Since Thee Oh Sees start their UK tour tonight in Liverpool (then Leeds on the 7th, Cardiff (8), London (9), and Camber Sands ATP at some point between the 10th and the 12th), today seems a good time to post this excellent piece about the band by Lou Barlow.

Been meaning to post this piece for a while, since the whole clandestine operation around the new Boards Of Canada album, “Tomorrow’s Harvest”, began. It’s an interview I did with the duo in February 2002, around the release of “Geogaddi”. NME billed it erroneously as “Boards Of Canada’s first ever interview” at the time, which was pushing it a bit…

Seeing as how Matthew E White and his band are on tour in the UK this week (I’m seeing him play in London tomorrow), it seemed a good time to post the feature about my visit to Richmond a couple of months ago. I’ve put a few links to stuff in here, too, so you can get a taste of the really interesting music coming out of the scene that revolves around White. Long read, this one…

Not sure how many of you braved the scrums of Ebay dealers on Record Store Day, but one of the more interesting things to come out of the whole business this year was the surreptitious return of Boards Of Canada.

The new issue of Uncut arrives in UK shops on Thursday, though perhaps a few subscribers, with a prevailing wind, might have already received their copies. Lots of interesting stuff in there, including new interviews with The National, Laura Marling, Deborah Harry and Todd Rundgren; The Eagles, The Waterboys, Deep Purple, Mark Mulcahy, Kurt Vile; reviews of Fleetwood Mac, Vampire Weekend, REM, Van Dyke Parks and Jandek; respects paid to Jason Molina, Andy Johns and Phil Ramone; and a brief exchange with the now notorious Michelle Shocked.

It’s Record Store Day on Saturday; a kind of weird, but necessary I guess, annual event that’s become a critical point in release schedules. I’ve been going through the lists of releases at recordstoreday.com and thought it might be worth picking out a few things that are worth looking out for. Increasingly, a fair amount of the day’s business is built on canny catalogue management aimed at collectors (especially vinyl fetishists), and there are a bunch of things here that fall roughly into that sector:

Strange juxtapositions and all that, but please have a listen to the Date Palms track and, in the unlikely event you haven’t been near the internet for the past few days, the Daft Punk clip. Nile Rodgers’ expression is a thing of joy, among other things.

A momentous week, one way or another, though I can’t help wishing the resonant and thought-through fury of “Tramp The Dirt Down” was heading into the Top Ten instead of “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead”.

John Dwyer has the sort of discography so deep and complicated that one suspects even he must have trouble keeping up with himself. As a consequence, it might be a mistake to try and divine paths and trends in career which his encompassed Coachwhips, Pink and Brown, Landed, Yikes, Burmese, The Hospitals, Zeigenbock Kopf and Sword + Sandals (according to Wikipedia, anyway, if I can emphasise my spotty knowledge any more) as well as Thee Oh Sees.

A fairly eclectic selection here this week, including some great proto-Takoma guitarists from the 1920s, chamber music reimaginings of the Kompakt back catalogue, that lost Romanian kosmische record you’ve always been looking for, and Prince making a stoner jam out of “Let’s Go Crazy” (which you can hear below, along with a bunch of interesting other stuff).