Aphex Twin – '73-yips'
When I bought the 12–inch Aphex Twin single On, I had heard just the title track.
This b–side blew me away.
Television – 'See No Evil'
If justice prevailed, the surviving members of Television should be on dollar bills in the USA. This album is a masterpiece. I could have posted any song above. OK, fuck it:
Tom Verlaine, the main mind behind Television, took his stage name from Paul Verlaine which kind of says a lot about the music. But the music is North American. There's jazz. There's guitars played like Coltrane, to paraphrase what Verlaine wanted.
I love how we can clearly hear the instruments and voice all cleanly separated in the mix. This is wonderful music. The lyrics aren't the sharpest tool in the box, but what the fuck, that's partly why they're perfect.
What I want
I want now
And it's a whole lot more
Than “anyhow” I wanna fly, fly a fountain
I wanna jump, jump, jump, a-jump
On a mountain
#music #Television #TomVerlaine #RichardHell #rock #MusicTips
Aesop Rock – 'Mystery Fish'
Aesop Rock is, for me, a hit-and-miss rapper. I don't mean he's bad at times: he's very good all of the time; for me, I can't take more of his intense lyrical delivery a few songs at a time. To me, he's like a speech-therapist's dream version of Run The Jewels.
This track just rocks. I love the build-up synthy intro; the song is the intro to the album The Impossible Kid. The horns in the song work so well with the beats and Aesop's rap. The lyrics have a lot to unpack.
Shane Parish – 'Maetl'
Shane Parish has made an album of Autechre covers on guitar. In other words, he's turned one of electronic music's grand ole acts of glitchy, instrumental electronic music into acoustic-guitar stuff. It's wonderful!
Example:
The original version:
The current political repression in Serbia
This is not new; this is on par with the usual behaviours of desperate despots. Their time will come.
More about this is found in an article by Balkan Insight.
Aleksandar Vučić, the despot in this case, will be gone soon but not soon enough. The people of Serbia know the score.
#Serbia #despot #dictator #politics #AleksandarVucic #repression
π. Διονύσιος Ταμπάκης – 'Φῶς Ἱλαρόν καὶ Ἠλεκτρικόν'
- A Greek-orthodox priest who releases 'metal' is cool.
- The album cover is made for cassette tape, which is cool.
- There's a Proton Mail e-mail address on the cassette cover, which is also cool.
All of those points are spoken by my twelve-year-old metal self (who never existed really because I discovered metal in my forties).
There's an interview with Father Tabakis here. Maybe there's no reason to fear the priest?
WriteFreely and security issues
On 2026-04-26 a critical bug was registered to show that anybody could create a user account even if the administrator of a WriteFreely instance disallowed the registration of user accounts. The person who logged the bug added this information:
PS: not sure if it's actually a security issue, but we tried to reach out to security@writefreely.org beforehand, but haven't received a reply
The fix was merged into code two weeks ago.
The release to fix the problem was published ten hours ago. At the same time, WriteFreely posted this on Mastodon:
Most importantly, this fixes an issue where malicious actors can create accounts on closed-registration #WriteFreely instances running the previous v0.16 or below. We've heard reports of this ACTIVELY being exploited today across many WriteFreely instances — multi- and single-user. We advise ALL WriteFreely admins to upgrade immediately. You may also notice many unwanted accounts on your instance that need to be manually cleaned up. We'll be adding admin tools to make this quicker soon.
Two days ago, a person commented on the bug fix. The person made some points:
[...]
Today, I discovered more than 150 automatically created accounts on my instance, which was configured with registrations closed and invitations restricted to administrators. Each account immediately published a spam post.
We are talking about a complete bypass of the registration access control, which allows attackers to:
- Create unlimited accounts without authorization.
- Publish spam or malicious content under the instance’s domain.
- Consume storage and server resources.
- Damage the domain’s reputation.
- Potentially access private content on instances where authenticated users have additional permissions.
This issue was reported months ago and acknowledged as unintended behavior:
“This isn't by design, and did need to be fixed.”
However, it was deferred to a future release, without publishing a security update, notifying administrators, or providing an official mitigation. In the meantime, the vulnerable endpoint is actively being exploited.
A vulnerability of this severity should not have to wait for the next regular release. A corrective version, even if it is simply
0.16.1, should be released immediately, together with a security advisory warning all WriteFreely administrators.[...]
Please release a security update immediately and clearly notify administrators. It is not acceptable to leave a publicly exploitable endpoint available for months when it completely invalidates the closed-registration setting.
I just had to manually connect to my instance and use mysql commands to manually delete a number of users.
Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful to use WriteFreely and I'm grateful to its makers. However, the critique should be taken seriously. WriteFreely does generate money for its maker. To wait nearly three months to fix what WriteFreely themselves seem to infer to as a 'critical security fix' is extremely bad. I'm considering to migrate from WriteFreely to a static site generator, for example, Mataroa, where I host another blog.
Gold Panda – 'Loser Mentality'
Gold Panda's latest album, TON UP, is exactly what I need this morning: hi-energy house that deeply reminds me of the old Paris is Burning style of life.
This album is a lot of fun and high-tempo throughout. Somehow, this album makes me think of SebastiAn's recent DJ session at Peacock Society.
#music #MusicTips #GoldPanda #EdBanger #SebastiAn #HighEnergy #house #techno
Tomma Intet – 'Tidöd'
In a few months, it's election time in Sweden. The Tidö parties are probably going to lose, which is the best thing for anyone. They're a pack of xenophobic power-hungry political parties that engage in power, disguising their desires as ideology.
Tomma Intet are a Swedish indie-rock collective. Imagine a Californian sect that've been forced to sing choral hymns and gorge themselves only on music by The Radio Dept. Here you are. This song is sweet and dreamy. Kind of like something that George Harrison would have made and added a prog drive.
The chorus goes like this:
Själlösa jävla parasiter ni kan dra åt helvete
...which translates to something like this; translation by yours truly:
Soulless fucking parasites go to hell
If that's not love, what is.
Will Sheff – 'Extra Mile'
Today dear Will Sheff releases his sophomore album, Extra Mile. It's a good leap from his first album, Nothing Special.
Will once co-founded Okkervil River and Shearwater, two bands that I love. He's now making thoughtful, visceral, and lovely music to which we hum and swing our hips.