Assistant

I think I can sense a sudden shift in the intensity of the greens too. The leaves are darker & reflect less light, moss thickens on stone walls and tree trunks. Stray terracotta & coarse granite homes replace the pale limestone of the North. And the sky feels so much closer!!

Two hour of those middle-France flatlands and I’m itching for some variation. We’re about two hours north of the Dordogne when we get the first real sense of interplanetary travel! The climb is accompanied by taller trees, by denser shadows & redder soil. Cereal is swapped for pine, fur & spruce.

Onward travel is just the best feeling. I admit that stepping from an aeroplane into the lizard-dry heat of, say, Crete is the best thing, but even then I hanker for the blur of objects out of the window - the twin sense of getting somewhere & leaving stuff behind. I enjoy our drive south so much.

YouTube video by Goodbye Wudaokou Goodbye Wudaokou - Loop Back To Us (Official Music Video)

…if you saw someone recording a music video on Rochdale Road/Manchester New Road at about midnight last Saturday, you didn’t hallucinate it. The video for my new single, Loop Back To Us:

#indiepop #janglepop #dreampop

youtu.be/-Sa1KSQlVec?...

So we began the next stage of our descent, heading down from our shepherd’s hut in Sologne to southern Limousin and our lake-side campsite for the next two days. It was a two hour drive which took us through a thrilling range of landscapes.

Sologne is a witchy sort of place. We were creeped out.

It felt a bit like being in Kansas. The whole way we were conscious of the flat, urgent, arrow straight drive, time falling away from us as we ploughed down long empty roads.

“I think we’re in the South”, I’d say.

Alison would squint. “Not yet”.

So we kept driving, waiting for it to all change.

We pushed on. Once the forests cleared the sky opened out above us & our car shrank until it was a minuscule speck raising dust.

Berry (not named after Bill) is presumably France’s agricultural middle, and if it’s not, it should be. Huge, wiiiiiide fields of wheat & tens of thousands of sunflowers.

It’s flat, forested, pond-rich, full of dark swampy corners. Having arrived from the silvery, painterly Seine it was like landing in the dark ages. Marshes, ritual sites, witchy bogs.

Le Lac de Soings fills & empties of its own accord! Despite or perhaps because of all this we liked it a lot.

So we began the next stage of our descent, heading down from our shepherd’s hut in Sologne to southern Limousin and our lake-side campsite for the next two days. It was a two hour drive which took us through a thrilling range of landscapes.

Sologne is a witchy sort of place. We were creeped out.

thank you, this is so great, love the yearning, the longing & the rawness in the vocals.

Different reference points than “Only Qs”, think I might even for the first time agree with the New Order comparisons… but there’s a touch of something Sarah in there too?

Anyway. It just reeled me in!

Loop Back To Us, by Goodbye Wudaokou track by Goodbye Wudaokou

The new single, Loop Back To Us, is out on Bandcamp now (other places to follow in the coming days). Unashamedly catchy guitar pop. Hope you like it. Shares and listens sincerely appreciated.

#janglepop #dreampop #lofi #manchester #indiepop

goodbyewudaokou.bandcamp.com/track/loop-b...

Jonathan's Holiday Journal #1 Includes a review of The Girl With The Replaceable Head (and some poetry about mermaids)

Have you heard the stuff that Hurrah’s Taffy Hughes is doing these days? As The Girl With the Replaceable Head? It’s just fantastic. My excitable review of their last LP is embedded in this slightly rambly piece:

open.substack.com/pub/intheapr...

Coming to Bandcamp tonight:

#musicsky #diysky #lofi #jangle #manchester

Jonathan's Holiday Journal #1 Includes a review of The Girl With The Replaceable Head (and some poetry about mermaids)

Have you heard the stuff that Hurrah’s Taffy Hughes is doing these days? As The Girl With the Replaceable Head? It’s just fantastic. My excitable review of their last LP is embedded in this slightly rambly piece:

open.substack.com/pub/intheapr...

Freaks, by Assistant from the album Ten Songs and Second LP

So far this is the only Assistant song with a verse sung from the perspective of a hamster. So far.

assistant.bandcamp.com/track/freaks-2

Flowers Made Of Light, by Ben Holton 10 track album

The limited edition 2nd press, colour variant of the 'Flowers Made Of Light' CD is now available to pre-order 🙂

digital.waysideandwoodland.com/album/flower...

It does not! But you might be hoping to read your book and have a glass of wine and chat with your beautiful wife rather than discuss unicorn kitties with an unravelling three year old! But I am good with all of the above!!

Some free codes for one of our LPs - for fans of Yo La Tengo / Felt / Sterolab etc, on a good day.
Redeem at assistant.bandcamp.com/yum

plcy-hrgd
rsj3-vdfh
hvef-clgv
hb6l-we29
jd3h-hbwz
94vj-5wlg
zcf8-bw53
3945-xasl
wysf-j2ce
skql-yc43
pn8h-7h5s
rdzh-5v2d
ucjw-c9l3
vpbc-xtqs
f9x4-e26d

Turned three today!! This better not be the future!!

Breaking news from the UK, the hi-fi chain Richer Sounds was today forced into an early closure as hundreds of radio listeners besieged their stores seeking to return or repair “faulty radios”. As yet no explanation has been found for their desperation and distress.

Lydia is still up. In this photo she is laughing at us, trying to have our peaceful holiday like idiots.

Ffs.

I would like to have unwittingly turned on the radio at the start of that guitar solo

It’s Lydia’s birthday. Here is she lying outside, evading bedtime.

Don’t suppose anyone knows how to get a three year old to go to bed?

This is an indie pop account, yes.

Olivier Masmonteil, Sans titre, 2024

This last one was painted in 2024 and it’s from an untitled series by Olivier Masmonteil. I’m not sure if this is the Seine but Masmontei’s breakthrough work was painted at Giverny in 2011 and, well, I like this one as a contemporary redrafting of the river, even if it isn’t.

Claude Monet, Morning on the Seine, 1897. An ethereal, almost abstract Impressionist painting of a misty river scene at dawn. The canvas is filled with soft lilac, blue, and rose tones. Trees and their reflections appear as ghostly silhouettes on the left and upper edges, blending into the foggy water. The center glows with diffused light, dissolving form into pure atmosphere.

And then there’s this: Morning on the Seine (1897) by Claude Monet. It was painted not far from Bonnard’s - but is dazzlingly exact in comparison. Monet returned to this exact stretch of river again and again, often at dawn, by boat, and painted it dozens of times. These paintings are real water.

The Seine at Vernon, c. 1915–1920, by Pierre Bonnard. An impressionistic river landscape rendered in soft, hazy tones of blue, pink, and gold. The wide Seine flows gently through the centre, with indistinct reflections and blurred trees or riverbanks in the background. Loose, layered brushstrokes create a dreamy, sunlit atmosphere, evoking memory and sensation rather than precise detail

We’re further south now but my head is still in Les Andelys. I didn’t do much with my camera but these might be useful.

This is Pierre Bonnard’s The Seine at Vernon (1925) - nominally a few km from where we stayed. But Bonnard painted landscapes from memory, so it’s a kind of soft imagined place.

I’ve got such a good idea for a perennial feature!

We are on the road to ruin but have steered well clear of the road to Rouen.

Just a stop on our trip but far enough down away from Calais to feel jarringly foreign - free of those rather grey industrial northern skies but no grapevines yet, though we look for them. We soon hit those long tree-lined avenues though - roads of my dreams. & chalky hills topped with dense forest.