Songs for swingin’ Bobcats! Dylan salutes the magic of Sinatra...

This week's big distraction has been what appears to be a crazy number of early Aphex Twin tracks accumulating on Soundcloud (I've added the link below). Among the new stuff, though, please try Bop English; the new solo project of James Petralli from White Denim.

Today (January 28, 2015), social media reliably informs me that Robert Wyatt is 70, which seems a reasonable justification for reposting this long and, I hope, interesting transcript of an interview I did with him at home in Louth back in 2007, a little before the marvellous “Comicopera” was released. It begins with Wyatt discussing, of all things, Big Brother...

Still at that stage of the year where I nearly type 2014 every time instead of 2015, but time moves on - swifter, perhaps, than Bjork for one would've liked this week, given how an unauthorised leak forced the release of "Vulnicura" a couple of months ahead of schedule.

Meet the garage-rock wunderkind at the heart of California's psych scene

1240: By the entrance to Somerset House on Waterloo Bridge, there is a shop called Knytta, where one can "create your own unique jumper and see it made in front of you."

March 2013, Richmond, Virginia. Matthew E White's Big Inner album has become a minor word-of-mouth sensation: a country-soul fantasia, saturated with lavish horn and string arrangements, mostly recorded in the attic of his Richmond house (You can read my 2013 interview with Matthew E White here).

Some fantastic new additions here, though it's been tough these past couple of days to navigate away from the playlist that Caribou posted on Youtube: 1,000 tracks that you're advised to play on shuffle. I keep getting Wire and J Dilla every time I dig in, but it's really a constant source of familiar pleasures and usefully contextualised new discoveries.