Octannual Update

Recommendations ahoy!

There’s so much great stuff around at the moment that I’m dedicating this newsletter to a list of recommendations. After I made this list, I realised that the things I wanted to recommend didn’t fall in the expected categories - TV, film, radio, album etc. It was mainly media categories that didn’t even exist in the last century. What to make of that I don’t know, but perhaps when old industries are broken, creativity finds a way. I do know that, for pretty much all subscribers to this newsletter, there will be something in this list that you will love.

Presented in no particular order - enjoy a rummage through this haul!

PODCAST

I’ve raved about Broken Veil before - I can only describe it as post-Cyberpunk folk horror. It’s a slowly unfolding, increasingly unsettling story that feels like classic folk horror but which is set firmly in the modern digital world. Following the success of the Backrooms film there are many film producers scouring YouTube for the next contemporary horror but what they are looking for is right here.

The first series picked up an award at the 2025 British Podcast Awards and is freely available on your podcast platform of choice. The second series - which if anything, gets even better - has also been nominated for this year’s awards. It is paywalled on Patreon with subscription from £3 a month, which also gets you extra one-off stories to enjoy. If “enjoy” is the right word for such creepy mischief.

Alas the episodes no longer have the inappropriately jaunty announcement at the end of each episode - “This has been a Cheese and Pickle production!” - which originally served as a banishing ritual for the disturbing atmosphere the show created. I guess we’ll just have to remain creeped out.

INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY

“Interactive documentary” is a new category to me - it might be equally valid to describe Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story as a lovingly curated digital museum. If you had any interest in video games in the 80s and 90s you will no doubt remember the singular, ungulate-obsessed work of Jeff Minter, including Attack of the Mutant Camels, Sheep in Space and (a key one for me) Metagalactic Llamas Battle at the Edge of Time. Minter’s stuff was unapologetically nuts, and he had a taste for making you think in extra dimensions compared to standard games - making playing them deeply psychedelic, and not just because of the freaky ever-changing colours.

Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story gives you a timeline of his work, allowing you to browse the artwork, read the fanzines, watch mini-documentaries or play the 42 games (and light synthesisers) included here, from the ZX81’s 3D 3D to the Atari Jaguar’s Tempest 2000. There’s also an updated version of Gridrunner as a bonus. Minter happily ignored the games industry’s shift from playful amateur experimentation to big money corporate cynicism, making him fully deserving of this excellent tribute. Also, playing ZX81 games on a PS5 is a pleasingly perverse thing to do.

AUDIOBOOK

In a better world, I would now be recommending the audiobook of Gabriel Kennedy’s biography of Robert Anton Wilson, Chapel Perilous. But alas - it does not yet exist. Fortunately there is a Kickstarter campaign attempting to rectifying this, so if want to help help bring this thing into existence, click here and consider supporting. Do it for Bob!

YOUTUBE SERIES

For The Record: An Incomplete History of Music is a science-based documentary series about the history of music, presented by Charlotte Richie from Ghosts. It starts with the Big Bang and leaps randomly around - over 9 episodes and about 11 hours - up to the present day. It is pleasingly geeky, obsessive and feminist, and despite all the science and history it doesn’t lose the sense that music is a wonder. Also, Robert Smith pops up.

With over 100 interviews filmed around the world, it’s a stupidly ambitious production. It’s the sort of thing that would once have been made by the BBC but is now made independently (by the Cosmic Shambles Network) and put on YouTube for all. For lovers of the BBC there is something depressing about that, but at the same time, something inspiring.

BLU-RAY

I was lucky enough to catch a screening of David Bramwell’s The Haunted Moustache - produced by ESP-FC’s Andy Starke - at a sold-out screening at the Depot cinema in Lewes a couple of weeks ago. If this is not the sort of thing that your local cinema programmes, then the limited edition Blu-Ray is the way to go.

The Haunted Moustache is a filmed version of a one-man talk - nothing more than a storyteller and a story. It is entirely out of sync with modern film, having more in common with the work of Spalding Gray than with Netflix. In many ways it is the exact opposite of AI slop, and it captivates because you can never predict where the story is going next. It begins with David being bequeathed a mysterious moustache by an elderly relative, and only gets stranger from that point on.

The Blu-Ray comes with a soundtrack CD by Oddfellows Casino, and there’s a very limited version that comes with the book as well. More of this sort of thing!

BOOK

Okay, I know I said that all these recommendations were in new categories of media, but you’ve always got to have a book. You can’t not have a book. And I absolutely loved Graeme Thomson’s recent work on the last four Talk Talk/Mark Hollis records, In Another World.

Given that the key people involved in this story are no longer with us or make a point of not talking, writing about Talk Talk is quite a challenge. This has pushed Thomson into focusing on the records themselves, how they were recorded, and what impulses were behind them. My take on Talk Talk differs a little from the standard critical consensus - Laughing Stock is the pinnacle for me, which I rate above Spirit of Eden, and I get more out of It’s My Life than I do the self-titled Mark Hollis album. But regardless of your take on those records - if they mean anything to you, then that relationship will be deepened by this book and that is a wonderful thing.

And on the subject of books, how productive is my wife Joanne Mallon? How to Find Mindfullness in Five Minutes a Day is her second book this year - she shows me up for the slacker that I am. As usual it’s beautifully designed - a little book stuffed full of bite-size suggestions that will help you Be Here Now. If that sounds like a good thing that you should have in your life, you can find it here.

GRAPHIC NOVEL

And if we’re having a book, we should also have a graphic novel. My Beloved Other by Angela Watson and Nick Abadzis of Laika and Doctor Who comics fame is a powerful and touching anti-racist memoir about their 30-year relationship. It’s a reminder of the one thing that those who wish to downgrade multicultures into monocultures can never account for, which is that people fall in love. Moving and timely, and highly recommended.

But that’s enough from me - I hope there’s something in that lot which will mean something to you. Until next time!
jhx