They did it with compost, you know

Fresh from seeing the Coen brothers' stupendous return to form in No Country For Old Men, I found myself staggering down internet ginnels and dead ends until I found this video.

UNKLE's Rabbit In Your Headlights features French actor Denis Lavant getting smashed up in a tunnel and being taunted by Vince from Queer As Folk.

It reminds me of the scene in No Country where the blood-soaked Llewelyn Moss is staggering on the highway near the American / Mexican border; the sense of isolation he feels as the cars drive past is palpable.

I also posted this because VFX artist Gavin Toomey slapped a bit of emulsion on this video. He's also known as Vessel and his comment a couple of posts ago led me, via Google, to his impressive IMDb listing as a visual tomfoolery boffin.

Although, don't make the same mistake I did and read 'compositing' as 'composting'.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: REQING OUT, BATTLES ATLAS

Adam's backside causes a rumpus - or should that be a medial rectus?

Adnam's Broadside, affectionately known to the pub's staff as Adam's Backside, was nearly my downfall at the quiz this week.

Still, myself and my co-host 9/10ths managed to grasp onto reality for long enough at our monthly tryst of trivia on Wednesday. He's posted his questions there, and I'm posting mine here.

The typical score on this general knowledge round was about 45%, or eight points, so it isn't a walk in the skate park. Don't let that tempt you into the evil of Googling.

Answers in the comments section please: I will post the proper real answers there in about a week.

1
The invention of which drink reportedly caused its inventor to exclaim: “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars”? (1 point)

2
Do these African countries have a larger or smaller population than the UK? (4 points)
A – Ethiopia
B – Nigeria
C – South Africa
D – Zimbabwe

3
Where in the human body would you find a posterior compartment, a medial rectus muscle and a bulbar sheath? (1 point)

4
Name me the three most common computer passwords in the UK according to PC magazine. Clue: one is a noun, one is a sequence of numbers and one is a sequence of letters. (3 points)

5
Polar bears (2 points)
A – What does Allen’s Rule have to do with polar bears’ legs?
B – What colour is a polar bear’s fur?

6
If you were to see Pegasus carrying the First Lord in modern day Britain, what would you be looking at? (1 point)

7
In a Boots poll of 4,000 adults, what percentage of smokers had kept their habit secret from their parents, even into adulthood? (2 points if you’re spot on, 1 point if you’re within 5%)

8
What is the most popular boy’s name in the UK? Is it: Jack, James or David? (1 point)

9
In what year was the Ford Transit introduced to the UK? (2 points for the correct year, 1 point if you’re a year out)

10
What word connects a US rapper, a flavour abandoned by Coca Cola, a Cameron Crowe film and Obelix’s mother in the Asterix comics? (1 point)

Edit: I've snaffled all the answers into the comments bit of this post, so look there for the solution. If you are posting your own answers, don't look for fear of spoiling probably the most fun you'll have all year.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: PLEASE DIARY

Merzbow makes crap an art form (that's meant to be a compliment, by the way)

Merzbow used to construct art from rubbish before he pioneered Japanese noise music.

If you don't know, Japanese Noise Music is Japanese, it just sounds like noise, and some people think it's music. I'm not sure where the name comes from.

Anyhoo, now Merzbow makes art from the unwanted noises we often cast away: static, radio fuzz, analogue glitches and machine hums. Still art from rubbish, then.

It's a sound that has served him well: he has a discography that's as long as your arm, but only if you're some long-armed freak who's spent too much time on the rack in your Uncle Cranford's secret torture chamber.

The latest ambient addition to that discography is an album called Higanbana, which literally translated means "you told me this was like Sigur Ros, I want my money back." If you're the sort of oddbod who hears music in the urgent clatter of a train or enjoys scratched muzak CDs stuttering over the speakers in Poundland, then you need this album. If, on the other hand, that sort of thing sounds like an audio atrocity, I'll never be able to persuade you that this extreme, experimental, harsh landscape is actually quite a nice place to visit.

Onto other things. Brighton's Square Records is the new home for iTAL tEK, and thank bigbeat for that because the eponymous title track from his new Deep Pools EP is my track of the week. If I did a track of the week. Which I don't.

A slow moving, spacious take on dub techno, with wheezing synths and heroin-flattened echoes of William Orbit's Water From A Vine Leaf, this record drips with the sort of hope lacking from his darker material previously offered on parent label Planet µ.

Like spacious? Klimek's Dedications is brooding and filmic, which make sense with titles like For Stephen Speilberg And Azza El Hassan. This mile-wide ambience is more suited to the plains of America than its home in Germany, and will appeal to fans of Deaf Center. (You can download a Klimek video by clicking here.)

And finally, a bit less minimal and slightly the worse for it is Vessel's Pictureland 01. It's lovely to have a chill-out album that doesn't have a picture of bloody Ibiza on the cover, but I don't think this release will change the fact that Vessel will eventually kick the bucket and his epitaph will be "'im off the Pet Shop Boys' Back To Mine complilation".

It's a fine way to remembered, but not as fine as making art out of a binful of crap.

DEEPER FRIED FAT: ENO GUITAR, REVIEWS MASSONIX

Ironic really, that I chose to see Heima nowhere near my real actual home

What kind of twittering moron throws himself on the mercies of the New Year's Day public transport system to see a film in a different county that he could bloody well see up the road from his house?

Still, I don't regret trekking for hours from Manchester to Bradford to see Sigur Ros' masterpiece Heima.

This smouldering film, infused with the ashen Icelandic landscape that no doubt inspired Richard Long, is slow moving, contemplative and beautiful. As the film glides to a close, you think you've seen a "nice" documentary. Then they let rip with Popplagið in all its boldness and intensity. It will leave your ears ringing.

It's definitely one for the big screen. If you fancy schmoozing over to the Cornerhouse in Manchester later this month to see Heima (and you're not a random internet stalker hell bent on stealing my trousers), then give me a shout.

My trip to Bradford had a brace of nice side effects. I sat near a man who, if he wasn't the real thing, was an accomplished Pete Doherty impressionist. Then out of the blue, I flirted outrageously with the bloke who drove my railway replacement coach:

EXT. BUS STOP - LATE EVENING

DRIVER stands in the doorway of his stationery coach chatting and laughing with a colleague

ME: Are you East Didsbury?

DRIVER: No, I'm a driver.

ME: Well, you look like East Didsbury. You know... classy.

DRIVER remains overly formal for the rest of the journey, although he still let me on without a ticket...

DEEPER FRIED FAT: KNOBS COCKS

And the winner is "I am a blithering hypocrite and you should pap me on the nose with the back of a spoon"

While I continue to search for my work / life balance, here's what has tickled or tackled me in the last 12 periods.

Oh and unlike last year, don't expect a 'record of the year' post. Most of this is about me, myself and what I've written, and my favourite things about me and myself and what I've written. You have read this blog before, right?

My DJ moment of the year: I've DJed less this year than you've had hot McDonald's chicken nuggets (they don't exist), but the impromptu gig at the Greenbelt festival has to lay the smack-down on anything I've ever done.

My video post of the year: It's stupid to take credit for plonking down a signpost towards other people's work, but then again I am a DJ. Here is the link which made me realise there wasn't such a difference between the Scratch Perverts and Delia Smith.

Blogs I have enjoyed with my eyes, part one: Here are five blogs that struck me in 2007. Like a freight train. And while my head is flung 600 yards down the track, let me reassure you I have missed a lot of favourite blogs off this list. But here goes the list, including links to their most recent entry. James and his blue cat was The First Blog I Ever Really Got Into, and while we're at it, Patroclus brought a beautiful humanity to the blogocube. Chinglish went round in linguistic circles while Fiction Bitch dotted the js and crossed the eyes. Nine Tenths Full Of Penguins made so many of my best moments of 2007 happen due to his annoying persistence of organising things.

My own blog post of the year: Stupidly prophetic because HMV went on to sell some of their Fopps and the Klaxons scooped the Mercury, and a notch above the rest because I don't know any other blogs that used the phrase "Fopp's flopped shops", my favourite post this year is I'm Quietly rooting for the Klaxons but this is a post about Fopp's flopped shops and not the bloody Mercury Prize.

My own phrase of the year: Because it projects the false impression I am a humble monk-like gentle giant and not an egotistical fame-felching starfucker, my piece about r 'n' b rises to the top for the opening phrase "I am a blithering hypocrite and you should pap me on the nose with the back of a spoon". It's amazing what a nonsensical word can do to a sentence; just ask Anthony Burgess.

Blogs I have enjoyed with my eyes, part two: Five more doozers, whatever a doozer is. No-one could touch George Monbiot for making me think until it hurt, so thank goodness for the soothing You Have Got The Wrong Person who, quite simply, got the wrong person. Get Weird Turn Pro pressed a cultural ear onto the tracks of electro funk-daddiness. Cultural Snow pimped his book (and my blog, to my surprise) and was still interesting. And the Manchizzle did what the Guardian says it does on the tin.

Other crap: It's has been my first good year for a long time. I went to counselling and it changed my life. I had the privelege to work at Greenbelf FM. I got too fat. I got lucky and paid off all my debts. I've already mentioned the Greenbelt gig. My cat turned 18. I forgot people's birthdays. I became Formula One pundit for a local radio station. I bought red trainers. I got a new job for the first time in nine years. I saved someone's life because I remembered my first aid course from years ago. I worked my bum-bum off at Refresh FM and loved every minute.

And now it's that part of the post where I put my self-centredness to one side and start awarding prizes to other people. Sorry? What's that? I've exceeded my 2007 bandwidth?

See you on the other side.

It's a magic carpet ride, every door will open wide to happy people like you

I've just burned my thumb by shoving my hand in the oven*, which was painful but on the bright side has lessened my chances of being murdered from hitchhiking**.

And it reminded my fast food-addled brain that I have itchy fingers or feet*** or whatever the saying is because I haven't run a music night for months.

My last foray into live Manchester eventdom in which I was the organiser and, naturally, the star was a moderately successful ABC-themed event with a punter-led video installation and big, colourful buttons for the public to select which Sesame Street clip they watched.

Part of the reason is this: I haven't had time. Strike that from the record; that was a putrid bile-dripping lie. If the truth be told, and this is the internets so it's always true all the time, I think I have become lazy.

So lazy, in fact, that here is a list of words I couldn't even be bothered to type on this blog:

a)

b)

c)

d)

e)

See? So the plan is to click my heels and land back into the colourful world of electronica arts, with the added expertingness of my Squeaky Productions cohorts. The last Squeaky Productions night, called Two, is dead in the water, although you can dredge for bodies on these blog posts.

Watch this space. Because at this rate, that's all my blog will become.****

*when I say "the" oven, I mean my oven. There's isn't some special oven shared by everyone like the sun or the air.

**I'm reading On The Road, which probably also explains ***.

****If I do too many of these asterisked post-scripts, it will also become an anemic imitation of James Henry's blog.

Reviving my shrivelling grandma and getting out of my depth with Mahler

Just because I've been adjusting to a new job for the first time in nine years, that's no excuse to leave my blog shrivelled on the edge of the pavement like an old forgotten grandma.

Still, there's nothing better to distract you from your blogless disappointment than some nice charts. Above is a bar chart interpretation of Jay Z's 99 Problems, and you can see plenty more here. If anyone can tell me the collective noun for charts, tell me using a graph.

Because blogging is the way I speak, I've kept silent about lots of music. Not least Sun Electric's Lost & Found (1998 - 2000). The tracks were rediscovered on an old CD-R, as the title suggests, and it's a welcome reminder of a band that have been dormant for donkey's.

Sun Electric always lacked the crunch of their techno peers Orbital, and perhaps the production talent of some-time Orb dabbler Thomas Fehlmann lent their music too much whimsy.

When it's not trying to be Brian Eno's Nerve Net on a little too much horse tranquilizer, Lost & Found works wonderfully, not least in the flapping rhythm of Echelon which sounds as though the whole thing was recorded inside a pipe.

A hop over to the Leaf Label now, and Murcof have thrown a curve-ball with their new album Cosmos.

Their glitchy precision has been buried in favour of ambience sweeping from Mahler-inspired moodiness to Wagner-inspired pomposity. (All the other reviews have mentioned György Ligeti, but I don't know who he is and I'm bloody useless at classical comparisons).

It's either quiet, or it's the ambient equivalent of a guitar solo. It's certainly not worth buying it on its own, which is good because apparently it'll be fully realised as an audio-visual project.

In fact, stuff all this lot. Screw it. If you're looking for something on which to spend your hardcore pimp wage, plump for Luke Vibert's Chicago, Detroit, Redruth. Playful acid rave has never been so listenable, and it's the first album I've owned dedicated to a Cornish town.

mpSunday: Pole's Stefan Betke remastered the newly found gems on Sun Electric's Lost & Found. Pole are seriously underrated, so here's a free track. Grab it while you can, because as soon as I post another mpSunday, this mp3 will be kicked to the kerb like gran. POW! This mpSunday is no longer available - click here for the latest mpSunday

It's coming home, it's coming home, it's coming, Fatboy's coming home

I am a lying philandering whore.

Okay, I take back the 'philandering' bit. And 'whore' may be overstating my case.

But you may tattoo my bonce with the word 'liar', for that is what I am. My Blogger profile details pin me down as a "Manchester writer, DJ and man about town". This is disingenuous.

The 'town' I was referring to was Macclesfield. It has been my place of work for the past three years. It's a strange place, inward-looking and not really sure what it is. But it's picturesque in some places, and the charity shops offer treasures for which Gollum would kill.

However, Macclesfield is not Manchester (photo of Oklahoma Cafe door by Dullhunk). I am a proud Mancunian. I have been risking life, limb and lobes on long public transport journeys into the Cheshire town, often feeling I should be working back home, in the holy city that gave the world Shameless, the Hacienda and, er, Jay Kay from Jamiroquai.

So... I'm proud to announce the birth of my new-- oops, sorry-- I'm proud to announce I will be working back in Manchester from tomorrow. I have a new job with Blackwell's university bookshop. It should afford me more time for blogging, writing, shopping lists, scratching, stabbing and anything else that can be done with a pen.

It's nice to be back home. I see you've kept the place tidy.