After a lengthy dry patch, the gigging season is picking up again… which makes for less embarrassing FPBs, if nothing else! Here’s a superb progressive post-metal band called Brenda, playing last Saturday in a tiny venue by Southsea seafront:

Truly awesome in every way, and I’m not just saying that. Imagine Jeff Buckley fronting Oceansize… that’s as close as you’ll get, but still not close enough.[1]

Writing about music

A relatively placid week, as fortune would have it; means I’m a little ahead of myself for next week already, which is always a great place to be. Especially considering that it’s Showcase season, which means I’ll be called upon in my judging capacity (as well as my “keeping an eye on the scene” capacity). Good old summer… well, all but the weather, anyway.

Album of the week

Technically it’s an EP, but it’s still the best of the week - the Nightmares of the Ocean EP by The Arusha Accord. Very intense UK progressive metalcore, great stuff.

Writing about books

Some notes and frameworking toward the Snow Crash piece have been laid to paper, but that’s about it. I’ve had my brain occupied by the first half of Farah Mendlesohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy, which is extremely interesting so far - not necessarily as a prescriptive document, but more as a useful toolkit, as well as a chance to see the more academically-rooted form of criticism[2] being done. Learning a lot, which is good.

Freelance

Well, the first website redesign project is all but finished; just waiting on some final feedback on functionality before I can whisk an invoice off into the aether for it and show it to the world. Feels good, I tell ya.

Another source of work has been confirmed as well, in that I’ll be reporting on novel manuscripts for an organisation that shall remain nameless. It’s not great money, and I expect much of the reading will be pretty dire… but hey, income is income. Just call me Mr Can-Do![3]

Futurismic

We’re in the process of email-exchanging contracts for next month’s Futurismic story, which is another corker, and something a bit different - a dark corporate satire, with death rays!

Otherwise, all rolls on much as usual - up to and including the increasingly prevalent downtime problems. This, coupled with the fact that I’ll need more hosting space as my client base grows, has led me to setting up with a new hosting company; I’m currently waiting for the transfer of the domain names to finish, and then I’ll be upping sticks and leaving NetPivotal long behind.

It’s kinda sad, because they’ve given the best customer service I’ve yet had from a hosting outfit… but as I remarked to Darren a while ago, the best customer service in the world is no use whatsoever if you can’t actually connect to the server where your site is supposed to be located. Another internet company that expanded too fast, I’m guessing. Selah.

Books and magazines seen

This week we have a soupçon of poetry in the form of the latest issue of Obsessed With Pipework.

Also in this week’s mail from Orbit (along with a bunch of fantasy titles that’ll be put aside for my mother, who is threatening to start some sort of reading group in her village up north with all the freebies I’ve been bunging her way) is a very nicely made hardback ARC of Ken MacLeod’s forthcoming title, The Night Sessions:

As a youth I never thought I’d hear myself say it, but in the last few years I’ve said it nearly every week: I have too many good books to read.[4]

Apologia

It’s been pretty dead here but for links posts, hasn’t it? And there’s me above describing a relatively calm-seeming week… well, suffice to say there is a degree of turmoil beneath the surface, and I’ve had a slew of unglamorous things to do that are part of the lot of the freelance[5]. I can’t promise an immediate return to greater VCTB output, but I hope I’ll not be quite so quiet in weeks to come as I have been of late.

Coda

And that’s your fix of FPB from PGR for this week. I’m spoiled for choice this evening - the pub as usual, or perhaps a bunch of local bands at The Wedgewood Rooms? Friday being Friday, I shall play it as it comes, I think… though you can rest safe in the assumption that right now I’m going to go fetch The Friday Curry, as is right, proper and preordained.

Have a great weekend, ladies and gents, and here’s hoping the weather isn’t as crap as the Met Office is promising. Hasta luego, amigos!

[ 1 - Play close attention to the guitarist on the right, who is slapping the strings instead of strumming. Sounds great through a delay modeller, y'know, especially on a solid-bridge special edition Fender Jaguar. ]

[ 2 - As opposed to the seat-of-the-pants bootstap bluffing type of which yours truly is a proponent. ]

[ 3 - Actually, please never call me that ever. At least not when I'm there to hear it. ]

[ 4 - There are worse afflictions, though, eh? ]

[ 5 - Accounting! Administrivia! And other stuff you can't bill anyone else for! ]

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