The Listening Club - 29th May 2016

Evening all,

Hope all is satisfactory with regard to your existences. Quiet weekend here in Amsterdam, after the gig frenzy of last weekend, we're taking it easy, doing a little gardening and what have you, and enjoying the sun when it decides to give us the benefit of its undivided attention. So all par for the course, as you'd expect.

Back in #LC land last week, @mrhig was in the chair, and had everyone reaching for the kleenex by the sounds of things with his pick of Antony & The Johnsons "I Am A Bird Now". A classic, to be sure. Many thanks to Matt for the pic and for skipping the frisbee north to @cakehugga, who's here with this week's intro...

"Hello Listening Clubbers, today’s choice is one that has been in the back of my mind as a potential pick a few times but has always been nudged out by another choice.

The album is in an 80s style and pays tribute to the life story of a powerful man who rose from rags to riches to disgrace. I love the guest artists, 80s vibe and catchy choruses. I’ve had this album for years and still love it.

Hope the “emotioniest” songs on it are as good as Chas n Dave!! Put on your 80s sunglasses and enjoy :)"

Okaydoke. Direct download is here, and the HearThis stream is...



See you at 8pm BST (GMT+1).

The Listening Club - 22nd May 2016

Hey there,

Hope all is good and well with you all. In the midst of a gigorama weekend here in Amsterdam, as I mentioned, seeing LV on Friday, and Radiohead & Holly Herndon last night, all flipping great. Tonight off to conclude the weekend with Plaid and The Southbank Gamelan Players, which should be equally wunderbar, I hope.

Note that next week, being end of the month, could be a vortex - however, as we seem to be struggling a bit for decent original themes, I think it best that we make the vortexes optional from now on - if someone's got a good idea, please shout it out and we'll see if it floats, but if not, we'll carry on with regular picks. Seem fair? I hope so.

Last week @RougeForever folked us with her pick of Eliza Carthy's "Neptune", which hit the Sunday spot with most folks. Many thanks to Liz for the pick and for flipping the frisbee across the room to @MrHig, who is, natch, here with this week's intro...

"Are any of us the culmination of all our potential at birth? How about upon reaching adulthood? All we ever do is change, and that's a necessary thing, something to be welcomed, even celebrated. Even to someone like me who is deathly afraid of change of any sort. I see who I am now, conceptually at least, as the best version of myself. It's a pleasant ideal anyway. Looking back at yourself a few years back, a decade back, a few decades back… cringing should be the natural impulse. Just as you're never the pinnacle of what you can be, and looking back at yourself in a few years time, you'll probably recoil in awkwardness at who you are now.

I had a few possible options for my pick this time. I had an initial thought, dismissed it, dithered between two other options (those of you who saw my Twitter poll about Americana Folk and Baroque Pop will now know what that was about, if it wasn't clear at the time), before, eventually, returning to my first instinct.

Because, not to put to fine a point on it, when I was trying to choose between the other options I could feel something wasn't right and it wasn't the way things were meant to be. The real choice - the only option, really - was staring me in the face the whole time.

So this week's pick is about metamorphosis, about transformation, about improvement, about realisation, about being the best version of yourself, about being true to who you've always known you are, instinctually.

It's also Baroque Pop (with a bit of soul thrown in). Sorry about that."

Okaydoke. Direct download is here, and the HearThis stream is...


Hope to see you at 8pm BST (GMT+1)

The Listening Club - 15th May 2016

Hello folks,

Hope you're fine. Amsterdam weather has jumped back to cold grot, but that's not bothering us too much as we're having an easy weekend gently sorting plans for Glastonbury and taking deep breaths before next weekend's chunk of gigorama (LV, Radiohead, Plaid with Gamelan Orchestra and Psychic TV, since you ask).

Last week that @JimMcCauley was in the chair and hit a home run with his choice of Manu Chao's "Clandestino", making for some groovy sunday sofa shuffling times. Many thanks to Jim for the pick and also for sailing the frisbee across to @RougeForever, who has this to tell you:


"I've picked a folk album.  Deal with it."

Right then. Direct download is here, and the HearThis stream is:


See you at 8pm BST (GMT+1)

The Listening Club - 8th May 2016

Greetings folks and may the eighth be with you. Or something.

Well then, I do wonder sometimes that my hellos here always seem to be followed by some sort of weather report (*does jazz bass fingers*), but hello-o sunshine! Last week was a gloomy kings day, frost and hailstorms, this week: break out the electric fan and fetch the iced coffee. Keeps you on your toes anyway, whilst you wait for the new Radiohead album to arrive. Or not, as the case may be, as it seems to have arrived prematurely as I type.

Last week @nessiest was in the chair, and smoothed out the week's end with Edward Sharp & The Magnetic Zeroes new album "PersonA", which met with approval all round I think. Many thanks to Ness for the pick and for flipping the frisbee a whole five feet across to @JimMcCauley, who was sitting on our sofa at the time. He's not now, but sent this in, by way of introduction...

"Tempting though it is to subject you all to my current obsession tonight, at two hours and twenty minutes the whole of Hamilton would be pushing things just a little bit, and as a lyrically and musically dense sung-through hip-hopera (I've genuinely seen it described as that, which raised a smile) it defies editing down to best-of selection; very few of the songs make much sense out of context. 

Instead, then, here's an older obsession of mine. Staying in a very cool and groovy little Amsterdam guest house back in 2000, I needed some music to go with a box of psilocybe mexicana, so I found a record store on the Leidsestraat and picked up a couple of CDs: Underworld's 'Everything, Everything', and this album, the two of them providing an excellent soundtrack for a few hours of realisation of the interconnectedness of everything, and observing the grain of the wooden floor rearranging itself into lines of intricate runic glyphs.

I'd heard bits of it before at work, usually accompanied by 'What the hell is this?' comments; the sort of reaction that immediately makes me mentally file something  as worth checking out in full, and it was definitely worth it in this case. It's an artist who's a very big deal in plenty of non-English-speaking countries, but more of a cult thing around these parts. Possibly a bit Guardianista, and definitely one from the world music section. I'm not sorry. Enjoy!"

Okaydoke. Direct download is here, and the HearThis stream is....


See you at 8pm BST (GMT+1)

The Listening Club - 1st May 2016

Hey folks,

Hope you're all doing fine. Happy mayday, international Dawn Chorus day, International workers day, labour day or whatever else takes your fancy. - tapping this out a day ahead of usual, as tomorrow I'll be nipping across the Netherlands to see the Bosch 500 exhibition, accompanied by @nessiest and a visiting @JimMcCauley.

Last week, @saucer was in the chair, and sent us on a bizzare new-retro trip courtesy of "Heim Und Garten" by Mängelexemplar, which hit that oblique 80s Germanic spot rather efficiently. Thanks to him for the pick, and for flipping the frisbee back here to @nessiest, who's ready with the intro...

"2016 has been a bitter harvest. 

After a reflective weekend I set out on Monday to find stuff from artists  busy making, creating, inspiring, making music to look forward to. I found three albums, all relatively new, all of which could easily have been my pick. This is one of them.

I knew nothing about the artist before hearing this week's pick. It has a gentle pace, pays tribute to influences with grace and humour, and it grabbed me and held my attention. It's probably the most introspective of my three standout listens from this week. Maybe 2016 might turn out to be a decent vintage after all."

Okaydoke. Direct download is here, and the HearThis stream is...


Hope to see you at 8pm GMT (BST+1) for the playback!

The Listening Club - 24th April 2016

Hey everyone,

Yeah well, that came as a complete shock didn't it. As with Bowie, I certainly don't need to wax lyrical about Prince here, it's pretty evident how important he was to so many people, myself included, and how much he will be missed. Even if his recorded output was seriously patchy from the late eighties onward, his live shows were always truly phenomenal, and, as @nessiest pointed out, unlike DB, he's been denied the chance of a glorious final recorded act. So very fucking sad indeed, and combined with the loss the day before of Negativland's Richard Lyons, which will mean less to most, but means a hell of a lot to me, I'm still feeling rather brain-frazzled after three days. Too many heroes gone.

Oddly, I forgot to kick off a vortex last week, and as there were no immediate suggestions, decided to go ahead with regularly scheduled programming, which still stands. However, if you want to do a #purplevortex next week, tweet me and we'll do one. It's up to you guys. Right now things seem a little raw to be paying immediate tribute.

Last week @samsmitter was in the chair, and played a fine hand in the shape of Laura Cantrell's "When The Roses Bloom Again", which mellowed out the evening splendidly. Thanks to Sam for the pick, and for sailing the frisbee across to @saucer, to whom apologies must be given for the vortex spin-around, and the additional purple-hued dilemmas. But it's business as usual, so over to him for the intro...

"(Although I was living in Minneapolis in the late seventies as Prince was playing around town as a local, I was into other sorts of music and art. And I remain supremely unqualified to pay tribute in words or with a suitable pick, so I humbly leave that to others. To wit, today's pick is a million miles from the week's devastating news, news that prompted @oatmeal to write on Wednesday, "I'm starting to suspect that George R.R. Martin is the author behind 2016."

So. If we can pretend for 40 minutes that it's just another week and maybe that time travel is a thing... here's what I wrote, for today, last Monday....)

In honor of the recent Record Store Day, this evening's artist was tipped to me in a tiny record store in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo (to define "tiny": to pass another customer, one of you has to briefly walk outside). That store, Ned's, specializes in Japanese noise. But while I was there one evening the owner's daughter happened in and I asked (expecting she had her own taste, not her dad's) if she'd offer recommendations. One of them was these guys, that we're about to hear. 

Today's pick is the band's [redacted], released [redacted]. It's lovingly stylized and expertly, deliciously anachronistic. If this is your first time hearing them, I hope you can start to enjoy their brilliant artistry, musicality, and humor half as much as I do."

Okaydoke. Direct download is here, and the HearThis stream is...

The Listening Club - 24th April 2016 by listeningclub on hearthis.at

See you at 8pm BST (GMT+1).

The Listening Club - 17th April 2016

Hey folks,

Hope all is fine with everyone. Another mostly sunny weekend here in Amsterdam (yeah, I know I keep mentioning it, but this place usually grayer than gray for the most part, so it's remarkable), soundtracked by the webcast from Coachella, which has delivered a few gems amongst a lot of landfill indie and dance cheese. (Currently Ice Cube is declaring it a good day in the background as I type.) So... on y va.

Last week @akx was in the chair, and paused unpacking his new abode long enough to treat the assembled to Ott's "Hallucinogen In Dub", which seemed to chill folks quite satisfactorily. Thanks to Aarni for the pick, and for spinning the frisbee back down to London where @samsmitter is waiting with this week's intro....

"About 15 years ago I was living in America, sitting at a desk doing a tedious corporate job for most of the day. The internet was still young enough at that time that I was amazed and grateful that I could put on a pair of headphones at my desk, listen to John Peel’s show, and be transported home for a couple of hours. The show was still my most reliable source of hearing new music (nowadays its you people), and almost every show I would hear something that made me go “who was that?”. One show I remember well was when I heard the White Stripes for the first time, along with the artist I have picked today, in the same show.

It was John Peel’s enthusiastic endorsement that made this artist popular in the UK, among those who like this sort of thing at least. I later read that he described her first album (released today on vinyl for the first time, along with a BBC sessions album, which is one reason I am picking this) as the most enjoyable of the last 10 years or something. This is her second proper album, and just as good as the first in my opinion, if less celebrated. Its not really typical “John Peel” music (if such a thing exists) as its very conventional, easy listening kind of stuff. But it is full of great songs.

I’ve missed a few Listening Club sessions over the years but I also think this might be the first album we have had in this genre. For some time I have wanted to pick something that would prove to everyone that I own music recorded after 1979 – well now I have, but its not exactly Deep Scratch Cyber-Dub, in fact it sounds like it could have been recorded in the 1950s, production quality aside. I hope you enjoy it, but if you fall asleep, I won’t be offended.. Sam x"

Okidoke. Direct download is here, and the HearThis stream is...

Listening Club 17 April 2016 by samsmitter on hearthis.at

See y'all at 8pm BST (GMT+1)