the quietus : the new look

eek:

Dear all,

as of today The Quietus is no longer part of the joint venture deal with DrownedinSound and Sky. This obviously has major repercussions for The Quietus in both long and short term. Firstly, we'd ask anyone who has outstanding unpaid invoices to email them over to us within the next 24 hours so that we can make sure you're paid in full for work that has already been published. Secondly, as far as we're concerned this is not the end of The Quietus. With your help we've managed to achieve 40,000 unique users and 157,000 page views a month (that's a lot, for the webshy) since April and, more importantly, published some of the best music journalism that the British bit of the internet has yet seen. We're in discussions with various people to try and find a way of carrying on with The Quietus as an independent and financially viable entity. If you could get in touch with John and I about work already commissioned or with any questions you might have that would be a great help.

Thanks for all your hard work and support thus far,

J0hn D0r4n & Luk3 Turn3r

I wish them well - I've really enjoyed it so far.

in before LBZC

published some of the best music journalism that the British bit of the internet has yet seen.

Could someone link to any of this plz.

Maybe someone had better tell Los Campensinos' and Belle and Sebastian's lawyers about SWells referring to them as p43dos which I'm pretty sure counts as criminal libel...

...unless it's true!!?!?!??!?!?!?1/1//1/!

There's no point now though, Doran's got no money anymore.

"anymore"

Well, yeah.

http://www.yorapper.com/Photos/50-cent-i-get-money.JPG

Has Swells run so short of targets that he's hitting out at bands' legal representatives now?

doran stanky rich

http://www.thequietus.com/articles/black-sky-thinking-manchester-so-much-to-answer-for

^^ fucking retarded bullshit

I agree with it to the extent that undergrads are attracted to Manchester because of its music scene, but that's hardly a searing insight is it.

saying 'the wire' is like 'hill street blues' meets 'the great american novel' (like what, saul bellow? philip roth? not seeing it homes) is just ignorant bullshit.

is it really so bad that undergrads find this city appealing because of its music? no worse than londoners who affect to be interested in the psychogeography of the east end or whatever.

No, it's not bad, you're right. And a lot of crap gets talked about a lot of cities' music scenes, Manchester perhaps only marginally more than anywhere else.

http://www.yorapper.com/Photos/50-cent-i-get-money.JPG

Standard manc 'everything is shit' cynicism, just directed at Manchester not everything outside of Manchester, for once.

Just about sums the piece up, really.

A whole generation of walking lists, that’s what they’ve become: mention The Stooges or Scott Walker on your mySpace page and you’ve made it.

It’s as if the whole ethos of ‘Rock & Roll’- the whole fuck-what-came-before, daringly primitive and unabashed idiocy of it all is the one thing from the past that nobody can locate: not truly anyway; that, in reality, nobody wants to find.

For like lads huddled round the damp porno mag in the six - week holidays, or girls gawking at Big Brother bodies, the real thing might just be a bit too much to handle and live with: better the surface, the page, the TV, the comfort of make-believe.

haha

Seriously I kind of wish I had the self-confidence to baldly proclaim that there was no contemporary music out there that 'understood' the 'ethos' of 'rock'n'roll' without pause for thought that maybe it might be me not looking hard enough. It would make me more of a dick but I would like to have a holiday in that mindset

For like lads huddled round the damp porno mag in the six - week holidays, it was all for a dare so there was no consumnation involved

Did anyone watch Massive on BBC3 on Sunday night? This in a nutshell.

no. but i meant to.
its still available iplayer - worthy of a look nick ?

It was pretty horrific.

ahh, it was one of those that could have gone either way.
shame.

It seems to me that the Quietus would be a lot better with some synths and drum machines (e.g. Simmonds).

It seems like everytime I visit that site, they have a news story about Morrissey.

It's like Viz and Shakin' Stevens really.

the quietus was called "mildly pompous" in the graun on saturday...

That's what you get for using words with more than one syllable in them.

they ought to put a donk on it, quoth alan rusbridger.

http://thequietus.com/articles/01003-caligari

riiight, so... literacy -- what was *that* all about, eh?

Caught up in a handover, the film needed to make something that would stand out against the cookie cutter films of the day, and thus came forth this expressionist masterpiece. Frame after frame, it delivers slices of artistic masterpieces - from the pained look in the eyes of Francis in the beginning, to the introduction of Holstenwall and Caligari himself, Cesare's final flight over rooftops and through the woods, right through to the end - never missing a beat or forgoing art for content.

i spose no-one reads quietus, but still.

There are lots of rumours circling around Caligari and his cabinet. Siegfried Kracauer wrote From Caligari to Hitler in which he erroneously states that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was an allegory for post-war Germany, setting it up for the Nazis to take power

ehhhh kind of

Kracauer didn't bother to see the film for about 25 years before writing the book and couldn't even have read the script which was at the time lost. His theory that a film made in 1919 could somehow be an allegory for events that were still 13 years away has been debunked time and time again. But never the less, the story has stuck.

it's not going to get unstuck by repeating a stupid version of it, is it?

Created as a response to the boring and bland cinema of the day, now, as before, this film can be viewed as it was meant to be, still standing strong against empty special effects laden atrocities that insult us around every bend.

wonder which boring and bland films he's specifically referring to? might have been use ful if he'd named them.

Have another slice of artistic masterpiece, dear.

thing of it is, the film is the 'pet sounds' or 'sgt pepper' of cinema. it's (basically) 'the first art film', the first film to qualify as art, i.e. be recognized as such by people who argue the toss over that kind of thing -- i.e. people who didn't go to the cinema much, it being basically for prole women and kids, but were just about ready to 'take it seriously'.

it qualified because by using weird painted sets the film was abandoning photographic reproduction, and the idea was that just filming something wasn't art, it was at best 'filmed theatre'. no-one at the time wrote about other aspects of filmmaking, like editing; and few people got that, actually, photographing things is not not-art.

i suppose most films made in the US in 1919–20 could be called 'cookie-cutter', but i'm pretty sure also that the german makers of 'caligari' would not have had that at the front of their mind. there was the small matter of the first world war, for example, and the consequent trade embargo with the western allies that continued till after the film was made. wonder how many cookie-cutter films they might have seen...

i am impressed that the rio sold out a screening of this, in a way. it is a terrible film.

the last sentence about special effects is probably going to give me a headache.

Interview as PR analysis. And I'm damn entertained.

Really not a big fan of the tactic of leaving all the ums and ers in as an attempt to convey inarticulacy. I'd call it a dick move, in fact

agreed

thats a pretty cruel article

yea it just seems mean

Guess I'm starting to feel quite uncomfortable with the glee with which these "ooh, look how stupid pop star X" is are RT'd and tossed around. I know I have participated - a lot - in the past. But it is starting to make me uncomfortable.

Jesus, did Florence fuck the author's boyfriend?

too cringeworthy to read, cruelty is not a good look. Neither is encouraging anyone to be more like her from La Roux. (I can be cruel about her because I'm just some lame guy on the internet rather than someone she gave some time to and such.)

Am I the only one who read this as dismissive of her and cruel towards the PR machine that placed her in the public eye?

A couple of observations: firstly, how stupid do you have to be to not be able to work an iPod? It'd be nice to be able to somehow justify that she's clearly not an idiot, but what's still to come might seem to negate that.

^^ both cruel AND dismissive!

ha okay I kind of forgot about that part

yeah but seriously i'm reasonably technologically illiterate myself and i worked out how to work my ipod in about a minute

I work in IT and iPods confuse the fuck out of me. What's your point?

its not just that we have to call her stupid because she cant use an ipod, its that we also get to imply that she partakes in some kind of 20th-century ludditry that makes her both an idiot AND ideologically suspect

Yeah, and there's that whole subtext of "women can't deal with technology..." - not sure where the writer is going with that one. I'm not sure if she's condemning Florence for playing to that stereotype, or just reinforcing it.

There just seems to be a nasty edge to this "let's smash down pop stars" when they're female (see also the rage directed at LaRoux) - but I suppose there were those puppets on YouTube acting like idiots.

I'm not sure how the dynamics of the writer being female play into this. It would be easy to dismiss it as misogyny if the writer were male - but the female writer being dismissive of and cruel stupid female pop star is just too close to home for me. There's probably a healthy dose of projection in this discomfort. Women police other women just as rigidly - if not worse - than men do.

But in this case, I'm just as guilty of it, as LaRoux and Florence annoy me perhaps *more* because they are sold as "strong or arty women" when they're poppets. But how to counteract this - coverage of non-poppet females doesn't get quite the discussion and fuss, does it?

Sorry, my thoughts are ill formed and I'm tired.

I would just like to make it clear I'm not excluding myself in this, before anyone calls me out as hypocritical.

I'm trying to figure out why it makes me uncomfortable.

interesting list at the very least with the occasional completely bizarre pick, like i would have never imagined the quietus would rep for travis scott's birds in the trap sing mcknight, of all things?

agree with a lot on the list but the travis pick is ludicrous, especially considering all the artists he ripped off have made better albums/tapes. the us rap picks being kendrick/kanye/travis/death grips is so "i don't like rap but _____", really just missing run the jewels.

great site for 10 years

ah reading again this list was voted on by everyone who's ever contributed to the site, unlike the end of year lists which are compiled only by the 5 core staff. that explains why it's in some ways a lot less distinctive than i would have expected for a quietus list, but still doesn't explain travis scott showing up

that claim can't be true cos I contributed a few reviews to the quietus and they never contacted me for this article, the bastards :)

that claim can't be true cos I contributed a few reviews to the quietus and they never contacted me for this article, the bastards :)

ditto, but without the emoji.

Twelve years old and a subscription model to help the site continue -- as well as get a slew of bonuses -- is now live:

https://thequietus.com/articles/28833-the-quietus-subscriptions-birthday

Think about it, won't you? (So I can write even more for them. :-D )

oh yes will do that now

tQ needs a subscriber boost -- if you can contribute, please do!

https://thequietus.com/articles/32853-quietus-subscriber-discount

I uhm ... doubt that I'm the only Quietus reader over 40. Why then the eyechart typeface

To make you work for your edification. :-D

The Quietus is one of those websites that doesn't specify a typeface. So if you go into your browser settings, change the default typeface and reload the site you should find something more to your liking.