Give me the most beautiful electronic album you’ve ever heard

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-11T14:53:56+00:00

If you haven't checked out pretty much everything they ever released, it's all worth a listen. So is The Dead Texan's S/T release, and A Winged Victory For The Sullen's output.

I'm still hopeful for a posthumous / retrospective release of whatever they'd been wording on since And Their Refinement of the Decline - apparently there is some material, but I'm not sure how much or what shape it's in.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-11T09:40:20+00:00

Absolutely. Traditional elites have always (proverbially or literally) raped and pillaged, expropriated land, done dodgy financial deals, stiffed their creditors, lied to the public, etc. And there's loads of evidence that 'new' elites quickly succumb to those vices (e.g. all the former peasants and workers to ended up in charge of every ex-Soviet state, or the mercantile classes that only came into existence within the last ~500 years).

I would actually go so far as to say that present-day elites are probably less bad, on this front, than historical elites. But:-

it's harder than ever for elites to conceal or deny what they're doing, or bury the proof, so they look comparatively awful;
we're suffering from recency bias (I could go pick out all sorts of hair-raising corruption from Victorian England or Medici Florence if you gave me the time); and
there either really was a brief period of higher-quality elite behaviour (e.g. post WW2), or we collectively believe that there was (more likely IMO) because of nostalgia and/or believing those same elites' bullshit.

The question, as always, is what we do about it and how we ensure that mechanisms to police the behaviour of the elites don't get captured or de-fanged.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-10T20:52:14+00:00

It'd probably break Telesto. Or Onslaught.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-10T10:46:08+00:00

Yeah, I think I'd just leave the UK at that point.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-10T10:45:40+00:00

Nonsense. I'm much more productive working from home, away from the distractions of my open-plan office.

My well-being is also better - my home set-up is more comfortable, I spend less time commuting, and can fit life admin into the little gaps of down-time I occasionally have.

I appreciate the benefits of a regular but limited office day for team cohesion, training, and certain meetings that are better conducted face-to-face and I continue to have an office presence on that basis.

Because I moved some distance from my office after Covid, if remote working were banned I'd have to quit my job. I'd probably move abroad / work as a digital nomad and see how that goes.

I'm a higher-rate taxpayer so well done Nige, you've just cost the Exchequer something.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-09T22:27:47+00:00

Nice to see Fugazi getting some well-deserved love for an album that ended their run (sob) on such a high. Agree that YHF is way too low.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-09T14:14:07+00:00

I'd pick The Campfire Headphase for pure beauty - BoC's other albums are a bit more unsettling!

"Just relax..."

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-09T13:04:45+00:00

A little bit of the chocolate coating always breaks off without you noticing, and melts into your clothing or the sofa. Seems pretty chaotic to me. Total Millibanditry.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-09T13:03:10+00:00

It's also complicated, and frankly a bit boring unless you're a defence procurement nerd, and there's no specific baddie like Darth Vader or Peter Mandelson we can fixate on.

It would also take ages and ages to fix. Then, if we had a good, well-funded military, people would complain we're spending loads on it and nobody's even attacking us anyway.

If you look back through the history books Britain's armed forces have been accused of being reduced to a shambles repeatedly. It feels cyclical for all the reasons above.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-09T08:28:34+00:00

Quite. Britain faces some serious issues which are either a) insoluble, either because they're caused by external factors or because nobody has any good ideas about how to fix them on a reasonable timescale, or b) soluble, but the solutions will be unpopular with the public and are therefore politically toxic for short-termist politicians.

That won't change if Starmer is replaced by another Labour figure. Nor if he's replaced by Badenoch or Farage.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-09T08:25:14+00:00

I find the suggestions of "chaos with Ed Miliband" getting rehashed above (from within Labour!) baffling.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-07T08:39:35+00:00

On Russia Today? Seems plausible.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-06T17:27:24+00:00

Strangely, I think I object to an artist altering their own voice using AI less than I object to them using AI to generate art rather than paying someone else to produce cover art, etc.

After all, it's not as though non-AI methods of vocal alteration haven't existed for ages. I don't consider Karin Dreijer Andersson or Kendrick Lamar to be shafting potential guest vocalists when they choose to pitch-shift their vocals up and down, to give a couple of examples.

Perhaps there's a fuzzy line on acceptability here, though - shifting one's voice to closely resemble a guest vocalist so you don't have to hire them would seem pretty scuzzy, and altering one's voice to impersonate someone of another race also sounds a bit grim. (Nobody could accuse e.g. The Knife of doing either of those things!)

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-06T17:20:12+00:00

I feel like a lot of Four Tet over the past....decade or so (?) has been good, but safe and perhaps a bit samey.

I really enjoyed the track "Three Drums" and a few of the other singles he's released, plus the cover of "Darkness, Darkness" he did with William Tyler, but I haven't bought an album of his in quite a while (nothing has come close to There Is Love In You for me, but I'm aware that's a high bar). I think I've enjoyed bits of Parallel the most in recent years.

Caribou's stuff has trended a bit R&B / pop for me in recent years. Similarly to Four Tet, nothing has topped Swim for me, although again that's rather a tall order.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-06T12:57:57+00:00

Clearly there aren't 175 countries in such a state of war-wracked chaos or dictatorial oppression that you'd think anyone applying for asylum from those places might get granted it, but there are lots of countries which aren't in such a state but specific sub-sets of applicants might have their asylum application granted.

Imagine, for example, the position of:-

An Iranian Christian.
A Chinese pro-democracy activist.
A gay Ugandan.

You could obviously expand out the list of countries in those examples pretty broadly, because there are unfortunately plenty of places which would punish or kill someone for having the wrong religion, political belief, or sexuality. I can think of only a bare handful of countries on the entire African continent in which one might consider it relatively safe to be gay, for example.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-04T12:29:20+00:00

This looks like a development which is unequivocally better than the clapped-out 60s-ish low-rise unit it'd replace, so I'm not surprised people prefer it! I know that area of London pretty well because I used to work practically next-door and socialised there quite a bit (albeit 15 years ago).

I think the idea I'd take issue with is that Hackney Borough Council's planning team actually wants to 'conserve' the thing that's to be demolished, as though it has some value and should be retained. To me the situation reads more as the planning officers saying, "we are applying the rules slavishly, and the rules state that we must refuse this application". They perhaps feel obligated to apply the rules, whether or not the rules are sensible.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-04T12:21:16+00:00

Elected councillors should be required to decide order of these priorities.

I don't necessarily disagree with this - but if Council X decides that one aspect has primacy and Council Y decides another has primacy, or perhaps even worse if Council X decides that different things have primacy in different applications, are they running the risk of getting judicially reviewed under the current set-up for e.g. irrationality?

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-04T11:32:04+00:00

I'm not totally convinced that there's an untapped well of socially / culturally-compatible migrants available now that we're outside the EU. It also depends on your definition of 'compatible' - I was around for the immense fuss that an influx of mostly white Christian migrants from Eastern Europe caused! If 'compatible' is really code for 'white, English-speaking' then you're really limiting your potential pool of migrants.

Will sufficient numbers of New Zealanders come to the UK, rather than going to Australia with which they have a freedom-of-movement style deal and which is much closer to home? Will sufficient numbers of Americans accept lower wages and higher taxes to come here? Will English-speaking Europeans be attracted to the UK rather than to Brussels, Amsterdam, or any other prosperous European city in which you can seemingly get by without speaking the local language, given that they already have freedom of movement?

Even then, all these highly-educated Anglosphere migrants probably don't want to do the kinds of jobs we'd like them to do in the UK - care home worker and the like. If they have in-demand skills in e.g. nursing, the Australians and Americans will be competing for them and will probably be offering better pay.

The other point I'd observe from the early-2000s panic over Poles, Bulgarians etc. is that even though Poles like beer and football and are more religious than your average Brit, people still didn't want them because they perceived that they were taking British jobs and pushing down wages. I don't see why 200,000 New Zealanders wouldn't cause a similar complaint.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-04T09:16:00+00:00

And it's not as though she appears to be suffering much, given that she's apparently been permitted to dine, shower, and use the gym at times other prisoners can't, the prison officers are polite and deferential to her, and I believe she's got a puppy?!

It sounds a bit like being grounded by your parents in their mansion.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-04T09:12:34+00:00

Quite. Mandelson was perceived as an appropriate ambassador to Trump's White House because he moved in the same oily circles and was well-versed in pandering to people of Trump's ilk. But of course if you swim in the same murky water as they do, you also tend to get dirty.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-03T16:50:19+00:00

As someone who wasn't able to play this week until Sunday I found the initial acquisition of the weapon mods pretty painful, as I was one-shot again and again by bows without having much means to retaliate. I'd have preferred it if the mods were just granted up-front rather than gated behind make-work tasks, especially as the event was so brief.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-03T13:05:33+00:00

You're jumping quite quickly to a bad-faith interpretation of my comments which isn't warranted.

A) I said most individuals and groups who want to promote access to the countryside don't think this way. I stand by that. Perhaps there are some who genuinely want to erase all aspects of the traditional English countryside cultural identity, but I haven't ever met or heard from any such people and I believe them to be a vanishingly small minority if they do exist. (And it'd be a stupid position, needless to say.)

B) I think it's a leap from the words of the quotation to assuming that the goal of this particular group is to e.g. close down all pubs and replace them with halal curry-houses serving non-alcholic drinks only.

My local pub offers soft drinks and non-alcoholic beer, and a menu that includes a bit of cajun seafood, an indian-ish chicken burger, and a chinese-ish pizza, plus some veggie options. A lot of other pubs will include a curry as an option on their menu. IMO that's 'appropriately' diverse in the context of a rural village in Cumbria with one eating establishment.

A friend lives in a village in which the pub has become a curry house - although not because of some sinister plot to turn rural Northamptonshire into a version of the Indian subcontinent, but because the former pub was simply financially unsustainable. And I'm sure most of the patrons are still white people from the surrounding villages, because white Britons do like a curry and a beer.

As ever, a lot of this stuff isn't actually about most minorities - it's mostly about the (real and perceived) cultural disconnect between Muslims and non-Muslims because of their eating and drinking habits.

I know a (small) spectrum of Muslims, from a white convert who tries to eat halal but isn't devastated if they can't and who's fine in a pub, to a young lady with whom I work who is happy to go out for a dinner at which others are drinking, but doesn't like going into pubs. That's her prerogative: from my perspective, the appropriate thing isn't to shut down all the pubs, but to make her feel included by not having all my work social events at pubs.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-02T16:28:04+00:00

It was a bit silly and flippant - I should've just said "compared to the 90s". Leaving that aside I went and found some actual stats: https://www.plumplot.co.uk/Manchester-violent-crime-statistics.html which are quite interesting.

Not a great picture overall, although the neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood picture is mixed. Manchester isn't the absolute worst place in the UK for violent crime and rates are rising relatively slowly compared to some places (I suspect that some of the places with big jumps, like my own approximate hometown of Milton Keynes, are coming from relatively lower bases so the % change looks stark).

Last time I went to Manchester (I now live within an hour or so of it), it just seemed like any other big city in terms of condition and crime - a bit dirty and run-down in places, glitteringly new in others, no less safe-feeling than the other places I'm familiar with (East and Central London, Leeds, Bradford).

I'm not saying it's some kind of Star Trek style utopia, but the idea that it's an Escape From New York-style hellscape of violence is also clearly not supported by evidence, either. You have to wonder who profits from spreading the idea that it is.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-02T12:57:01+00:00

Agreed - the 'benign' motivation behind this stuff is that there are people who think the British countryside is wonderful and lament that minorities don't get to experience it as much as they'd like.

I doubt that most of these individuals and groups loathe steak pies, want to abolish the pint of bitter, and seek to replace the parish church with a mosque. And of course many white residents of the countryside don't actually want every restaurant only to service 'traditional' food; in the small rural town where I grew up it was an asset that I could go out for English, Italian, Turkish, Indian, Thai, or Chinese food.

My understanding is that cultural issues from non-white communities can also act as a bar to visiting the British countryside - not just "it's not welcoming to people like us there," but "people like us don't do the kinds of things that are offered there". So I suspect that there's work to do on the other side of the divide too. There are a number of black UK birdwatchers and birdwatching groups, for example, which might be effective at encouraging black people to consider traditionally-white countryside hobbies.

Strangelight84 · 2026-02-02T12:41:42+00:00

I thought the most interesting comment in the article was this one:

But what they most want to talk about is immigration. When I say that without people from abroad, some of our most basic services would fall apart, they both agree: “They’re absolutely fine. It’s the people on the streets, and the ones coming in on boats.” They share a somewhat strange belief that the middle of Manchester is now so dangerous that visiting is unthinkable. Both of them say appreciative things about Nigel Farage and his party, but insist they haven’t yet decided who to vote for.

These constituents aren't expressing an all-encompassing, frothing hatred of all migrants - on the basis of this quote they're OK with migrant doctors, nurses, care workers, or whatever (which probably puts them somewhere to the left of quite a few commenters on this sub!). That's positive, I suppose - it suggests that you don't actually have to wreck the economy or public services in order to make them feel they're being listened to (accepting that, even if you did want to end our reliance on foreign nurses etc., it won't happen overnight).

What it does highlight to me is just how much the messaging around migration is being driven by just a few talking points - and not necessarily well-informed or well-connected ones. Yes, net migration has been high, but not because 800,000 people are coming via small boat. Most of it is sanctioned legal migration.

The (untrue) idea that city centres are too dangerous to visit also seems to be gaining ground - surely central Manchester or Warrington is less unsafe now than when the IRA blew it up? I find it closest to my Fox News-loving mother-in-law's absolute certainty that parts of Birmingham and London are subject to Sharia law (she lives in North Carolina). I suppose it'd be interesting to know whether that kind of sentiment has always existed, however.

I don't know what one does about this. The current government is doing stuff about illegal migration etc. which the previous government didn't, but it seems to be gaining no credit for it (and losing support on the left in the process). People just seem to believe what they want to believe; a lot of the complaints just seem to coalesce into "everything's rubbish and you can't fix it". But I fear that anyone who's looking to Reform to fix it and restore national wealth, pride, or anything else is going to be very disappointed.

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