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.

A low-denominator, low-rent scally by any other name would smell like sweets

When I was young and unwrinkly, I went flyposting to promote a night called Automa.

In my misty dreamcloud memory, I wore a hooded top and tried to look street despite spilling wallpaper paste all over my trousers.

It was a partial success. Manchester was plastered with Automa posters right up to the point where I got chased out the city by some bad boy gangster types.

You try running when your legs are stuck together.

It was no surprise, then, to find these Warehouse Project posters discarded near my house. They advertise the weekend just gone, headlined by the leg-end in his own lunchbox Dave Clarke.

The perpretrators of this oft-tolerated crime of flyposting have probably been strangled by some razor sharp bling or, even worse, been made to listen to a 50 Cent album all the way through.

Or maybe, just maybe, they couldn't be arsed and went to the pub instead.

There's an art to a good poster. These ones promoting the Warehouse Project are instantly recognisable thanks to a basic template they use for all of them.

Thank goodness too for Bill Drummond's understanding of a poster that does what it says on the tin, or Underworld's eye for a brilliant image.

Just save us please from the anti-Christ of quality, the Bop.

This infernal itch of a night continues to drown Manchester in low-denominator low-rent advertising that promises, "whilst the rest of club land goes high class, the Bop remains true to its roots... drinks prices are still dangerously low."

They add, "a relaxed dress code means you do get the odd scally". There is no other kind of scally, surely?

This blog post has been brought to you by my inflated middle-class Grauniad-reading ego. I'm off to clean my trousers.

You can take the cinema out of Michael Owen but you can't take Michael Owen out of the cinema, not without force

It's been a while. The last time I posted pub quiz questions on the Fat Roland blog, men were boys, sheep were lambs, and Virgin Pendolinos were loo rolls with jammy dodgers for wheels.

Last night, my bearded cohort Nine Tenths Full Of Penguins and I hosted a quiz in Ye Olde Cock in Manchester, where 'Olde' is pronounced to rhyme with 'mouldy'.

So here are the questions. It's about sport, of which I know little. A brace of questions have been felched from other internetwebsites, but most of it is my own work, miss.

If you reply with answers, I will mark you - no googling please. The real factual answers will materialize in a few days in the comments below this post.

Question one. What’s the perfect score in ten pin bowling? (1 point)

Question two. Let’s play Soccergram! Rearrange the letters of a football personality to find the longest word you can, e.g. from 'Michael Owen', the longest word you can get is 'cinema'. The football personality is: Sven Goran Eriksson. (1 point, plus a bonus point if you can find a nine-letter word)

Question three. The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens in 1896. How many women competitors were there? (1 point)

Question four. Part one: who was the last Formula One driver to die at a grand prix (whilst driving in practice, qualifying or a race)? Part two: which past or present Formula One driver has a name that contains nine consecutive letters spelling out a London borough? (2 points)

Question five. The exact distance of a marathon please, in miles and yards. (1 point)

Question six. Let’s play Soccergram. Rearrange the letters of a football personality to find the longest word, e.g. from 'Michael Owen', the longest word you can get is 'cinema'. The football personality is: Ruud van Nistelrooy. (1 point, plus a bonus point if you can find a nine-letter word.)

Question seven. Andy Murray is the UK number one singles player. In what is Jamie Murray the UK number one? (1 point)

Question eight, and yes this one was taken from another website. Part one: black is always with blue, red is always partnered by yellow. What is the sport? Part two: throwing stones at houses. What is the sport? (2 points)

Question nine: Rugby Union. Wales vs Fiji on Saturday. What was the score? (1 point)

Question ten: Match these people with their sports. The people: Barry Bonds, Beth Tweddle, Bobby Dazzler, Yesica Bopp. The sports: Baseball, Boxing, Darts, Gymnastics. (1 point for each correct match)