Lake Lewisia #1362
Jan. 28th, 2026 07:08 am---
LL#1362
Abel held up his hands, helpless. “She’s sitting in my house holding Cissy’s hand this very minute! She gave me her valise before I left the house, and I thought sure she’d send an errand boy to fetch it back tomorrow. But no, not an hour ago she walked right up to my door, determined as you please, and I do believe she intends to stay despite how the whole damned ruck of Stirlings must be throwing a tantrum as we speak. The spunk of the girl! The ways of Providence are strange.”
Life was full of surprises, but in Barney’s experience, people generally weren’t. Oh, people had surprised him before, in his callow youth, but that was because he hadn’t understood who they really were. Once you got down to someone’s true character, you could see that they’d been who they were all along. People mostly kept doing just what they’d been doing their whole lives, what they’d been brought up to do. Of course he’d met a handful of those who bucked tradition and struck out on their own, but he hadn’t expected to find one in Deerwood.
“Is it Providence?” he asked. “That seems as clear a demonstration of free will as anything I’ve ever heard.”
Five times Valancy Stirling surprises Barney Snaith.

Dialect
Full Serpent
Andrew P.M. Hunt makes music for small speakers and close quarters, a tender kind of futurism
Full Serpent by Dialect
In just the first three weeks of 2026, the world has become more uncertain than it has been in the entire past twelve months. Low temperatures in Kiev, protests in Minneapolis, marches in Nuuk, Greenland. Is anyone else wondering where the world is heading? Overwhelmed by this news, it would be best to hibernate and wait out what is overwhelming us.
Andrew P.M. Hunt – one quarter of one of the best contemporary “guitar” bands, Ex-Easter Island Head, and at the same time an exceptionally creative solo artist – returns with an EP lasting just twenty minutes. Released a year and a...
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Ahead of the first ever vinyl reissue of Djelika, Mary Chiney provides ten entry points into the work of the master kora player from Mali, tracing a lineage that stretches back 71 generations
The word "fusion" was an insult to Toumani Diabaté. Throughout his life, the maestro of the kora, the 21-string West African harp-lute, rejected the term with a polite but steely firmness. "Fusion means confusion," he often told interviewers, his voice low-pitched gravel, possessed of a gravity that seemed to pull the room toward him. "I don't do fusion. I do a meeting. When you meet someone, you talk to them. You don't become them."
This distinction is the key to unlocking the strange, sprawling, and intimidatingly beautiful world of Toumani...
The post The Strange World Of… Toumani Diabaté appeared first on The Quietus.

Ian Wade meets Peaches in Soho to discuss the 13 records that have shaped her life and work, from Lil' Kim to Laurie Anderson, disco to krautrock
Photo by The Squirt Deluxe
With Peaches’ new album No Lube So Rude arriving next month, the temptation to call it a comeback seems, well, rude. Sure, it’s her first release in 10 years, but that’s not to say she hasn’t been busy. There have been films, a succession of features on other people’s records as well as her own exhibition Whose Jizz Is This? In Hamburg. There have been anniversary tours as her seismic debut The Teaches of Peaches first reached 20, then 25 last year, and three documentaries about her career. Her influence...
The post The Reaches of Peaches: Peaches’ Favourite Albums appeared first on The Quietus.

Backengrillen
Backengrillen
A garbled and rushed melding of doom metal and free jazz born from the ashes of Refused’s recent demise
Backengrillen by Backengrillen
On 21st December 2025, Swedish post-hardcore stalwarts Refused played their final gig in the group’s hometown of Umeå. A sweaty and teary affair, Refused unleashed a rolling broadside over a brisk 90 minutes, unfurling the entirety of the band’s dedication to weighty and outspoken hardcore in a fierce and conclusive salvo.
As tastefully monochrome images of the band embracing were dragged and dropped onto social pages, you would assume that after thirty-plus years of sonic vitriol the group might sit back for a bit of R&R; a bit of fika maybe? Maybe this would have been the right move considering the...
The post Backengrillen – Backengrillen appeared first on The Quietus.


We say goodbye to the Jamaican drummer Sly Dunbar who died at the age of 73 this week, after helping steer the beats of reggae, working globally with everyone from Serge Gainsbourg to Grace Jones
It was at the school gates, while picking up a KPop Demon Hunters-obsessed five year old, where I heard the sad news that Sly Dunbar had left this mortal coil yesterday. This may seem like the last place you’d expect to find out about the passing of reggae’s most enduring drummer and, alongside bassist Robbie Shakespeare, one half of the most prolific rhythm section in show business, but such was Sly’s reach, his music permeated pop culture, supplying the back beat for everyone from Bob Marley...
The post Remembering Sly Dunbar by Wrongtom appeared first on The Quietus.

After gazing into his crystal ball, JR Moores rounds up the latest psych rock rackets
Michael Hampton
Another year, is it? Already? What’s on your bingo card? For me? Maybe actual bingo. I’m old enough to remember when telephones were attached to the walls, like in Stranger Things, and the whole family would gather in front of the telly together to enjoy anything that wasn’t hosted by Cilla Black.
Here are some predictions for 2026 in the world of psychedelia, other music, and beyond. Given the catastrophes that are already looming, they’re actually quite light-hearted.
My Bloody Valentine will “drop” a brand new album… into the bin. And begin rewriting it from scratch.
The Spectator columnist Bonnie Blue is going to headline Cheltenham Literature Festival.
Jools...
The post Columnfortably Numb: Psych Rock for January by JR Moores appeared first on The Quietus.

Tashi Dorji
Low Clouds Hang, This Land is on Fire
The Bhutan-born, North Carolina-based guitarist picks up an electric guitar for this initially somewhat softer take on his solo practice, albeit spiked with greater urgency as the record progresses
low clouds hang, this land is on fire by Tashi Dorji
One of the more enduring legacies of the World War II partisan movement can be found in its anthems of resistance and uprising. Unlike the brutal force of usual calls to arms, the Soviet war song ‘Katyusha’, its Italian version ‘Fischia il vento’, the French ‘Le chant des partisans’, and the memefied/commodified to death yet eternally poignant ‘Bella ciao’ occupy a softer emotional space, trading outward aggression for profound melancholy. Their melodies draw strength...
The post Tashi Dorji – Low Clouds Hang, This Land is on Fire appeared first on The Quietus.

Drew Daniel of Matmos has been creating dance music as The Soft Pink Truth for over 20 years, but recently he was forced to ask himself a difficult question: what utility does making music have while the world slides inexorably towards unmitigated disaster?
Drew Daniel aka The Soft Pink Truth by Josh Sisk
Like most of us over the past ten years, I am struggling with how to live my daily life against the backdrop of a global slide into genocide and fascism. Because this is a music publication, I will narrow that down a bit: since the decisive ascension of Trumpist politics in my country, I have struggled in particular with how to proceed as an electronic musician at all in...
The post Edith’s Diary: Drew Daniel on Creating Art under Fascism appeared first on The Quietus.