Entertainment

On a personal note, a stored image returns to the forefront of my thoughts as summoned by the reading of Bill Hayes' achingly beautiful memoir Insomniac City. It is a February night in 2010, a Toronto winter considering an early spring, a night four hours' distant from consideration of a whispering dawn. I am stood outside an all-hours McDonald's smoking the fifth cigarette of the first pack after I had given up quitting. My eyes followed the mix of smoke...

Richmond Virginia's Municipal Waste are back with their latest piece of toxic detritus, Slime And Punishment. Their sixth album will be released on June 23rd via Nuclear Blast Records. Ryan Waste states, "We've been getting punished for the last five years by people asking for a new album. Now we're here to return the favour with an aural onslaught of speed metal punk. Enjoy a taste of slime courtesy of the Waste." Slime And Punishment is the first Waste album to be...

Geordie comic Carl Hutchinson has been called "Uniquely stubborn, outright impractical and undeniably hilarious" and we caught up with him for a quick chat... What is your show about? The show is called The Fixer, I get people to tweet in before the show starts with "If you were PM for the day what one law would you introduce?" It's just a fun little way of getting to interact with the crowd without asking the standard, where you from? What do...

Fyre Festival, the Bahamas-bound, Insta-model endorsed music fest is officially a disaster. Touted as  a 'cultural moment created from an alchemic blend of music, art, and food', patrons were greeted by a festival site that wouldn't look out of place in Children of Men. The promised A-list models and boutique tents in reality turned out to be wild dogs and hastily-assembled emergency shelter, all for tasty ticket prices upwards of 10K. Evidently, Twitter has latched onto the catastrophe and run with...

Only Echoes Remain are a London-based 4-piece that blend the classic 'wall of guitar' sound of This Will Destroy You with post-metal elements a la Russian Circles/If These Trees Could Talk, the atmospheric prog-y math of Karnivool with the emotions of Sigur Ros or Yndi Halda. Debut album The Exigent is set for release on June 16th. Recorded at the Abbey Road Institute The Exigent is very much a concept record with a full narrative running throughout. ‘Aurora’ is the...

He could have blown out eighty candles on a birthday cake this July 28, 2017 if he hadn't blown one bullet through his head on February 20, 2005. If the earlier event never happened the future one likely would have happened in the exact same place, in the kitchen cum office cum command center of a rustic ranch house in Woody Creek Canyon ten miles outside of Aspen, Colorado. The house's owner referred to it as the Owl Farm and...

Hundreds of people witnessed a one-of-a-kind event last night as an audiobook was beamed into space for the first time ever. The audio drama Alien: River of Pain was transmitted from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, with onlookers afforded the chance to see the audio drama get converted into a digital signal and beamed out into the atmosphere, before listening themselves. The transmission was created by audiobook retailer Audible to celebrate the release of Alien: River of Pain, which details the Alien saga...

It’s hard to understate the impact Spotify’s ‘Friend Activity’ sidebar has had on my listening habits. As the shadow of social connectivity crept across my Spotify account over the years, sprouting inboxes and sharing features as it went, the ‘Spotify Stalker Bar’ has made my listening habits at once more diverse, better-curated, and utterly, horribly micro-managed. For those unfamiliar with the Friend Activity sidebar, whether you are a mobile-only Spotify user or eschew the service entirely, this desktop feature allows you...

  Cultural curator, video remixer / audio-visual DJ Eclectic Method has revisited the Eighties and the sound of 80s synth lasers for this brilliant musical homage to time-travelling kung fu cop Kung Fury, the cult Swedish homage to everything that was on telly and silly in the Eighties. Kung Fury (you can watch it below) is an English-language Swedish Kung Fu comedy action flick written, directed by, and starring David Sandberg, paying homage to 1980s martial arts and police action films with more visual...