Three albums (one very Christmassey one!) and an EP this month. Tracey Thorn “Tinsel and Lights” Woob “Have Landed” Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin “Instrumental Tourist” Burial “Truant / Rough Sleeper Tracey Thorn “Tinsel and Lights” “Tinsel and Lights” is that rarest of records, a Christmas record that is perfectly suited to the season and is not in any way overbearing or irritating. Most albums that are Christmas themed are usually centred on lots of covers that are taken from a small subset of well worn classics.

Pretty much a sliding scale between songs and electronic wibble on this month’s albums and a particularly damp, chilly feeling to proceedings too. Bat For Lashes “The Haunted Man” Ital “Hive Mind” and “Dream On” Björk “Bastards” Brian Eno “Lux” Bat For Lashes “The Haunted Man” When it comes to Bat For Lashes, I prefer her first album “Fur And Gold” to her second “Two Suns” because when I listen to the latter I don’t feel connected to any of the songs.

A cat reaches the top of a mountain after a long climb through the snow. He is cold from the bottom of his fur to the tips of his claws. He is sodden and wet, and we all know how much a cat hates to be wet. At the top of the mountain there is not much to see. What may have been a breathtaking view is instead a murk of freezing mist and at any rate, snow assails the cat’s eyes and whiskers.

The second Woob album (AKA “Woob 4495”) is probably the greatest ambient album ever made and is certainly the best one you have never heard of. Originally released in 1995 on the em:t label it is also a rare record. I don’t have an actual copy but I have seen one! I downloaded it off the internet and even that is quite difficult to do. My friend is an avid collector of all the em:t releases and it is easy to see why: all the albums are titled in a specific way that is very appealing to people who like to collect things and they also have very striking nature photography on the covers.

Sometimes, when I am feeling a bit down, I like to write down some of my ambitions. As you can see from this list they are mostly pretty humble but they are also a bit cheesy and embarassing, so I have put them after the fold! Be wholehearted, cheerful, and sincere Be creative Look at the world and see its many faces, hear its many voices Explore new recipes as often as possible when I cook Learn to like the taste of tomatoes and cucumbers Be more at ease around people Listen to people and hear what they say Play my part Look after someone special Become a parent Share my values with others, help those who need it Break up all the negative things inside me Know what other people want, help them get it When I wake up each morning I would like to remember my dreams Understand art more than I do Lose my fear of creepy crawlies Learn to drive Learn to write left handed (why not?

So, two short reviews in a row. I had the day off work and went to see “Rust And Bone” this afternooon. It’s the new film by Jacques Audiard, who directed “A Prophet” – one of my favourite films of the last five years. “Rust And Bone” is a love story about Ali, a sexually feckless security guard who is struggling to look after his young son on his own, and Stéphanie (played by second most beautiful woman in the world, Marion Cotillard), who is injured while working as a co-ordinator of killer whale displays at an ocenarium.

I went to see “Skyfall” last night and I really enjoyed it. I knew nothing about the plot, mostly because I had avoided all discussion of the plot with people who had already seen it and I even avoided reviews as so many these days seem to just rattle off plot points, instead of discussing what makes the movie any good. With that in mind I will obviously try not to give away any of the plot in this brief review.

It has been a strange month and I found that I didn’t listen to a lot of new music. I have been a bit down and when that’s the case I tend to take refuge in music that I know well, stuff that cheers me up. I have listened to last month’s fave a lot, Nelly Furtado’s “The Spirit Indestructible”. I said a lot of nice things about it but it probably didn’t come over in my writing just how much I really liked it.

Tonight, despite feeling a bit under the weather, I went to Stevenage to watch Portsmouth play a League One game at the Lamex Stadium. In addition, I met a “person off the internet” for the second time in a week – this time Tom, a friend of a friend from Facebook: our shared passions being Portsmouth FC and really cool music. We met at King’s Cross and caught a packed train to Stevenage, a non-descript dormitory town that was even more non-descript than I remember St Albans being.

This is another mathematics post that does not actually feature any equations or graphs. It is intended to set the way clear for writing regularly about nonlinear systems. This in itself is a precursor to writing more about mathematical biology as biological systems are inherently complex and nonlinear. I am reading P. G. Drazin’s textbook on Nonlinear Systems and this post is a glossary of terms from the start of the book laid down here because I wanted to remember how to typeset definition lists in Markdown (though in the end I (ab)used <h4> tags because it looked better).

I had a bit more time to listen to this month’s albums because I was on holiday for two weeks. I didn’t manage to write about them while on holiday though! In fact I bought and listened to a few more, but I will save them for next month. The albums I will discuss now (in order bought) are: Four Tet “Pink” The xx “Coexist” Nelly Furtado “The Spirit Indestructible” Grizzly Bear “Shields” It’s quite a diverse collection and, Four Tet apart, quite song based.

Over my holiday I read “Even The Dogs” by Jon McGregor. I’ve not quite finished it yet but that will at least prevent me from giving away spoilers. I am not sure I would want to give any spoilers anyway because it is unrelentingly grim so far. Perhaps there is a happy ending but both you and I will have to read it to find out. I was introduced to Jon McGregor by the book group I was part of during my PhD.

Although I have put off finishing my UNO game for over eighteen months, I thought I would get started with another pet project of mine: making a Carcassonne game. This is not a serious affair, there is an excellent app of Carcassonne available for those of you who have iOS devices (it works particularly well on the iPad). The game just strikes me as having the right level of complexity to be a taxing yet attainable project.

It’s rather spooky but shortly after deciding to write about Nelly Furtado’s “Folklore” as the next understated classic, I found out that she has a new album out this week. As a result, I have been listening to a lot of her music while writing this post, and I’ve been enjoying it too. As always with these choices of mine, “Folklore” is a record that I can link to particular events and emotions in my life and so I guess my perception of it is coloured by that.

Album Digest August 2012 is also from the stack of albums that I mentioned last month. I chose this selection (along with the Passion Pit album) because the colours looked good together in the mosaic of covers that I make each month. Last month’s digest was about the right amount of detail so this will be another briefer digest. These are all good albums but not ones that will change your life, they’ll just happily sit alongside it.

“The Gone-Away World” is a novel by Nick Harkaway. It’s about a world slightly askew to our own in which the powers-that-be have deigned to unleash a weapon that simply wipes the enemy out of existence. Unfortunately the enemies also have the same weapon and there are terrible consequences to the extent that the very fabric of reality is threatened. If you don’t already know what reification means, you will by the end.

“I see the people working and see it working for them.” (Sat In Your Lap) The Dreaming by Kate Bush is a strange 1982 album that many believed had destroyed her career. Two weeks before her first ever performance of “Running Up That Hill”, the NME had written an editorial asking whether she had burnt herself out completely. Obviously “Running Up That Hill” (recently used to great effect in the Olympic Closing Ceremony) and the parent album “The Hounds Of Love” that followed showed that she had plenty more up her sleeve.

Just a short album digest this month. I bought a stack of CDs and am parcelling them out over the next few months (together with important additional releases as they crop up). This is in the hope that I can write more considered pieces about each one. This month I’ve grouped together albums with monochrome covers and a BT album from June that I found out about recently. These albums are not just linked by their artwork, they also form a cohesive whole.

Three fantastic albums for Album Digest June 2012: Saint Etienne Words and Music by Saint Etienne Liars WIXIW Hot Chip In Our Heads This month is a curious selection in that the albums are all by bands that I already own a few records by. When there is so much other directly related material that you can write about, it makes focussing on the album in hand quite difficult. I am always thinking up rankings and comparisons.

This post is about the films of Wes Anderson. I am no expert, I’ve just watched them all recently (inspired by seeing “Moonrise Kingdom”) and spotted a some similarities and differences between the films and I thought it would be fun to write about them. My appearance on Mastermind with “The Films of Wes Anderson” as my specialist subject will have to wait for now. Feel free to add to the discussion in the comments.

More books to add to the “University of life” course list. From top to bottom: I picked up “Generation X” for 50p in a charity shop in Tintagel. “Everything Is Going To Be OK” is a picture book full of inspirational mottos. “The Happiness Hypothesis” is the most useful and interesting book that I have read in a long while. I decided to read “How To Write A Sentence” as an alternative to Strunk and White’s “The Elements Of Style” which, while useful, can be a little stuffy!

As indicated by my reading list posted a couple of months ago (which has since been added to here), I’ve started to try to read more about the things that I felt that I did not understand so well. Most notably perhaps is this book “on love” by Helen Fisher. Lest there is any innuendo it is not a book about technique nor does it attempt to explain love to those who have never known it, instead it assumes that we have all been there.

This arrived on Monday and I thought I would give it a post of its own because at over 3 hours of music, I am unlikely to do more than dip into it before writing the album digest next week. It is a far bigger and more enjoyable artefact than I thought it was going to be, so it probably deserves special attention for that reason too. CAN are a German (“Krautrock”) band that I got into about four years ago after my interest in the genre was sparked by the “Neu!

Another book from the “university of life” pile (though not in the picture), “Gonzo” is the biography of Hunter S. Thompson in graphical form. In case you don’t know his work, Hunter S. Thompson was a journalist who invented the so-called “gonzo” style. This was basically to rock up at some major event and become embedded within it, usually writing up a long form piece from an outsider perspective. He was particularly famous for his work on the Hell’s Angels and Richard Nixon’s campaign for presidential re-election in 1972.

Tonight I avoided the first half of the football along with my friend Albert Jan and we went to watch “Moonrise Kingdom” at the wonderful Everyman cinema in Hampstead. It was a real treat in every sense. To start with, the Everyman is a lovely cinema. It is quite expensive but you do get what you pay for: a comfortable seat in a great theatre and the chance to watch more than just the latest blockbusters (though it shows those too).

Say what? We’re allowing compilations now? Yes. Why not? A good mix is as much an artistic statement as a full-blown single artist album. It takes a lot of skill to get from A to B and keep everything on the boil in between. This Fabric mix by The Amalgamation Of Soundz is one of my favourites because it is a downtempo (but, crucially, not too downtempo) compilation delivered with flair and using what I consider to be unconventional sources (soundtracks, tribute albums, hip-hop) to do it.

Four albums for Album Digest May 2012: Jack White Blunderbuss One Little Plane Into The Trees Beach House Bloom Oxia Tides Of Mind The April album digest was rather short on songs, so this month I decided to look for albums that were more based around songs not tracks. Electronic music is relatively easy to write about: the music is often simple (but not always), there are recognisable structures and genres (but not always), and there are conventions that are adhered to (but not always).

A mostly instrumental month with a comeback from Orbital, an excellent remix collection from Battles, an amazing movie documenting a live performance by the Chemical Brothers and Austin Wintory’s soundtrack to the game Journey. Orbital Wonky Battles Dross Glop The Chemical Brothers Don’t Think Austin Wintory Journey (Original Soundtrack) Orbital Wonky I am quite keen on Orbital, though perhaps not as keen as I am on the similarly named Orb. I think I have got all the Orbital albums, mostly bought on eBay after the fact.

A hefty reading list that should keep me occupied into the summer. A friend on facebook asked “What course is that for?”, to which I replied “It’s for one of the modules I am doing at the university of life.” This response was quite popular.

Sit back and let it happen, / Let us take your time away. Nearly God is Tricky’s second album, which was released under a different name either because Island rejected it as the follow-up to Maxinequaye or because it came too quickly after and Tricky just wanted it released. I had this album before Maxinequaye because back then it wasn’t as easy to go back and catch up with albums that you had missed as it is now.

The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon was written in 1956 and tells of the experiences of West Indian men moving to London for work. It has been described as the definitive novel about the experiences of the Windrush settlers. The narrative centres on a man named Moses who was one of the first to come to London and finds himself the first port of call for many subsequent immigrants: It look to old Moses that he hardly have time to settle in the old Brit’n before all sorts of fellars start coming straight to his room in the Water when they land up in London from the West Indies, saying that so and so tell them that Moses is a good fellar to contact, that he would help them get place to stay and work to do.

I pay to have this blog up and running. That is, I pay for the space where it is stored and I pay for the name. I have to look after all the files and plug-ins, I have to perform all the updates and optimise the database tables. All this is great fun but wouldn’t it be cheaper to slap the mattischro.me address onto a hosted WordPress.com account? Well, yes it would.

Five albums for Album Digest March 2012 Fanfarlo Rooms Filled With Light The Shins Port Of Morrow Grails Deep Politics New Build Yesterday Was Lived And Lost Scuba Personality A nice collection of albums this month - things usually pick up in March after a slow period after Christmas. One of these is a “catch-up” (the album by Grails) but apart from that one, everything else was released in the last five weeks or so… I should probably have included the album by Racehorses that I bought on my birthday but I will have to leave that for next month as I haven’t listened to it that much.

Among Fields of Crystal / Wind in Lonely Fences I have written about a fair number of ambient albums in this series (and there are at least two more to come!) but perhaps none are as unobtrusive as this one by Howard Budd and Brian Eno. It’s a subtle collection of music that sits at the margins of your consciousness: for a long time it was the music that I turned to when I could not sleep but I could just as easily imagine it as (ahem!

One EP and three albums for Album Digest February 2012: Burial Kindred EP John Talabot fIN Lilacs & Champagne Lilacs & Champagne The 2 Bears Be Strong Last February was a pretty good month for song based albums, although the likes of Radiohead and James Blake provided plenty of electronic noodling in and around their song structures. (Interestingly, out of the two out-and-out song based albums, one was one of the worst albums of the year and the other one of the best).

Ages ago I set out to write a post for each of JG Ballard’s novels. In fact it is the oldest post on this blog. Most of the novels (I don’t have the two autobiographical novels Empire Of The Sun or The Kindness Of Women and the late period novel Milennium People) are sat in a row on top of my broken bookshelf, part of the weight there that bowed outer frame of the unit and made the inner shelves collapse.

Five albums to see in the new year: FOE “Bad Dream Hotline” Leila “U & I” Diagrams “Black Light” Pyramids & Horseback “A Throne Without A King” FabricLive 61 mixed by Pinch FOE Bad Dream Hotline I listened to “Bad Dream Hotline” about four times thinking “who does her voice remind me of?”. In the end I realised it was Sophie Ellis-Bextor, though in parts she sounds like KT Tunstall too.

I got into Début via a cassette from the library, much like I did with Together Alone by Crowded House. I suppose it is less obscure than many of my choices for this strand but I do think that Post is more well-known (because of It’s Oh So Quiet, which we shall mention here only briefly) and that Homogenic is probably more popular among her fans. What I really like about Début though, as much as the album itself, is the panoply of remixes and alternative versions that surround the release.

Once upon a time there was a man who loved to paint. He studied the art and craft of painting for many years. He chose to invest his time and energy into creating the most realistic portraits that he could paint. For him the joy came not from completing the paintings but the process of recreating the real world with the strokes of his brush. For many years he continued to study the art of painting.

Dreams Of A Life is a documentary about Joyce Vincent, a woman who was found in her flat three years after her death surrounded by wrapped christmas presents and with the TV still on. £2400 in arrears on her rent, she was discovered by bailiffs who forced the door down. The film attempts to work out happened to Joyce by interviewing people who knew her. In two other strands that unfold in parallel, various events from her life are re-enacted along with the clearing of her flat by forensics officers.