United by music, a shared experience and a selection of tunes that includes Michna, Beta Librae, Ghost of Vroom, Guy J, Innellea, Overmono, Plaid, Alison Goldfrapp, Sofia Kourtesis, Amtrac, Bdrmm and more.
Track List
Gabríel Ólafs – Bambaló
BVG – Sunday Morning
Alex Kassian – Strings of Eden
Guy J – 94 Blossom
Midwife – Hounds of Heaven
Ane Brun – Hand In The Fire
Rahill – I Smile for E
Michna – Lunchbox
Ghost of Vroom – Pay the Man
Plaid – Shackbu
Alison Goldfrapp – Digging Deeper Now
Karl Biscuit – Hierophone (Avalon Remix)
Snowedin – Rabbit Valley (Chris IDH & Söhns Remix)
Innellea – Red Thread
Hector Zazou – The Light Gave Us Away (Deep Mix by Herbert)
A selection of tunes to see in a bounteous, flowery May including Avalon Emerson, Innellea, Talaboman, Jessie Ware, Baby Rose, Skinny Pelembe, Joy Oladokun, Indigo de Souza, Wallice, Dove City, Klur and more.
Track List
Elle King – Little Bit Of Lovin’
Avalon Emerson – Dreamliner
Innellea – The Conclusion – Five Phases Project
Talaboman – Discodrums
Jessie Ware – Beautiful People
New Breed Brass Band – Drop It How You Feel It (feat. Trombone Shorty, 5th Ward Weebie & Wild Wayne)
Baby Rose – I Won’t Tell
Skinny Pelembe – Hardly the Same Snake
Joy Oladokun – We’re All Gonna Die
JFDR – Life Man
Labrinth – Everything
Indigo De Souza – Always
Wallice – Rich Wallice
Dove City – Coal In My Chest (Frankey & Sandrino Remix)
A selection of tunes including Alfa Mist, Charles Oliver, Overmono, Lindstrøm, Easy Star All-Stars, Lael Neale, Esther Rose, Zombie Juice, St. Paul & The Broken Bones and more, along with some salacious excerpts from Jonny Trunk’s Flexi Sex compilation.
Track List
Folky Fenella & Jonny Trunk – Folky Fenella From Dorset
Alfa Mist – Variables
Charles Oliver – A Glimpse From The Other Side
Overmono – Is U
Worldtown Soundsystem – Another One (feat. Zeek Burse)
Alphawezen – Into The Stars (Firebirds Remix)
Vitalic – My Friend Dario
Rodrigo y Gabriela – True Nature
The Fall – Theme From Sparta F.C.
Pearl & The Oysters – Fireflies
Lindstrøm – Lovesick
Easy Star All-Stars – Hang on to Yourself (feat. Fishbone and JonnyGO Figure)
George Kranz – Din daa daa (Original Version 1983)
“The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time…since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, time pieces don’t really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they’re able.” – Dava Sobel, Longitude.
A selection of tunes to navigate our way through time, including Fruit Bats, El Michels Affair, Abraham Alexander, Dave Okumu, Temples, The Tallest Man on Earth, Fenne Lily, Bonobo, Kyson, Thylacine, Shlohmo, Hypnagog, Rich Aucoin, Rone and more.
Track List
Boogie Belgique – Fabrica
El Michels Affair – Protocol
Abraham Alexander – Déjà Vu (ft. Mavis Staples)
dj poolboi – don’t be so hard on yourself
Fruit Bats – Meridian
Thylacine – Duduk
Shlohmo – Rained the Whole Time (Nicolas Jaar Remix)
As an eater of stand-up comedy on Netflix, I finally encountered Mae Martin for the first time recently watching Sap, their post-lockdown stand-up special filmed in Canada on a set that may well have been nicked out of a skip containing leftover bits of a production of Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (they emerge, David Bellamy-like, through real trees, probably some real bugs crawling on their skin). Martin is a motormouth who has no problem sharing their addiction, emotional and relationship troubles in the most self-deprecating, rapidly vacillating (pessimistic one minute, optimistic the next) but always quirkily charming manner.
Having been blown away by that engaging hour of television and drawn to their likeable character, I naturally did a google and realised that two series of a sit-com written by Martin and collaborator Joe Hampson had completely passed me by. The first series of Feel Good aired on Channel 4 in March 2020, while the second and final series was commissioned by Netflix, who released it in June 2021. Proper Covid-era TV, for a locked-down audience. I must’ve been busy coughing my insides up or something. The totality of Feel Good comprises 12 half-hour episodes so I made up for the absence of it in my previous life by consuming all of it over four days.
Feel Good is a semi-autobiographical romantic tragi-comedy starring Martin as a fictionalised version of themself, alongside a TV crush of mine – English rose Charlotte Ritchie – as Mae’s girlfriend George.
The fictional Mae Martin’s life is pretty well aligned to the IRL version – they are both from Toronto, both did stand-up as young teenagers, both got kicked out of the family home and both explore gender identity, gender dysphoria, sexual orientation, sexual fluidity, sexual abuse, addiction, rehab, trauma and romance (and the impact of all of the former on the latter). Which, when you look at the list, doesn’t look like the stuff of too much laughter but it is very funny. It is also a moving and heart-warming love story that takes highly complex topics and issues and approaches them with sophisticated levels of intelligence.
Whatever gender and sexuality, Feel Good will resonate with any romantic human that has lived a life and experienced the dualities of pleasure and pain before finding someone that they’d happily spend the rest of their days with, while also battling inner demons and internal and external conflict. Feel Good is a masterpiece of a show that is emotionally mature, emotionally realistic, occasionally painful to watch and packed full of empathy. It will most definitely make you feel something and, more often than not, that feeling will be very, very good.
Mae Martin has written about their own, often humiliating, adventures in sex, dating and identity in their guide to 21st Century sexuality Can Everyone Please Calm Down?, which you can buy at the link below (which will take you to my virtual bookshop on bookshop.org)
Something to eat your eggs to at Easter. With tracks from Lou Rawls, Yaeji, Daughter, Yaya Bey, Quantic, Ben Lamar Gay, Blondshell, ĠENN, Wednesday and more.
“I have been thinking about what music is for a long time. Maybe half a century. And I’m still thinking and asking myself what music is. Of course, nobody has an answer.” – Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1952-2023.