Well after weeks and years of activity I have finally decided that I am going to start regularly updating Another Catastrophe again.

 In the past year I have moved from Brighton to The Netherlands, and in the rush of settling in/finding a job/etc, this blog got pretty neglected. 

To start off with here is a round-up of free music that can be found scattered across the web.

 Italians Do It Better have a download link for the track Desire, an outtake from there recent album ii here.

Canadian noise/skronk/no-wave revialists AIDS Wolf have a download version of a recent tour only tape up on their blog.

Lefse Records (home of hyped to death, pitchfork-beloved, ‘chillwave’ group Neon Indian) have  a free label sampler for download (featuring the aforementioned group) here.

 WFMU’s Free Music Archive is stuffed full of great stuff ranging from Lucky Dragons to Foot Village.

Finally, Jean Michel Basquiat and Michael Holman’s early 80s, NY-based noise band (latterly featuring Vincent Gallo) have a bunch of tracks up here . 

…and is apparently fronting a new campaign for Lóreal Elvive.

Trickledownblog has uploaded several songs onto Youtube from a Live Skull set at CBGBS in 1986. I definitely think the pre-Thalia Zedek incarnation of the band was the best.

Now if someone would only find some old footage of UT.

I write the above rather optimistically, because despite the best will in the world, I probably will almost immediately break the promise I made to myself and not keep this blog updated.

So I moved from Brighton in the UK to Nijmegen back in June 2008. I never actually thought that it would be something I’d ever manage to pull off, but I did finally. That should have been something to be pleased with at least. However, as I’ve now realised since moving, life doesn’t really change very much whatever country you are in. There are still the same old mundane things that need to be taken care of and experienced.  As for my world view, rather than being broadened it seems to have narrowed and I feel a lot thicker (I blame the internet here actually). I still seem to get bogged down with the same old issues and lack of self-confidence. Not that I suppose having such shaky Dutch helps here either.

I tell myself this sometimes as I wander around the streets of Nijmegen. “Wow! “I’m living in the Netherlands, how exciting is that”? Despite this I still can’t shake myself to the levels of excitement that the situation seems to require. Most of the time I wander around with my music on listening to Pink Section, or The Raincoats or The Shop Assistants, and think to myself: “I’m probably the only person in this whole town who is listening to this at the moment.”   

I don’t think that it helps that I actually work in one of the shittiest jobs I’ve ever done at the moment. The Netherlands is a much more slow-paced society than the UK. The shops are shut on Sundays (apart from once a month), and often are on Monday mornings too. People generally work a lot less hours as well. Not in my job though. I work 40 hours a week and get half an hour for lunch. If I still lived in the UK I wouldn’t do anything like this, but as my Dutch is only rather basic I need a job where all the work is in English. Unfortunately there aren’t many of those in the East of the Netherlands to come by. Of course the fact that I work 40 hours a week means when I do get spare time I have to squeeze all the stuff into it that I didn’t get chance to do for the rest of the day. It is also rather detrimental to me learning Dutch, thus keeping me stuck in the same bloody job!

Once of the few things that I do actually enjoy at the moment is cycling to work. Rather sadly it is the high point of my day often. I feel something approaching freedom as I bike to and from work (25 minutes each way).  As the cycle paths are so good it’s also safe to listen to music. Of course even when I do go on the roads I keep the music on. It’s unlikely but even if I did manage to end up getting killed under a bus it wouldn’t be so much of a tragedy, not really (I’m being pragmatic here, not expressing a death wish, or giving vent to ‘woe is me feelings’). Simply put, I think that managing to get run over by a bus while listening to Teenage and Jesus or The Jerks is one of the best ways you go. Indeed it’s rather a privileged form of death, and a finer death than 99 percent of people in the history of humanity have ever experienced.

in the new year. Although i said that in September…

I made an animation for one of my old de/V/oid songs.

who can spot the subtle socio-political subtext?

Like me, Grange Hill the BBC’s school-based childrens series, turns thirty this year, unlike me it is being killed off by BBC bosses who have decided that it is no longer relavant to today’s youth. Rather peculiar that, given the fact that kids, do indeed still go to school.

The fact of the matter is, of course, the fact that Grange Hill (like Top of the Pops before it) has been deliberately strangled by bad writing, and a production team who you can just smell are milky-white and middle-class.

I guess I was lucky to grow up in the eighties where it wasn’t felt necessary to patronise the viewer, like so much of today’s BBC output does. Eastenders in the eighties was full of grit and realism and colour. Today it is a tragi-comic farce of poor writing, terrible character development and atrocious continuity.

So no, I won’t be watching today’s final episode of Grange Hill.

Oh, and while we are on the subject of dumbing down – can anyone tell me why the BBC news appears to be aimed at mentally disabled, Daily Mail readers?

Here for old times sake is the origianl opening credits. I always liked the bit with the sausage.

Mofungo were one of the many bands that sprung from the loins of No Wave, and went on to record a slew of records throughout the eighties. There is a rather nice piece on them on Perfect Sound Forever.

Anyhow there last unreleased tracks are available for free download, from former band member, Willie Klein, here.