from the punk rubble, he was one of the starkest. Tall, pale, skinny and goggle-eyed, topped off with an electro-Gothic shock of hair, he physically epitomised the spirit of New German music. He had an ill, messianically consumptive air as if he had personally inhaled for our sins all of the toxic, asbestos-like by-products of the post-war German economic miracle.