Ian Preece shares another year in books, records, film, life and community.

I think, as I get older, I’m just on a simple path in life now: to strip out all the crap, all the artifice. I managed to catch at the NFT this year, on a super-beautiful 35mm colour print, a screening of what’s possibly my favourite film of all time: Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum (or 35 Rhums in the French). First released in 2008, it’s a kind of simple tale of a train driver in Paris (played by Alex Descas, a Denis staple) and his daughter (Mati Diop), who’s about to spread her wings. There’s lingering ennui, melancholy, unrequited longings, the passing of time, and the simple matter of getting by, day to day, on the rainy twilight streets of a Parisian banlieue; a mise en scène superficially gloomy but full of hope, and soundtracked (like all Denis’ films) with commensurate aplomb by the Tindersticks, which also includes what has to be the greatest (and most fraught) use of ‘Nightshift’ by the Commodores ever captured on celluloid. It’s the fans of understatement’s most understated film. I’ve been searching for that bottled essence on the silver screen ever since, but it’s proved elusive (Paterson, Perfect Days, Past Lives, Shadows in Paradise, Winter in Sokcho – close; What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? ‒ also close, but too whimsical; The Holdovers – sharp lines and superb acting, held back by dollops of Hollywood cheese; The Mastermind ‒ disappointingly flat, all super-cool cars and cinematography, though an unengaging lead untypical of Kelly Reichardt movies renders it not quite the measure of its brilliant Rob Mazurek soundtrack; La Cocina – great, more than a tad theatrical though; Denis’ own Trouble Every Day – similar palette, superb matching soundtrack, but too psychotic). I probably need to work my way back to Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring. 

Is it me, or is everything over-produced, over-hyped, suspect, lurching to the false, or just downright fake these days? On one level there’s obvious questions like: isn’t Venezuelan oil Venezuelan? Or shouldn’t a manager familiar with life on the touchline be allowed to run a football club (rather than someone who was once a winger, or founded a talent agency from the back bedroom of their mum’s house before making a killing on the futures markets)? On a more micro level, we live in an over-mediated world: 6 Music DJs and trailers carry on like they are all our best mates accompanying us on our own personal ‘journeys in sound’ (‘shout out to Maya and Felix baking cranberry muffins with their dad in Swanley, Kent’; with, of course, the honourable exception of Gideon Coe, who actually is someone listeners would queue round the block to have a pint with); the Guardian want us to ‘share our experience’; and ‘this is our BBC’, for ‘each of us’. Why is there a ‘severe weather warning’ and news bulletin on the weather page of my phone from the Sun proclaiming ‘snow in London’ when out of the window the sun dazzles in a clear blue sky and there’s just a very slight firmness under foot from a light frost? Why this desperate faux inclusivity when this feels like a time when people are more divided than ever? The answer, I guess, is the same as it ever was: the smokescreens, filters, buffers and diversionary tactics of ‘late’ (it’s always ‘late’?) capitalism. Fifteen years late to the party, I read John Lanchester’s Whoops! just before Christmas, explaining the financial crash of 2008 to finance-illiterate idiots like me: he was on the money re. the monetization of every last walk of everyday life; and I think I buy his overreaching thesis that now communism is dead and buried in the east, capitalism no longer has to pretend to be benevolent in terms of the greater good in the west (no more education, welfare, infrastructural spending for the mass ‘we’), the untethered banking madness leading up to 2008 (super high-interest subprime loans earning bankers a fortune ahead of them reaping a further payout/bailout/fortune from taxpayers) signaling just the start of a new rapacious world order curated for the entitled few. 

Fuck that. Highlights of 2025 have included Wassie One at new reggae night ‘People’s Choice’ in the Plough & Harrow in Leytonstone (it was a lady called Sandra’s birthday – she cut up a large chocolate cake and handed rounded slices in polystyrene bowls to everyone, friends and strangers alike); joining the Polytechnic of Wales WhatsApp group for the BA Communication Studies alumni, intake of 1985, then meeting folk I hadn’t seen for 37 years on a lovely weekend at Gareth’s house in Dorset, everyone chipping in, cooking, washing up, walking on the beach, playing table tennis and catching up with more chilled, older versions of ourselves after four decades of life; then, as a direct spin-off of that, dancing to A. Skillz’s ‘California Soul’ in a fog of lazers and dry ice in a basement in Dalston at Helene’s 60^th birthday party that has now passed into legend; listening to speakers talking about the inclusivity of their community on a keep-Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon (let’s stick to real names)-and-his-thugs-out-of-Whitechapel march (plus a fine dahl, roti and tea afterwards in a café by the tube station with my mate Wayne); checking out the rooftops, swimming spots and environs of Marseille; DJing with Doug of the Sir Douglas Sound Hi-Fi, loading Doug’s periscopic speaker and decks in and out of the van and into various south-east London pubs, then spinning tunes from the likes of Al Campbell, the Morewells, More Relation, The Invaders and Phyllis Dillon. Doug has been heavily involved in a local musicians’ open mic night, set up and ran a poetry and spoken-word night, facilitated our services as a support act to The Brockalites, and soundtracked plenty of pubs’ Friday and Saturday evenings in SE23: exemplary use of a wide-angled lens; selfless community service of the highest order.

*

‘I love a circular conversation,’ as the late, great, sadly missed John Broad/Johnny Green used to say at the end of a phone call. Just to circle back to French railways, Mattia Filice’s Driver (nyrb) is a life-affirming book, a free-verse novel based on Filice’s two decades as driver on French railways, much of it in the Paris region. I’d be bullshitting if I said I got every reference or allusion to Rimbaud, Congolese French rappers, suburban railway stations, inner diesel and electric workings or Apollinaire poems, but I love all the smoking in the cab, the quotidian dramas, the endless tussle with management, the Socratic asides and existential crises that arise staring at miles and miles of steel rails unfurling before you on misty mornings and dark nights, the slowly accruing sense of solidarity and friendship among the drivers in Filice’s intake. Jacques Houis’ translation is beautifully musical: at various points Filice compares the tempo of the train running over the crossties to Tommy Flanagan’s piano on John Coltrane’s ‘Giant Steps’, alludes to the pantograph and the train itself as like the bow of a cello scraping against the strings of the catenary wires, and writes superbly with a cabin-eye view. Here he is on a morning commuter train, deciding whether to pull out from the platform on time: ‘I think I’m God, master of the doors . . . To those who run, who pant in protest at their sad fate, I reopen the doors. Some mortals are aware and give thanks through the camera, others ignore me and put their faith in providence . . . To those who drag their feet I’m pitiless. In my kingdom, one’s place has to be earned.’ Right on; chapeau.  

*

Mixtape 2025 

1 Rafael Toral, ‘Take the A Train’. I’ve got slightly obsessed with this D-side, bonus vinyl track, which takes a while to bloom into life, but when it does, does so magnificently: a glorious stretched-out blare of the main riff of the Billy Strayhorn/Duke Ellington classic of yore. The rest of the experimental Portuguese guitarist’s album Traveling Light is similarly made up of elongated, languorous jazz chords ‒ especially beautiful are the versions Billie Holiday’s ‘Body and Soul’ and the Chet Baker/John Coltrane/Don Raye standard ‘You Don’t Know What Love is’. ‘Lovingly valve saturated strums, bent by Toral’s whammy’ is the fine description on Boomkat. Album of the year. 

2 أحمد [Ahmed] ‘Isma’a [Listen]’. In truth I’ve listened to Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s ‘Summertime’ from his sublime 1963 LP The Eastern Moods of Ahmed Abdul-Malik far more than I have the modern day أحمد [Ahmed]’s furious deconstructions of the Brooklyn bebop bassist and oud player on their own Wood Blues or Giant Beauty. But this year I finally caught أحمد [Ahmed] live at Café Oto. That gig smoked. Antonin Gerbal’s pulsing, skittering skins; Seymour Wright’s horn sparking into the darkness; Pat Thomas’s clangorous piano blues; Joel Grip’s pounding bass . . . what could have been a relentless hammering was an ecstatic journey that gently descended to smouldering embers. 

3 Nicole Hale, ‘All My Friends’, ‘Give it Time’, ‘Sleeping Dogs’ (from the Curly Tapes cassette Some Kind of Longing). This tape has been stuck in my deck all year. It’s a languorous but poised, beautifully smoky thing. Opening track ‘All My Friends’ unfurls and fills out slowly like the morning light. Some of these melodies might feel hazily familiar from 1970s FM radio, filtered through a Mazzy Star-like (even a more somnolent Big Star-like) gauze. There’s early Jolie Holland in there too, but Hale’s take is all her own – she’s listed as playing ‘keys, guitars, vocals and skateboard’. I got so obsessed with the track ‘Give it Time’ its lustre has dimmed slightly. New favourite these days is ‘Sleeping Dogs’, complete with spare, sleepy piano and, if listening on headphones, what sounds like a crackling distant storm, audio vérité not a million miles away from Sonic Youth’s ‘Providence, Rhode Island’. 

4 Joe McPhee, ‘Cosmic Love’. Talking of 1970s vibes, I bought this on 7-inch a few years back, but it’s cropped up again as the closing track on a fine Corbett vs Dempsey compilation LP linked to a Sun Ra exhibition in the label’s gallery in Chicago. Man, is this a beauty. I was DJing at a local writers’ open-mic night in south-east London earlier this year and I tried to mix it in with ‘Short Pieces’ from McPhee’s latest poetry/free noise opus on Smalltown Supersound (with Mats Gustafsson) and got the levels and timing all wrong: the rutly, strangulated raspy skronk in the middle of ‘Cosmic Love’ fused with the vacuum-cleaner feedback on the poetry LP. The speaker stack squalled, the pub cat shot out the door and a few poets grimaced. Just as beautifully coruscating is Straight Up, Without Wings: the Musical Flight of Joe McPhee (also published by Corbett vs Dempsey). There’s a fantastic moment when a young McPhee, driving home from his late shift at the ball bearings factory outside Poughkeepsie where he worked for years, first hears John Coltrane’s ‘Chasin’ the Train’ on the car radio at 2 in the morning: ‘I went beserk. I pulled up in front of my house, the windows of the car were open and the radio was blaring. The sound was extreme. I couldn’t contain myself. I went crazy . . . screaming and going on. My father heard the sound of the radio and me screaming, and thought I was insane. I was, but that’s another story.’ I just listened to ‘Cosmic Love’ again, and after all these plays hadn’t realized right at the end, just as McPhee’s space organ fades, you can just make out ocean waves crashing against the shore. 

5 Zoh Amba, ‘Fruit Gathering’/‘Ma’. Haunting, mournful moments of quiet Ayleresque beauty from Zoh Amba’s excellent new Sun LP.

6 Mike Polizze, ‘It Goes Without Saying’. From Polizze’s dreamy Around Sound LP this track lodged in my head for much of the summer; kind of acoustic J. Mascis with mellotron and vibraphone fuzz. 

7 Phyllis Dillon, ‘You’re Like Heaven to Me’. Just an exquisite 2 mins 04 seconds from 1972, reissued as a Duke Reid 7-inch. 

8 The Invaders, ‘Give Jah the Glory’. Beautiful upfull reggae vibes from archive LP of the year, Floating Around the Sun, which should be in every home, and also includes Invaders’ gems ‘Conquering Lion’ and ‘Heaven & Earth’.

9 Al Campbell ‘Babylon’. In the sleevenotes to the 2000 Pressure Sounds Phil Pratt Thing compilation, Harry Hawke noted, ‘When Phil first took Al Campbell to the recording studio many observers apparently laughed at him saying that Al “couldn’t sing”! Phil felt differently.’ I knew there was a reason I love Al Campbell’s singing. Give me his slightly flat, unique grain any day over the more honeyed tones of Ken Boothe, Alton Ellis and Delroy Wilson, et al. ‘Babylon’ is a Peckings’ masterwork of smouldering intent: ‘Babylon them a criminal/Babylon them an animal/Babylon them a conman/Babylon them a ginal’. 

10 Yassokiiba, ‘Dub 5’. Beautifully spacey, chilled-out digidub 7-inch from Tokyo; a heavenly muted steppa. 

11 Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, ‘Lamp Fall’/‘Dieuw Bakhul’. Rhythm & Sound’s Berlin dubscapes rinsed through a Dakar filter. Hushed, spectral hypnotic vocal from Mbene Diatta Seck floats through Ernestus’ slowly intensifying beats.

12 Mother Tongue, ‘Djangaloma Dara’. Mola Sylla’s windblown Senegalese blues refracted through jazzy Puerto Rican drummer Frank Rosaly and Dutch electric clavichord courtesy of Oscar Jan Hoogland. Slightly desolate but deeply funky too.

13 Melody & Bybit, ‘Kwakaenda Imbwa’. Total heater from glorious comp Roots Rocking Zimbabwe: The Modern Sound of Harare Townships, 1975‒1980, written by Oliver Mtukudzi’s sister Bybit, and featuring Oliver – a kind of lodestar for Samy Ben Redjeb’s Analog Africa project – on lead vocals.

14 Pharoah Sanders, ‘Ocean Song’. I spent too long stoned as a pigeon in my chalet at Pontins, Camber Sands (and in the heated swimming pool ‒ first time I’d been in one of those), and have only a dim memory of catching A Tribe Called Quest late at night on what I think was the first ever Jazz FM weekender, in November 1990. In my defence I was only 23, but to compound my dismay I’ve belatedly come to realise, after years of lamenting never catching Pharoah Sanders live, that he was on the bill at the holiday camp too. Fuck. Still catching up with his records – this beauty is from the Bill Laswell-produced LP Message from Home of a few years later, but Sanders’ gorgeous saxophone melodies make me think of 1980s Crown Heights/Brooklyn/Manhattan, a world this émigré from the East Midlands had no idea about (just received images from the TV).

15 The Uniques, ‘My Conversation’. Totally ace, lolloping late-1960s rocksteady, spun (I think) by Miss T in the Servant Jazz Quarters’ basement at a recent Ram Jam night, and a fixture on our kitchen turntable over the festive period and ever since. 

16 Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, ‘Contemplating the Moon’, ‘Glow in the Dark’ and ‘County Z’, from Music for Rebuilding, the elegiac, beautifully composed soundtrack to forthcoming Josh O’Connor film Rebuilding. This is serene, poignant Willy Vlautin/The Delines The Night Always Comes, William Tyler’s First Cow and Bruce Langhorne’s The Hired Hand territory. ‘Things We Lost’ concludes with a glorious muted brass finale (from Anna Jacobsen) that makes me well up every time (like Johann Johannson’s The Miners’ Hymns fifteen years on).