Kevin Maher blunders badly in today’s Times two-star verdict on the movie 21. Under the headline Not just a poker face he writes,

Unfortunately, for large chunks of the Spacey poker drama 21 the scenes are all about what the scenes are about - ie playing poker.

Unfortunately for Maher the film is not about poker, but blackjack. This is rather like reviewing a movie about rugby; thinking it being about football.

The editor must have told him though, the online version of Maher’s review on 21 has the right game.

The excellent NonPop podcasts presented by Scott Unrein are back in tune (and with a new design) after almost almost a year of hiatus. The music is mostly modern classical.

Time to dust of my own microphone and get Acecast running again.

The Battles are namedropped in both a Sunday Times piece on underground dance music and are strangely called “post-punk revivalists” by Emma Warren in The Observer’s 50 top albums for 2007.

Mirrored rightly belongs in a year end list, but let’s call the music for what it is. Prog rock. Mirrored is late King Crimson (Discipline) , Bill Nelson’s Red Noise (Sound on Sound) with a dash of Gentle Giant vocal effects. Prog rock updated for a new audience.

Download Blogariddims 31, MP3@192Kbs, 60:00 minutes>

This is one hour of straightforward avant-garde electronic goodies, treated and non-treated voices, some phonography, computer code noise and the old pause signal from the Norwegian radio. There’s at least two tracks running at the same time throughout the one hour mix and if you don’t like it at first, try it again later or when in a different mood — it might grow on you.

I started out with several ideas for my second layered mix for the Blogariddims project (an “English Organic” mix with ie Virginia Astley and John Foxx’s The Garden? an all-female mix?). After compiling tracks for a couple of months and reducing the running list to around 20 tracks I ended up with a pretty much full-on electronic mix to go with my Blogariddims 9 effort.

Blogariddims 9 consisted of 100% Norwegian tracks; but on this one I have restrained myself to a handful of current homegrown artists like Nils Petter Molvær and last year’s big releases from 120 Days and Lindstrøm.

The exception is Arne Nordheim’s pause signal/music for the Norwegian Broadcasting from 1970. Arne and the recording engineer were working on a different project. The engineer had a dental emergency, so Arne decided to have a play with the kit in the studio to make his entry for the 1969 competition for the broadcaster’s pause music. It is one of the earliest electronic pieces I can remember hearing as a kid (Hot Butter’s Popcorn being another one). Even if the quality of my sample is not the best I wanted to include it (I make these mixes mainly for my own enjoyment).

I’ve put in some classic modern music from Stockhausen and Reich plus a voice piece from Bernard Parmegiani (unknown to me a month ago, but an editor’s choice at the newly discovered avantgardeproject.org). There’s also an extract from a longer interview that Stockhausen did in the US in 1964.

Noise, found noise and flat out experiments. I like it. So for added spice there’s JJ Burnel’s Triumph Bonneville revving up, Pete Shelley’s computer code for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (sounding like old-fashioned “modem breath”) and Bernard Szajner’s (Zed) reversed half-speed track from the tapes used for the recording of Visons of Dune (mixed with Fremen from this album. Vangelis is probably best known for his more accessible works (and soundtracks), but I remember buying Beauborg on cassette around 1980 and it made a lasting impression of being enclosed in an electronic space, so here it is. Vangelis is currently involved in space issues of his own with the new Acropolis Museum.

The mix takes its title from Rachel Sweet’s debut Fool Around from 1978. An album I picked up a year later to go with Jona Lewie and Lene Lovich. The album (on white vinyl that does not exactly improve the audio) is varied (courtesy of producer/writer Liam Sternberg) and still quite charming. The standout track is It’s So Different Here. Although I doubt many of today’s kooky Scandinavian female artists (from Stina Nordenstam to Hafdis Huld) have heard of Rachel Sweet the song in some ways preempt their music with a good 30 years.

There’s also a long Harold Budd track (from a release on the short-lived Uniton label), Fripp’s Exposure and a free online tune from the wonderful Lomov.

I finish the mix with Anja Garbarek’s Stay Tuned again. It’s quite simply the best track Kate Bush never wrote and the perfect tune to finish a mix with.

Tracklisting.

• [00:06-03:56] Kakonita (Deathprod Mix) - Nils Petter Molvær (2001)
• [00:33-04:44] Croydon Streetnoise (phonography, soundtransit.nl)
• [00:39-08:19] part 4 of interview with Stockhausen (www.stockhausen.org)
• [02:56-13:38] Abandoned Cities - Harold Budd
• [06:23-09:43] Friday Temptation (Tone scene 1) - KH Stockhausen (www.stockhausen.org)
• [08:59-13:05] Kind of Pale - Lomov
• [09:52-10:22] Pause Signal for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation - Arne Nordheim
• [11:38-20:29] Come Out, Come Down, Fade Out, Be Gone - 120 Days
• [12:58-15:05] ZX Spectrum Code - Pete Shelley
• [15:26-24:16] Superficial Music - Bernard Szajner
• [20:45-24-52] Fremen - Bernard Szajner
• [24:25-28:57] Exposure - Robert Fripp
• [26:01-33:59] Monomoods - Maja Ratkje
• [31:37-34:28] It’s So Different Here - Rachel Sweet
• [33:30-42:38] Beabourg - Vangelis
• [34:35-39:06] Triumph - JJ Burnel
• [40:07-46:26] Ponomatopees II - Bernard Parmegiani (www.avantgardeproject.org)
• [43:18-45:39] John Peel - Delia Derbyshire/Brian Hodgson (www.delia-derbyshire.org)
• [45:49-51:02] Further Into the Future - Lindstrøm
• [46:10-51:53] Pulses - Steve Reich
• [51:17-55:10] Why She Couldn’t Come - EST
• [51:43-54 :48] Sky Island (phonography, www.soundtransit.nl)
• [54 :48-59:04] Stay Tuned - Anja Garbarek
• [59:15-59:45] Pause Signal for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation- Arne Nordheim

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today.

The analog rig used to extract the sound from the grooves is near state-of-the-art, producing almost none of the tracking distortion or surface noise normally associated with LPs.

I am downloading the sampler/editor choice selections to get a taste for what this is (now that the NonPop podcasts have taken a break).

After a year’s break from podcasting at Acecast I have decided to revive the site and my half-hour shows of free and legal music. The tracklisting has been ready for months and it shows. One of the bands on the show, Headless, have split (ouch). Hopefully we’ll hear some of the members in new bands in the future (The Ivories broke up shortly after I found out about them as well).

The tracklisting is below, head over to Acecast to download the show or subscribe in iTunes. I’ll freshen it all up with pictures and download links in the days to come.

• Wildspot — Belbury Poly (signature tune)
• Danza 3 — Night-Time Epitome
• 21 to 35 — Boom Bip & Doseone
• Sway (demo) — Headless
• Acid Reprise — French Theory
• Sonic Infusion — Mudhoney
• Everybody Daylight — Brightblack Morning Light
• Dogwood Rust — Comets on Fire
• The Greatest — Cat Power
• London, Leicester Square, Musicians — Dallas Simpson (ambience)

Although I have never read Nobelist Naipul, I am with him on Jane Austen,

I thought halfway through the book, ‘Here am I, a grown man reading about this terrible vapid woman and her so-called love life.’

In a nice piece of symmetric marketing over the weekend Naipul is interviewed in The Sunday Times

“After nearly 170 years, starting with Dickens, everything that a novel could do has been done …” He pauses. “These are private views.”

and found over in The Guardian writing about Derek Walcott,

My copy of 25 Poems is beside me now. The cream soft cover is brown at the edges, though the pages with the poems are in fair condition. The very narrow spine is frayed: more the effect of bookshelf light than of handling. Fifty years on, I see more than I did in 1955.