Imp of the Perverse

The son of a socialist agitator and local hero, Grant Morrison was born in 1960, and grew up in Scotland with the mixed blessing that was an American submarine base nearby. For an activist, the...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/graphic-novel-grant-morrisons-lost.html

For anyone born in the 80s or later (I’m a ’79-er myself), it’s possible you think of the Furs as an also-ran with an awful name. If you happen to know they were on a major label for their ...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/psychedelic-furs-book-of-days-1989.html

Performance-poet, translator, editor, and arguably the most important anthology-creator of the 20th century, Jerome Rothenberg was born in 1931 in Brooklyn NY, the son of Jewish immigrants from P...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/poetry-jerome-rothenbergs-white-sun.html

Among the foremost writers of the American Deep South, Carson McCullers remains second only to William Faulkner, and has been compared to many of the finest writers in the English language. Gener...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/book-carson-mccullers-lost-masterpiece.html

God’s Mama, God’s Mama (SM Press), 2010 It’s tempting to use anaemic Reviewer’s Algebra for this – “Lydia Lunch fronts The Birthday Party”, say – because, God’s Honest Truth, i...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-gods-mama-gods-mama-sm-press-2010.html

The Triffids, Come Ride with Me: 10xCD BOX-SET (Domino) Way back at the beginning of the Britpop era, the Melody Maker published a paperback of Great Lost Albums, in which Andrew Mueller asked r...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-triffids-and-meditation-on.html

Lost albums of the 2000s As the sharks circle, it becomes apparent we’re going to need a bigger caveat for what constitutes a Great Lost Album… The 2000s was the decade when every serious...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-lost-albums-of-2000s.html

HARMONIA & ENO, Tracks and Traces ’76 (Groenland) For the uninitiated, HARMONIA were one of those legendary collaborations from the fertile period of Krautrock without which no Electro, Techno...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-harmonia-eno-tracks-and-traces-76.html

David Berman, The Portable February (Drag City) Fending off the obvious questions – Why review David Berman’s cartoons? Why review cartoons at all…? – it saves plenty of time to be able ...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/poetry-cartoons-silver-jews-frontman.html

Manic Street Preachers @ The Roundhouse, Camden May 28, 2009 It’s a strange ritual, the initiation by Electrical Audio, and only for the pure of heart. Shorn of overdubs, and naked but for you...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/gig-lost-songs-of-richey-manic-live.html

Cultural Amnesia, Enormous Savages (Klang Galerie) Ooh! A lost post-punk band whose handful of cassette-only releases (1981–1983) is now being made available. In theory, **Cultural Amnesia** s...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-various-minor-releases-re-issues.html

MUSIC: The Magnetic Fields, The Charm of the Highway Strip (1993) Given that so many of the artists tagged “Alt.Country” actually consider themselves Rock or Indie, and most grew up with Pun...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-magnetic-fields-charm-of-highway.html

Judged by its cover alone, Deceit (1981) is the great prophetic record of the era – the front depicts a scream beneath a mask that is a collage of: Mushroom-Cloud between-the-eyes; JFK & Khrusc...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/this-heat-deceit-1981.html

Welcome to your new favourite band… kinda like your old favourite band. Okay, so that’s subjectivity raised to the n-th degree, but The Whiskers – who formed through the mediation of a Fro...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/whiskers-war-of-currents-2009.html

Early Day Miners @ The Lexington, King’s Cross (Sunday Dec 6, 2009) EDM are heavy. Not ear-bleeding in their settings, or wall-of-sound in their lack of arrangement, but heavy in their emphas...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-edm-pt-ii-album-and-gig-review.html

For almost a decade, Daniel Burton has led Early Day Miners, who still feel like one of the best kept secrets in contemporary American independent music. To say that Burton approaches songwriting...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-early-day-miners.html

Marnie Stern, This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That (Kill Rock Stars) This review will try to avoid hyperbole about “tec...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-marnie-stern-this-is-it-and-i-am.html

Super XX Man, Volume XII: There’ll be Diamonds (Tender Loving Empire), Oct. 21 How do you feel about music by severely mentally ill people? No, really – I’m genuinely curious, and openin...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-super-xx-man-therell-be-diamonds.html

Running to just over twenty minutes (and therefore ineligible for any charts), the ‘Dreamland EP’ by Spencer Krug (trading under the name “Moonface”) is an appropriately sensuous suite in...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/on-other-side-of-sunset-rubdown.html

The Fall, dir. Tarsem Singh (Oct. 3rd 2008) By any standards, The Fall is among the most ambitious films ever made, and may well be the most visually stunning, to rival works by Fellini, Tarkovs...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2011/07/movie-fall-2008-dir-2008.html

Finally, it’s a matter of letting the mind relax, an appropriation of automatism replicating the process of discovering the world anew, Yes, but also replicating the fantasy that is a fantasy...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2010/03/pair-of-sketches.html

A Selection of Opuscules from 1999-2002 NEXT TIME THERE BETTER BE MISTAKES This, the Best of All Possible Worlds is once again under threat of being upgraded: Early projections show, next time ...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2010/02/best-revenge-excerpt1.html

Jean-Paul Sartre is at his desk, trying to concentrate. He’s more than a little hung-over, having spent the night with the Surrealists, and hangovers are more than a little problematic when you...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2010/02/trauma-and-foreplay.html

The homunculus is crawling on the floor of the study, crawling toward the bookshelves perhaps, for books to chew on, crawling over well-waxed (albeit warped) boards. The homunculus has no particu...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2010/01/homunculus.html

How do we continue to live in the houses where someone has been Possessed? How do we trust the words safely sandwiched in the books neatly ranked on the shelf not to be replaced with your own nam...

http://impverse.blogspot.com/2010/01/vr-how-to-break-home.html