“The sounding relationships between the samples of Burial’s world and the those of the hardcore continuum express many things: a sense of distance and removal from the ‘real’ world; a feeling of loneliness and melancholia inspired by urban life; a malaise at the death of rave.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2021 – James McLoughlin
“As always, reading gives us the chance to escape, to imagine different worlds with exciting possibilities. Or sometimes it simply reflects the extant world back at us from an angle we have never seen ourselves. Either way, when you spend 99% of your time within the same four walls, reading is simply a way to avoid going postal.”
[Review] One Thoresby Street, Late Harvest, 2 October 2021 — Paul Paschal
“One Thoresby Street supports not only a diversity of practices – with different economies, values, and processes – but also that which resists sitting neatly within established disciplinary frames; or work not yet be ready to articulate itself to institutional contexts or markets.”
[Fiction] Reaping — Hannah Storm
“Now their talk is snatched sentences, words harvested by years. He wants to tell her how beautiful she is, that she should not hide as if she was ashamed of what once made her fly. She wants to tell him she has never forgotten the way he made her feel.”
[Poetry] — DS Maolalai
“a bird lands a moment/on the windowsill./makes footprints in thick/
fallen light.”
[Review] Of Sea by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett — Connor Harrison
“This is not nature as allegory, but nature as observed. Burnett is writing of the millipede and the ragworm as a historian; out of frame but entirely in control of the scene.”
[Review] Hawala, Paradise Row Projects — Connie Sjödin
“Paradise Row is an attempt to re-turf the marble parquets of the Mayfair gallery district, inviting different curators, artists and audiences to take root in the space.”
[Review] Tongue of blade ‡ Ears of mud (Cap Records) — Josh Mcloughlin
“The collection’s great achievement lies in framing conceptual questions and theoretical topoi in aesthetic terms, thus affording a critical alternative to scientific and linguistic approaches to enduring problems surrounding the relationship between language and music.”
[Poetry] — William Thompson
“My father leads me through the geometry/of ploughed fields gone hard after a fortnight/of heat”
[Essay] Empire after Empire: The Endless Desert of Settler Indigenisation in Nomadland — Patrick Turner
“Ultimately, Nomadland’s affective impact, and the sense of authenticity felt in McDormand’s performance should be understood within a colonialist standard of authenticity rooted in the indigenisation of whiteness – and the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty.”
[Poetry] — Yasna Bozhkova
“Observe/the winter sea staged perfectly/in all possible hues of white”
[Fiction] The Watchman — Jake Trelease
“At the kitchen window of an upstairs flat, there is a watchman.”
[Poetry] — James Strowman
“soft against the dark and I am gone/drifting to things far removed from prayer/into the silent cinema of my mind”
[Fiction] David Baddiel — George Aird
“I watched it move across the garden, emerging out of grass that hadn’t been touched since Sam moved out.”
[Essay] Goya’s Greyhounds — Michael McGinley-Hughes
“The cover of Blur’s ‘Parklife’ shows us how far the greyhound has travelled: from the palaces of Pharaohs and the forests of Hapsburg kings to the humble English dog track.”
[Essay] Tom Whyman and the Philosophy of Hope — Josh Mcloughlin
“Whyman replaces Benjamin’s pessimism with realism whilst adopting Adorno’s ‘standpoint of redemption’ to radically critique the present, situating hope firmly within the bounds of possibility without diminishing its transformative potential.”
[Poetry] — Nora Doorley
“At the apex of joined forewings/Is an exaltation.”
[Essay] Breaking Urns: From Ingmar Bergman to Yo La Tengo — John Talbird
“The atrocities of World War II and then all the post-war proxy-wars, most especially Vietnam, ossified and then shattered narrative wholes, all those well-wrought urns.”
New Critique 