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UPDATE This album is now available from the Resonance FM Shop.

Fans of Resonance FM and The Exciting Hellebore Shew will no doubt appreciate this collection of haphazard audio from poet and musician Dan Wilson a.k.a. Meadow House. I’ve been obsessing about it (Check out my AudioScrobbler chart).

For as long as I have known him, Dan has been a prolific producer and composer of wonky beats, hilarious suicidal poems and destressed noise. Dan is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and lyricist. He has a natural talent for melody, rhyme and harmony which he uses to effortlessly subvert the music industry. If Dan had a gram of commercial instinct, he could be as famous as Paul Mcartney, however I think he would rather entertain himself.

“Tongue under a ton of Nine Volters” the first album from Meadow House, a.k.a. Dan Wilson.

This album is partly a retrospective of some of the greatest musical moments from Dan’s first series, however for your listening pleasure they have been re-mastered by Resonance FM’s Xentos. These have been collected together and published by London’s ultra-alternative Alcohol Records.

For me, the track that stands out the most is “Lavendar Picking” – recorded spesifically for this album. This song is about the unfortunate consequences of trespassing in order to collect Lavendar for a girl. I suspect that the buzzy stringed instrument we hear through this song is the Elastic-Band Zyther, a trademark wilson instrument.

According to this review, we can expect to see it in all good record shops in a month or so. This album (ALDW1CD) will be released by Alcohol Records: P.O.Box 556, London SE5 0RL, England, UK

Update – Ed Baxter noted the following on the Resonance Forum: Send ten pounds sterling payable to “Alcohol” , PO Box 556, London SE5 0RW and we will send you a copy by return. Official release date: June 1st, i.e. reviews will not appear much before then, although Dave Mandl of WFMU and The Brooklyn Rail has received his advance copy already (check out Brooklyn Rail, March 05 for review). It should also be available soon on the Resonance104.4fm shop, with half the proceeds of these sales going to the radio station.

Yesterday was my first Critical Mass of 2005. I would like to present a collection of my photographic observances of this occasion:

This bike will be familair to anybody who has been on a London Critical Mass or run the Dunwich Dynamo.

Unsurprisingly for an election month, the political messagae in Critical Mass was in greater evidence. I think it’s great that people are taking politics back to the streets, however I do feel that incorporating overtly anarchist/marxist themes into the event only makes the primary message less effective.

For me, Critical Mass has allways been a protest about the de-humanisation of our city streets. This is demonstrated by the fact that the city is totally unprepared for a moderately large group of cyclists on the road; in numbers that would hardly seem extrordinary in Bejing or Copenhagen.

Regardless of your political allignment, I think we can all agree that the lifestyle of the average british commuter is one of hellish public-transport or stagnant roads. There has to be an alternative to spending over an hour a day in a state of misery.

One Less Car…

The title of the event has a dual meaning: Not only a mass of people who are critical of the urban environment we live in, but the act of assemling enough people to briefly control the road and show how London might be with a more human-centric transport policy.

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