Niklas's thoughts

Stream the album via this page.

My Bloody Valentine's song 'only tomorrow' is great example of what the band could and can create.

Kevin Shields has a billion guitar pedals and ways to make effects; still, this song is basically something that a young person with a few computer-based effects could make. Shield's great knack at creating music is what separates him from the chaff.

It takes a fucking aeon of trial-and-error to come up with this fucking sound, let me tell you, in case it's not already obvious to you. To mix a simple guitar that's not particularly fuzzed with another guitar that sounds like a Big Muff pedal has been blasted through overdrive... And pairing those two elements with what seems to me to be pink and white noise, and then adding Bilinda Butcher's processed vocals...

The arrangement and full-on playing could easily have become ham-fisted but here we are: this is fucking grace.

From the first verses to the bridge at 01:20, to then twelve bars of overlays: softly toned-down guitar feedback and then back to the verse?

mbv live in 2025.

Fuck me. This is some really thought-through music that still sounds like it's made by renegades and young punks. This is some proof that the next MBV album will fucking rock the world, if it ever comes. Only Kevin Shields would know, I guess.

03:29: the start of a solo-guitar tremolo melody starts. I can't believe how more guitars are added just a bit after the four-minute mark, and the song grows even more. Is that a Leslie speaker? I don't know. I've heard this song and it's taken me to other galaxies so many times that I can now afford to chill out and just go somewhere else in my mind with this. Repetition, minimalism, and a simple wall of guitar-based music – the drums can't be ignored, because unlike most of the guitars, they and the simple one guitar that follows the verse are the only instruments that seem to contain a bit of treble.

It's all mixed very extraordinarily. If you know anything about Kevin Shields's ways around music, you know he cares about everything in how music is presented.

At the end of the day, the song is a fucking tune. Regardless of how well-produced, engineered, mixed, and presented a track is, if it ain't a tune, people won't like it. This is a track that one could play on one acoustic guitar and people would get off on it.

#MyBloodyValentine #music #MusicTips #shoegaze #feedback #composition #sound #tone #guitar

I'm reading The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky. I's a special book for mainly one reason: it shows Vaslav Nijinsky, a very famous person—perhaps the most famous dancer of all time—in his own words as he descends into madness.

It was first published in a highly bowdlerized edition; in 1995, the first unexpurgated edition was released.

Reading Nijinsky's diary is extremely freeing—because he writes perhaps without boundaries—and at the same time very trying. It's trying because he was obviously very ill at the time of writing; seems to get worse as the diary goes by; I've read a little more than a third of the diary so far.

A lot of texts are written as large swathes of text, not paragraphed. Here's just a few examples.

I showed her the blood on my foot. She does not like blood. I gave her to understand that blood was war and that I did not like war. I asked her a question about life by showing her a prostitute's dance. She felt it, but did not leave, because she knew I was playacting. The others thought I would lie down on the floor and make love. I did not want to complicate the evening and therefore got up whenever it was necessary. I felt God throughout the evening. He loved me. I loved Him. Our marriage was solemnized. In the carriage I told my wife that today was the day of my marriage to God. She felt this in the carriage, but lost the feeling in the course of the evening. I loved her and therefore gave her my hand, saying that I felt good. She felt the opposite.

---

I do not want to dance in St. Moritz, because people do not like me. I know they think I am a sick man. I am sorry for them because they think I am sick. I am in good health, and I do not spare my strength. I will dance more than ever. I want to teach dancing and will therefore work a little every day. I will also write. I will not go to evening parties anymore. I have had enough of this kind of jollity to last me a lifetime. I don't like jollity. I understand what jollity is. I am not cheerful and jolly, because I know that jollity is death. Jollity is the death of the mind. I am afraid of death, and therefore I love life.

---

I stand on my head in the ballet “Scheherazade,” where I had to represent a wounded beast. I represented the beast well, and therefore the audience understood me. Now I will represent feeling, and the audience will understand me. I know audiences because I have studied them well. Audiences like to be astonished. They know little and are therefore astonished. I know what is needed to astonish an audience, and therefore I am sure to succeed. Do you want to bet that I will have millions? I want to have millions in order to make the Stock Exchange crash. I want to ruin the Stock Exchange. I hate the Stock Exchange. The Stock Exchange is a brothel. I am not a brothel. I am life, and life is love for people. The Stock Exchange is death. The Stock Exchange robs poor people, who bring all the money they have in order to increase it, in the hope of achieving their goals in life. I love the poor and will therefore gamble on the Stock Exchange in order to beat the stockbrokers. Stockbrokers are all men who gamble on the Stock Exchange with vast sums. Vast sums are death, and therefore sums are not God. I want to win money on the Stock Exchange and will therefore go to Zurich one of these days. My wife is urging me to go to Zurich to see a nerve specialist in order to have my nervous system examined.

---

I do not like past centuries, because I am alive. I cannot write with this ink, because I do not feel it. I like a pencil because I am used to a pencil. I do not know why I picked up the fountain pen, because I can write well with a pencil. I do not have attractive handwriting, because I do not understand fountain pens. I like this fountain pen because it is very convenient. It can be worn in the pocket together with its ink. It is a very ingenious invention, because many people want to have a fountain pen. I do not like fountain pens, because they are not convenient. I will go on writing with mine because I received it as a present from my wife for Christmas. Christmas is a name for a habit that exists all over the world where there are Christians. I do not like Christianity, and therefore I am not a Christian. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are Christianity. I am God and not a Christian. I do not like Christians. I am God and not a Christian.

---

I do not study people in order to write about them afterward. I want to write in order to explain to people the habits that make feeling die. I want to call this book “Feeling,” I will call this book “Feeling.” I like feeling and will therefore write a lot. I want a big book about feeling because it will contain your whole life. I do not want to publish the book after your death. I want to publish it now. I am afraid for you because you are afraid for yourself. I want to tell the truth. I do not want to offend people. Perhaps you will be put in prison for this book. I will be with you because you love me. I cannot keep silent. I must speak. I know that you will not be put in prison, because you have not committed a legal error. If people want to judge you, you will say that everything you say is said by God. Then you will be sent to a lunatic asylum. You will be confined in a lunatic asylum, and you will understand the lunatics. I want you to be put in prison or in a lunatic asylum. Dostoevsky did a spell of hard labor, and therefore you too can be committed somewhere. I know men whose love never falters within them, and therefore they will not allow you to be committed anywhere. You will be free as a bird, for this book will be published in many thousands of copies. I want to sign “Nijinsky” for the sake of publicity, but my name is God. I love Nijinsky not like Narcissus but like God. I love him, for he gave me life. I do not want to pay compliments. I love him. I know his habits. He loves me, for he knows my habits. I am without habits. Nijinsky has habits. Nijinsky is a man with faults. Nijinsky must be obeyed because he speaks with the tongue of god. I am Nijinsky. Nijinsky is I. I do not want Nijinsky to be hurt, and therefore I will protect him. I am afraid for him because he is afraid for himself. I know his power. He is a good man. I am a good god. I do not like a bad Nijinsky. I do not like a bad God. I am God. Nijinsky is God. Nijinsky is a good and not an evil man. People have not understood him, and will not understand him if they think. I know that if I were obeyed for several weeks at a stretch, great results would ensue. I know that everyone will want to learn from me, and therefore I hope that my preaching will be understood. Everything I write is a teaching essential to mankind. Romola is afraid of me because she feels that I am a preacher. Romola does not want to have a preacher for a husband. Romola wants a young, good-looking, and rich husband. I am rich, good-looking, and young. She does not feel me, because she does not understand my beauty. I do not have regular features. Regular features are not god. God is not regular features. God is feeling in face. A hunchback is God. I like hunchbacks. I like ugly people. I am an ugly man with feeling. I dance hunchbacks and straight-backs. I am the artist who loves all shapes and all kinds of beauty. Beauty is not a relative thing. Beauty is god. God is beauty with feeling. Beauty is in feeling. I love beauty because I feel it and therefore understand it. Thinking people write nonsense about beauty. Beauty cannot be discussed. Beauty cannot be criticized. Beauty is not criticism. I am not criticism. Criticism is an attempt to be clever. I do not try to be clever. I flaunt my beauty. I feel love for beauty. I am not looking for straight noses. I like straight noses. I like my wife's nose because it has feeling.

#books

A short while back, MTV—a.k.a. MTV Music—stopped broadcasting. Their website went fairly dead as well. The music video phenomenon didn't start with MTV but without MTV, it would have gone nowhere.

Now, a developer has taken it upon themselves to try and save the feeling that MTV was. Enter MTV Rewind.

What's saved:

• 120 Minutes (6,063 videos): The holy grail of alternative rock and shoegaze.
• Headbangers Ball (1,604 videos): A shrine to thrash and heavy metal.
• Yo! MTV Raps (348 videos): The golden age of hip-hop, preserved.
• MTV Unplugged (343 videos): Stripped-back intimacy from before auto-tune ruled the charts.
• Club MTV (232 videos): For the techno and house heads.

There are also decade-specific buckets—ranging from the experimental MTV 70s (268 videos) to the massive MTV 2020s (8,050 videos)—proving that the music video format isn’t dead, it just lost its home.

Here's an embedded example of MTV Rewind:

For more information about the project, see this Midnight Rebels post.

#music #video

Robyn's 'Sexistential' vs Factory Floor's 'Fall Back'

'Sexistential' feels a bit dated as Robyn's done this stuff before; it's not bad, it's just that I feel spoiled with how more of an pop innovator Robyn used to be. This isn't bad stuff! It's just that other artists, for example Fever Ray, make sexual music that's more exciting and uproariously fun than this. 'Sexistential' feels like Chicago house, the stuff that Robyn tapped with Honey.

I can't help but think of music like Factory Floor's song 'Fall Back' as I hear this new single. Even though their sound owes a lot to that of New Order, they managed to release something with a distorted and contorted vocal, a very simple bass-line, and drums that sounded as though they've been programmed by myself (not an accolade in any way), and yet everything coalesced and sounded good; better than that, it was really fucking good.

I hope Robyn's coming album contains a lot more interesting and mainly experimental stuff. She's a pop master, I get that, but we need more. MORE!

#music

📚✨ Books I read in 2025 ✨📚

Edit: the entire list in better form: Bookwyrm

***

Their shortest read this year…

Serialbathroomdummyrun

by Blixa Bargeld

44 pages

…and the longest

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause

by Benjamin Nathans

817 pages

• * *

Niklas left 115 ratings,
their average rating is 3.17

---

Their best rated review

Det var mörkt i mitt huvud men aldrig i mitt hjärta

by Lukas Moodysson

Their rating: 5

• * *

All the books Niklas read in 2025

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The Racket Molly Silencieux Unreliable Silent Coup D e kroniskt Nuclear War Skolplattformen Det var mörkt i mitt huvud men aldrig i mitt hjärta Neu Klang Sluten anstalt Det stora enklas dag Electronic Body Music The Bullet Journal Method The Nazi Mind Drucket språk Hundra år modern fransk dikt Märkliga Jämviktslägen Den ljugande reportern The Benefactors Passage för simsvaga fiskar The Bookshop Pretend We're Dead The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You Blood in the Machine Twist Careless People Orissa Strangers Funny Because It's True Texter Låt oss förvandlas Explaining Hitler Next One Is for You Things the Grandchildren Should Know Kristallskeppet V13 Smälter Hitler's People Brygge-den-Döda Din vilja sitter i skogen Audition Fars rygg Crumb Feeding Ghosts En värmländsk Hitler Män och kvinnor Fuskbygget Knockemstiff The Quest for Christa T. Over the Rainbow The Short End of the Sonnenallee The AI Con Story of a Murder Bonsai The Question of Palestine The Names To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause Murderland Serialbathroomdummyrun The Möbius Book Into Thin Air Strangers and Intimates Salt Green Death The Mission Den stora rollen The Score All Fours A Marriage at Sea Den sista boken om mordet på Olof Palme The Devil Reached Toward the Sky Spent Enshittification The Tesla Files Bäste bokförläggare! Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia Volume II Every One Still Here Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia Volume III The raw shark texts Everything We Do Is Music Bless Me Father Till de redan frälsta Epsteins Stockholm Den blinda ugglan Journal 1887-1910 Bring Judgment Day If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies Mother Mary Comes to Me De närmaste Nation av poeter Black Cat Bone Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever Surviving the Twenty-First Century Writing for Busy Readers The Crying of Lot 49 Naturlagarna Document Like a Developer Imperiet de ärvde Välkomna till vårt äktenskap Fadren Man Up Bröd och mjölk Självbiografi. 1984-2001 There is no Other 168 Songs of Hatred and Failure Det förundrade ansiktet Förbannelsen Vitön Street-Level Superstar Erik Satie Three Piece Suite The Drums The Uncool The agile comms handbook Theory and Practice

#books

Sloperator

Merriam-Webster's word of the year in 2025 is 'slop'. One definition:

digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence

I think it's safe to say nobody sees AI-generated content as good, at least not from a high level. To constantly need to nanny what's basically autocorrect on steroids is a horrific user experience. Also, because AI is built on stolen copy, doesn't produce profits, and rapidly accelerates the climate catastrophe...what's there to like? Badly composed images? Computer code that imposes enormous security risks and isn't really built for maintenance?

AI doesn't even produce consistent results. Consistency is something we expect from AI to be used on a professional level, yet that's impossible to achieve.

Read this article on what AI can and can't do.

Don't be a sloperator.

If anything, AI should be used to replace the bullshitting managers who claim to love AI. Oh, bullshit:

I keep a garden page about bullshit.

#ArtificialIntelligence

Quotes from Cameron Crowe's autobiography The Uncool.

Cameron Crowe has written a brilliant autobiography, The Uncool. I warmly recommend reading the book. I love how he writes about his mom. Here are some choice quotes.

Richard Nixon was the enemy. Ralph Nader, Cesar Chavez, and JFK were the heroes. Rock music, especially the kind that was sexually provocative, was the enemy. The slowness of the American educational system was also an irritant. By the time I arrived, the youngest of three children, my mother had streamlined her teaching approach. She skipped me through kindergarten and put me in first grade when I was just five. “Kindergarten is just babysitting,” she said. “In Europe they don’t even have kindergarten.”

When my school later mistakenly skipped me over fifth grade, she convinced me to stay in sixth. “Nothing happens in the fifth grade,” she confided. “Maybe fractions.” What she didn’t warn me about was that skipping grades in these key adolescent years would create serious land mines in my life, and they weren’t academic. They were physical.

---

Tending to my menagerie, pretending not to listen to my parents talking in the kitchen late at night, I heard them fretting about my sister’s relationship with Steve. Cindy and Steve Dagnan had already discussed marriage. “If they get married,” my mom said, “she’ll be stuck in the desert forever.” “You can’t tell her not to be involved with him,” my dad parried. “You’ll drive her into his arms even more.” “She doesn’t realize all the world has to offer past Steve Dagnan,” said my mom. Nobody ever just called him Steve. He had a brand name, like James Bond or Paul McCartney. “That’s the power of sex!”

My mom would often blame problems on sex. The sex drive. The corruption of a society that used sex to sell everything. Sex in songs. Sex on television. If there was a problem, sex was never far behind as the cause.

“How do you know they’ve had sex?” my dad said. My mom narrowed her eyes, as if picking up the information from a distant radio tower.

“They’ve had sex,” she said.

“But you don’t know—”

“She needs to see the world,” my mom said. “That’s what I did. And that’s how I met you.”

---

“Did you enjoy Bob Dylan?” my mom asked as we filed out of the gymnasium.

“It was so good!” My sister agreed.

“Well, someday the Republicans are going to ruin all of this,” my mom said, “for everybody.”

---

Music was already more than music. It was a door that opened for three minutes. Sometimes way longer. In the forbidden world there was no judgment. Only your own thoughts and secret desires, slashing through the atmosphere. And when the song was over, the door clanged shut again. There was no choice but to scramble back to the beginning. Sometimes I would listen to one song twenty or thirty times in a row. There had to be other people like me. I just hadn’t met them yet.

---

That night, my schoolteacher mother succumbed to the power of rock and roll. And even when a tie-dyed Romeo in front of us offered her a spoon of cocaine, she chose to ignore it. It was an unforgettable night, if only for what she said quietly as we walked to the car. “I understand your music,” she said. “It’s better than ours.”

---

Kristofferson was already a master at writing plainspoken, unsentimental songs about sadness. I asked him if he needed to be sad to write a sad song. He sparked to the question.

“I write sad songs when I’m happy.” He laughed a little. “I guess because when I’m sad, I’m too sad to write a good song!”

---

The depth of the romance between Emmylou and Gram, and what grew from that afternoon, is a tale that belonged to them. As with George and Tammy, or Porter and Dolly, or many of the country stars Parsons loved, there’s more pleasure in the myth. I profiled her for Rolling Stone and visited a recording session for her second album, Pieces of the Sky. A few years back, we crossed paths at a Rufus Wainwright concert. She looked at me like I was a remnant of a life gone by. Though it was only one afternoon, she introduced me to a friend as “a kid who used to follow Gram and me around.”

Jerry Garcia on Spotify, almost:

Garcia sat in a reclining seat in the wood-finished offices located in a San Rafael complex. I asked him about the hippie concept that music should be free and belong to the people. He was immediately gregarious and delightfully prickly. “Fuck people’s music, man,” Garcia said, and laughed. “That kind of thing really irks me.”

This was decades before Napster or Spotify, but Garcia could see it coming in the summer of 1973. The people’s hippie, the guru of the Summer of Love, was already militant about not giving music away for free.

“To get so you can play music,” he continued, “you have to sacrifice a lot of what would have been your normal life. You know what I mean? For lack of a better phrase, you have to pay the dues to get so you can play music. It’s not a thing you just do. If that were so, everybody’d be making their own music and there wouldn’t be professional musicians. There’d be no need for them. For someone to deny the fact that you spent a certain amount of your life working on some sort of discipline and learning how to play … that’s the rip-off. That’s the state versus the individual. Anytime someone comes down on artists and claims their work on any level, I think that’s pure bullshit. There’s been too many great musicians who died poor. People’s music? It just ain’t so.”

---

Later that night, I made a phone call. It was about one in the morning, Birmingham, Michigan, time. He was still up, of course. I could hear the scratchy sound of the Raspberries in the background. Who listened to the sunny pop of the Raspberries at one in the morning? Only the world’s greatest rock critic. He was probably writing one of those coffee-stained masterpieces on the back of a record company bio. I told him what had happened.

“You made friends with them,” said Lester Bangs. He sighed loudly and coughed. “That was your mistake. They make you feel cool, and I met you. You are not cool.” He pronounced it with playground derision—kewl. He chalked it all up to the pursuit of idol worship, and he thought that I just might have saved my own life by blowing the story. Getting in bed with the corporate pursuits of Rolling Stone was one of the first mistakes we’d both made, he said. Again, he used the word we, which he had to know was a gift I didn’t deserve. I wasn’t in his league, or his universe, and it was clearly an epic belly flop. He considered it a badge of honor.

He left me with a battle cry and a laugh in the middle of the night. “We’re from fucking San Diego,” he said. “We’re uncool!”

---

David Bowie and too much cocaine, PCP, and/or amphetamines, man.

“The only problem with this house,” he said, “is that Satan lives in that swimming pool.” It was as if he were pointing out a pesky problem with termites. “I’ve seen him!”

---

Doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

#books #quotes

The Warner Bros and Netflix capitalist shitshow in memes

Baxter Dury – 'Allbarone'

There's a chain of bars named All bar one. Dury took that, his drawly speak-song, and made an electronic album with Paul Epworth, the guy who's produced Adele, Florence & The Machine, and Rihanna.

It's catchy. Imagine Orbital on downers. Footy hooligans come their fifties. Songs about schadenfreude, no love, being wrecked, laughing at c*nts.

The Velvet Panther.

#music

Today three live music albums are released.

Depeche Mode – 'Memento Mori: Mexico City'

Stream the album via this page.

I love the song on 'Walking in My Shoes'. However, I must say this: I'm a little worried about Dave's song on 'No Good'.

I saw DM live during the Memento Mori tour and they've been better and more inventive live in the past; just consider the official live version of 'In Your Room' that was recorded during the Songs of Faith and Devotion tour. Wow.

This album is released on the same day as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds' Wild God (Live God). Listen to that album to hear what is possible, by the hands and voices of people who are around as old as DM, who apply older tools, but reach more high-soaring goals.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – 'Wild God (Live God)'

Stream the album via this page.

This is, at best, a soaring, gospel-sounding experience. Just listen to 'Frogs', the first track on the album. The artist as preacher comes out; Cave quips lines like a reverend. This is closer to gospel than nearly what James Brown, Sam Cooke, and Little Richard did live at times*.

Hear the guitar and the chorus of 'Tupelo'. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Where Depeche Mode went electronic, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds go back to gospel music. To choral music. To human breadth in mass voices. To simple chords on the piano, to Cave chanting 'you're beautiful' again and again and again to a tambourine and the chorus singing 'touched by the Spirit/touched by the Flame'.

Where Cave has gone from noise and punk and art in The Birthday Party to gaming pop music during the 1990s to two of his sons dying and his making intimate and extremely soulful electronic music, to creating gospel, this is a fucking live album.

Listen to the song 'Conversion' as hands-up proof that this album should be heard.

*This is said in total awe and adoration of Little Richard live in Hollywood, James Brown live at the Apollo, and Sam Cooke live in Harlem. These are three of my favourite live albums.

Die Nerven – 'LIVE IM ELFENBEINTURM'

Stream the album via this page.

I've no idea how this came to be, but Die Nerven have become one of my favourite modern ice-cold punk-ish artists. I don't know German, but I love Einstürzende Neubauten enough to have learned a bit, and it's not like one can't translate lyrics online.

Die Nerven live is a one-trick pony. Their sound is based largely on the guitar sound: it's either very reverby and non-distorted or reverby and distorted; the singer's voice complements the guitar in exactly the same sound. Drums and bass sound circumstancial.

That's how they sound live, but on record it's a different story. They're tight as hell on record!

Having said that, there's something about Die Nerven's live sound that really captures me in small doses. Two or three songs at a time, brilliant! I can't listen to this album in one single go without pauses, and that's saying something having just listened to two entire live albums before this one: I should be able to make it, but I can't.

This band is fairly close to being a German version of Swedish band Kent some points, but that's doing Kent a disservice as they're a lot more varied in styles.

#music