Records, design and thoughts. Simon Minter is a freelance designer from Oxford, UK.
I believe that this is the first box set that my random number generator has selected for writing about on here. What a good choice! Even though Nick Drake albums are akin to The Catcher in the Rye in terms of items that every self-regarding young fellow has to hand to demonstrate his sensitivity, that […]
Nestling near to The Sonics, Sonic Boom and Sonic Youth in my collection, The Sounds Of Star Wars is a far less intimidating and weighty prospect than any of those three Sonic-y outfits. I bought this record at some point in the past 15–20 years, although I have no idea exactly where or when. I have […]
Thurston Moore was, of course, the frontman of my all-time favourite band, Sonic Youth. He – and they – are therefore responsible for a hefty wedge of records in my collection. As a band, their output is pretty huge and varied in style; as a solo artist, even more so. This album was released in […]
Nestling down at the far end of the alphabet – in between Young Knives and The Zodiac – it’s the heftily-named You’re Smiling Now But We’ll All Turn Into Demons. This is a band that’s hovered around my radar for quite some time; I seem to remember that they once sent a demo and asked […]
This record popping up as a random choice for discussion acts as a useful reminder: I need to continue building out my collection of Pebbles albums. I’ve got quite a number of them, but there are at least 28 ‘official’ volumes in the series, so I have some way to go. I’m sure everybody knows it already, […]
The lot of a small-time reviewer is an odd one. I reached merely moderate levels of coverage and/or influence with a series of fanzines – and an associated cassette tape label – back in the early/mid 1990s, selling fanzines to people around the world and maintaining an enjoyable and rich amount of postal-based correspondence with huge […]
Hood always felt very much like an English band – specifically, Northern English. Their songs had a gritty, blurred, romantic, hopeful and bleak combination of things going on. For a while, it seemed like they were on their way to becoming a bit of a Big Deal; Silent ’88 represents their ‘let’s break America’ album, in […]
I have quite a number of these ‘demonstration’-type records, no end of them were released through the 1960s and 1970s to show off the worlds/galaxies/spectra/etc of new stereophonic (or, in some cases quadraphonic) capabilities of, at the time, modern music-playing equipment. Most of the ones that I own were bought in the 1990s, during a […]
Charles Hayward was a founding member of This Heat, who released some of the best and most inventive records of the late 1970s and early 1980s – which is saying something, as there was a lot of inventive, good stuff going on at that time. I first heard This Heat when their track ’24 Track Loop’ turned […]
Thurston Moore isn’t backwards in coming forwards when it comes to releasing records. As a die-hard Sonic Youth fan, I do what I can to keep up with the ever-expanding circle of music that surrounds both the band and its members’ diverse array of side projects and current activities; but it can be a time-consuming, […]