It felt good doing some entries which aren’t about music the other day.

Music blogging is accessible and addictive – you do get loads of feedback that you generally don’t for the other stuff. Plus I find it very easy to write about music, and quite hard to write the psychogeography/politics/occulture/analysis.

I guess this is because listening to music is relatively passive. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve fallen asleep on the train in the morning trying to make sense of some kind of heavy theoretical article (the precursor to a lot of my non-musical ramblings) but music doesn’t do that (unless it’s been a particularly rough night). Which has to be one of the attractions of doing a music blog.

There’s also a nice, accessible, community of people chucking out regular high quality rants on all things musical (Reynolds, TWANBOC, and all the sidebar massive). It’s (mostly) excellent stuff, the like of which will never appear in news-stand mags because it’s mainly about personality and not about shifting product.

Much as I love his writing, I do have some problems with the cult of Reynolds. It just becomes a bit too much like a weltanschauung (phew! It IS in the spell-checker).

At the moment there’s a load of comment re-appraising The Associates. Which I don’t really get. I mean, Billy MacKenzie had a fantastic voice and ‘Party Fears Two’ is a classic and all that, but I just don’t see the relevance. Plus I got the greatest hits (and biog) out of the library a while back and it just didn’t do anything for me. I guess if there’s no relevance it makes it nostalgia. Not that I have problem with nostalgia, but I see blogging as a way of stirring the pot, causing trouble and just asserting yourself, not as an idiosyncratic version of those ‘I love 1982’ list programmes. (oooh! Back in the knife drawer Miss Sharp!)

But yeah, I’m as guilty as anyone else with my long piece about Mark Stewart, surely? (And harking back to they halcyon days of Shaka or King Tubby…). Maybe I’m just beating myself up over not getting it together to write any hard as nails political stuff, but the MS piece hooks in with trends around dub and noise in music, with some asides about conspiracy theories, plagiarism and so on.

I guess that’s a fundamental reason for me to write about music – its accessibility. It allows you to raise ideas which are, in some way, subversive. And hopefully not in a clod-hopping ‘up the workers’ fashion.

[Tangent ahoy!] At the Association of Autonomous Astronauts intergalactic conference in Bologna, the AAA was lambasted by a group called the Men In Red (MIR). Their background was in heavy duty ultra-left theory like Toni Negri, and their critique was that the AAA, by trying to set up autonomous communities in outer space, would be exporting something called ‘micro-fascism’. I took this to mean that you couldn’t create new forms of society if you were coming from a world held in the thrall of capitalist relations (but Negri is another of my somnambulant influences, so I might well be wrong). I felt this had the stench of ‘original sin’ to it and said so. There followed a massive row at the conference which was ably translated by Mr Ricardo Balli (now of Sonic Belligeranza).

But it did all get me thinking about the ‘micro’ and it occurred to me that it’s maybe this area that primarily interests me. If there’s a common theme in all the projects I’ve been involved with it’s perhaps those little, almost undefinable areas of human interaction and existence – psychology, alienation, the subconscious, ambiences, (repressed) desires, occulture, psychogeography, gut reactions and so on.

And also how these areas can gel together to form little ‘micro-communisms’ – kneejerk solidarity, carving out your own counter-cultures, plagiarism as a denial of the rule of commodity, the way that resistance can leak out in all forms of music, the transcendental moments of experiencing a massive bassline, the politics of ‘selling out’. That ‘other-worldly’ feeling you get from listening to Autechre records – or whatever. Human experience and social relations (probably soon to be the title of an electro track…) [Tangent over]

So this is the angle I am coming from when I write about music. I’m not saying this because I think it’s better or more clever than ‘just’ writing about music. Indeed, I don’t think I can actually do that any more because I’ve messed up my head with all this other stuff. (Small Space Dynamics isn’t by me, but it’s a great example of this sort of thinking turning in on itself). Of course people can write about what they want and there is some great writing in the blogging community which is definitely something to be supported (not least because it breaks the stranglehold of media monopolies… off we go again). Different horses for different courses.

So I’m not really interested in Simon Reynolds’ broad-brush approach to genre mutation. It doesn’t do anything for me and I’m also really bad at making predictions at what trends will emerge because I studiously ignore most of what is happening at any given time. Not out of elitism, but more because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to physically listen to this stuff.