I’m passionate about music, and this is where I post about it.
Better late than never, here is my annual blog post listing my favourite new releases from 2023. It’s been a rather trying festive season this year because the rich soup of respiratory viruses making the rounds have ensured that my various holiday writing projects, including this one, got pushed and pushed.
Every year, I somehow commit myself to spending a few days writing up the best new recorded music I heard in the previous 12 months. Here’s the 2022 edition.
A couple of weeks ago, in the middle of the afternoon, someone enthusiastically rang our doorbell and then knocked several times. Unfortunately, we were both on Zoom calls so couldn’t rush to the door to see who was there. Usually … [read more]
This year, I’ve decided to occasionally make a streamed playlist “mixtape.” I don’t have a specific listener in mind. I do this for my own amusement primarily. There might be a series of these, or only a few ultimately. My objective is to include good music, of course, but also to sequence something that’s listenable in context.
It’s the morning of Boxing Day, December 26, 2020, and Ontario has been back in full lock-down since midnight. At least we are avoiding the worst possible super-spreader effect of the annual shopping melee. We are ten months into the … [read more]
My 2019 annual write-up of the year’s best new music. I publish this post into the ether once a year to summarize what I’ve particularly liked during the last twelve months, in the hope that you might discover something new.
A personal reflection on the death of Johnny Clegg, giant of South African music, in July 2019. … I met him once, very briefly. In my mid-20s, when I was living in Johannesburg, a colleague and I bumped into him holding court in a café at Rosebank Mall where we had gone during our lunch break.
2018 was another year full of outrageous distractions, the misconfigurations and abuses of the public sphere relentlessly encroaching on whatever space one tried to carve out for thinking, experiencing beauty or getting some rest. A year to test our commitments, … [read more]