Hello, I hope you’re doing well.
Welcome to Border Crossing issue #49. I’m hugely grateful that you give this platform your time and support. Thank you. Slowly but surely, we’re getting there.
No proper long-read today, though there’s loads to chew on. Partly lots of gems to share, partly I’ll write in more detail about the record in the ‘soundtrack’ section, and partly with the football season done, you’re undoubtedly keen to know how our Border Crossing Fantasy League played out.
This month, I’m spending most weekday evenings presenting a live 6pm radio talk show for Slack City, broadcasting from the Spiegeltent site in the middle of Brighton. It’s for the duration of Brighton Fringe and runs Mon-Fri, if you’re interested.
I’m enjoying it, being out in the world and encountering people, interviewing some fascinating humans. But I’d long forgotten what it’s like to be committed to going and doing an Actual Thing, every day. Not to mention it’s an odd, adrenalin-heightening balancing act to broadcast for radio, while half-performing to a small, informal live crowd, gathered each night. The pop-up studio is in this enormous decorated greenhouse (for real), which got intensely hot earlier in the week, as we hit twenty four degress. Our microphones were almost too hot to hold. My brain is similarly frazzled.
gems
1
This is important: MedConfidential’s simple guide on how to opt out, if you don’t want your GP data leaving your GP’s surgery for any purpose other than your direct health and care needs. It involves printing a form and posting or giving it to your surgery — and you need to complete the process before 23rd June. Yes, the government is selling your GP data. No, not properly anonymised. Yes, you can stop it, if you oppose that.
2
A rare Bridget Riley appearance, interviewed by Kirsty Wark on BBC Newsnight.
3
Human Resources is a terrific new investigative history podcast series presented by Maya Lothian-McLean for Broccoli Productions. It takes iconic British historic sites and explores their links to colonisation and the British Empire’s trade in enslaved people. An eye-widening listen, it’s beautifully presented and gets especially interesting when you can connect its topics to how other history shows have covered them. One episode touches on the search for longitude and how that was intricately tied to the slave trade’s shipping navigation requirements. The episode features one of the same contributors who spoke on a recent Radio 4 In Our Time episode on longitude but, obviously, foregrounds a notably different aspect of the story.
4
Zeynep Tufekci writes in The Insight (elaborating on her NYT piece) on ‘defeating’ coronavirus in the richest countries, while permitting it to fester elsewhere.
5
Exit Scam is Aaron Lammer’s true crime podcast series about the mysterious death (or not) of Gerald Cotten, who ran Canada’s biggest Bitcoin exchange, before more than $200million mysteriously vanished from its crypto wallet things. You don’t need to know about crypto to enjoy this tale of tomfoolery on a grand scale.
6
An outstanding entry in Nowness ‘Just Dance’ short film series, Tajabone: In The Belly Of Morning sees choreographer Nicholas Huchard collaborate with director Raphael Chatelain to connect modern queer expression to a traditional Senegalese crossdressing ritual. Thank-you Rifa for the tip-off.
7
8
Eight years after his tragic death, Aaron Swartz is vindicated in a legal clarification of the CFAA (Computer Fraud & Abuse Act) by the US Supreme Court. Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic blog and excellent Twitter thread explains the background.
9
Bill McGuire makes a powerful case for economic ‘degrowth’ as the solution to the climate emergency in Prospect magazine. It’ll be ignored of course but it’s worth a read.
potato gem
Trouble looms for Belgium’s over-industrialised frite trade.
More tenuously potato-related, New York band Spud Cannon is releasing a third album, here’s a nice profile in Flood magazine.
fantasy premier league
Hats off to everyone who joined in our Border Crossing league, there were 23 of you playing and I hugely appreciate you signing up, despite the weirdo season. I’ll definitely run it again next season.
Our runaway winner was Simon Atkinson’s Escape To Victory team — 2330 points, over 100 points more than his nearest rival. Humbling work, Simon.
Great showings in 2nd to 5th places, we have: silver medallist Stuart Goodwin’s Tippexed Trabs FC — 2222, bronze goes to Ben Adsett’s McGinn and Juice — 2201, with impressive work by Kerin Smith’s Asino Estremo FC — 2192 and Sarah Kenny’s Mane of Horror — 2184.
Only 15 points separate 5th and 8th: Jay Newton’s Madjayski — 2178, me with Mærcstapa FC — 2174, Alex Carter’s FootieFootieFootie — 2171, then it’s a bigger drop to Jamie Stuart’s Douche Tank— 2106 (though he’s still beaten the 2,100 mark) and finally, scraping into 10th (though he won’t mind, given Moyes’ West Ham miraculously turned into a terrific team and got into Europe) it’s Evan Cotter’s The Trumpton Rioters — 2061.
Hats off to you all. There are some very modest prizes for the top five, I’ll sort those out in coming days, look out for an email. It may take a week or two, because of the radio show swallowing my time.
My own FPL targets this season were hit, I’m chuffed to say: I wanted to make it into the top 10 in this league and in the Xtra Mile Recordings league and top 30 in the Carter USM league. 2,100 points was also a goal. I wasn’t on target until February, when the quality of my game leapt, once I realised that my ‘system’ (that is, lol, obsessively focusing on performances over the past three — and past five — games) worked to the point that I trusted it over the media tipsters. Excluding a lucky opening week, prior to February I’d been stuck down in 14th or 15th place in both leagues I was tracking, well outside the top 50 in the Carter USM league. But once I’d got it right, I shot up several places in a month and stayed there. Then in May, I almost spoiled the good work, got sucked into Pep Roulette and overthinking like mad. Even though she’s ended up 5th to my 7th, I spent the last six weeks in a close fight with Sarah Kenny, regularly swapping places, til she edged the closing fortnight. Good game, Saz.
•
soundtrack
Malka Spigel — Gliding EP (Swim, 2014)
This week I interviewed Colin Newman from post-punk pioneers Wire, alongside his creative and life partner Malka Spigel, Israeli bassist from 80s Euro icons Minimal Compact. These two artists have built an extraordinary body of work together over thirty-five years of collaboration in music, production and visual art, in a rich variety of projects and identities. They’ve run independent label, Swim, for over thirty years, worked with some of the world’s most interesting artists, and they’re brilliant to speak with. I’d forgotten that many years ago I fell hard for two of Malka’s records: her 1990s solo debut Rosh Ballata and later, most of all, her excellent 2012 album, Every Day Is Like The First Day, which has people like Johnny Marr and Nik Void onboard.
Their musical output varies enormously (as Colin says, he went from being the man out of Wire to having 12”s in Jeff Mills’ record bag) but there’s a bunch of Malka’s output that I think sits in a sweet spot of kraut-influenced atmospheric alt-pop — you know, territory occupied by, say, Yo La Tengo, Cocteaus, a gentler MBV, even I suppose Low.
24th March, 2018, I’m heading up to London to play piano at Jim Bob’s first sold out show at Shepherds Bush Empire. But the train turns into a ‘rail replacement bus’ service, which here in Sussex can mean a nightmare — it can easily stretch a journey from Brighton to London to almost two hours. This bus-ride means life is especially annoying for the woman sat next to me, who is carrying three huge bags of gear. We fall into conversation, she’s a French musician who played a collaborative show the night before. It takes me about four minutes to realise I’m chatting with Lætitia Sadier from Stereolab. No surprise she doesn’t know my music, though she’s aware of Jim from his Carter USM days.
That conversation on a bus — tied to the success of the gig later that night — ended up having a great deal of meaning for me, at a time I was still processing my career change and the (sometimes overwhelming) layers of regret I have glued to my poor decisions in music-making. Sadier’s plain clarity in a French accent and lack of hype about her own creative journey was unexpectedly very helpful.
It turned out, the gig she was travelling home from had been working with Colin and Malka — as Immersion — on one of their ‘Nanocluster’ collaborative events, where they worked intensely on new music for a few short days, recorded it and performed it, all as a one-off experience. No safety net.
Surely the very best kinds of artist are those who can shake off the risk averse. Sometimes I think of it as an ‘abandonment of the body’, into whatever they’re creating or performing. But I don’t mean simple creative flow: more, an enabling of such abandonment that oversees and envelopes a whole project. Like, people who do dangerous physical activities (not so much the long, slow stuff like mountain climbing but the instant action of leaping off a high rock into water, or baring flesh without vanity or shame). It’s only something I’m trying to define, because I lacked it. Perhaps great artists (if they have a long career) don’t make very good work; they make incredible work and terrible work, all in service of the same thing.
I can hear drunk Tom Robinson at 3am in a hotel lounge in Antwerp. Finish all your songs, Chris! Only later you’ll know which ones are classics. So if you’re only finishing the ones you already think are good, you’re throwing away many things that might’ve been your best work.
The present day. To complete the circle, on the morning of the interview, in a Whatsapp with Jim and Les from Carter USM, I mention I’m speaking to Colin Newman and they both name Wire albums in their all time top 10s. Les in particular is a serious Wire fan.
In the mid 1990s, Britpop stars Elastica famously got in trouble for stealing Wire’s riffs for their debut album. Meanwhile, Jim tells a parallel story of Justine from Elastica once slapping him across the face, because she furiously claimed Carter USM had supposedly stolen a a riff from her boyfriend’s band, Blur. Listening objectively, the Carter riff ‘theft’ is pretty tenuous and certainly debatable — it’s an obvious, simple part — and it’s nothing compared to the cut-and-dried outright thievery of Elastica’s Wire-y snarfing.
The social, as well as creative, circularity is amusing.
After all that, and alongside a few hours of thrill, revisiting classic Wire albums, I’m properly blown away by Malka Spigel’s Gliding EP from 2014 and its seven-minute opening jam ‘Strumgliding’, music that swoons and soars so richly over an ace bit of laid-back stoner indie motorik groove. It really is like uncovering a lost peak Yo La Tengo EP. Her bass playing is a dub ooze.
get in touch
email: chris@christt.com
insta: @thebordercrossing | @cjthorpetracey | @folkhampton
twitter: @christt | @folkhampton
always there
The Border Crossing shop at Big Cartel
Folkhampton weekly music radio show —
Wed 4pm (GMT) / 11am (ET) / 8am (Pacific) on Slack City
Mon 12midnight (GMT) on Brighton’s Radio Reverb 97.2FM/DAB+
and all shows archived at TotallyRadio.com
New Folk Friday — weekly Spotify playlist for new releases in folk, psych, songwriting and americana, updated every Friday.
The Hudson Records Mixtape — I host this Spotify narrated playlist for the great Sheffield record label, updated every couple of weeks.
My Pact Coffee discount code is CHRIS-A8UKQG. Sign up for coffee bean delivery, use this code, you get £5 off and I get £5 off a bag too. Thank you!
Loads of love, as always. Look after yourself and your people.
Chris
xx
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