THE MAGAZINE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Elsewhere is a concept and a place, and Graham Reid goes there for his wide angle travels, writing, music review and interviews with writers, musicians and artists.
Elsewhere is an on-line magazine for new music (we filter out the mundane and spotlight the more interesting albums), different travel, arts and more. It is dedicated to the diversity and possibilities of Elsewhere. It's an equal opportunity enjoyer. Subscribe here (it's free) for a weekly newsletter. Welcome . . .
Latest posts
HEADLESS CHICKENS, INTERVIEWED (1988): After the money, the pay-off album Stunt Clown
27 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
When the Auckland band Headless Chickens won the cash-carrying Rheineck Rock Award in 1988, the knives came out from conservative radio programmers, critics and those people standing next to you in a bar when you mentioned the band's name. On the one side was a small number of fans who'd actually seen the band and fellow travellers in the Indi.rock world, and on the... > Read more
LOVE IS THE SONG WE SING; SAN FRANCISCO NUGGETS 1965-1970: Flowers and freak outs
26 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
Any box set or collection which tries to mop up an era, genre or decade is probably doomed to failure, not from lack of genuine effort but because some artists (the big ones) don't want to be included. So you can get a multiple disc, very inclusive set of the Eighties for example and it doesn't have anything by Madonna, Prince, Springsteen and Michael Jackson. That... > Read more
Think Twice, by Salvation
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . HARRY GARTH JONES: Or perhaps the master of Scandinavian exotica?
25 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
Actually we can make this column about strange and unusual characters in music pretty brief. There is no Harry Garth Jones. But thank you for reading. Oh, there is however Mattias Uneback who is the man behind the album Harry Garth Jones Presents Music For Love. The album sits at the vague border of MOR, exotica and Latin jazz. It's cocktail music in a... > Read more
Lights Around Us, from Harry Garth Jones Presents Music for Love
The Incredible String Band: Wee Tam and The Big Huge (1968)
25 Aug 2025 | 2 min read | 1
Sometimes for my own private amusement I will sing aloud The Incredible String Band's The Son of Noah's Brother in its entirety. All 16 seconds of it. The lyrics run, "Many were the lifetimes of the son of Noah's brother, see his coat the ragged riches of his soul". And that's it: a lovely descending melody and not a wasted note or word. Quite what it... > Read more
Douglas Traherne Harding
BEATLES FOR SALE, YET AGAIN? (2025): The way things are going, they're going to crucify me.
25 Aug 2025 | 2 min read | 2
That's it. It ends here. I think my passion, fascination and perhaps even obsession with the Beatles is over. It's a sad farewell and feels a bit tainted. Let me just say that I'm a fan, have been since I was about 12 when I first heard Please Please Me. I'd missed Love Me Do (and frankly never much rated it) but suddenly there they were: on the radio, in photos... > Read more
The Palace of the King of the Birds (Beatles bootleg)
ONE WE MISSED: Guest: vegetable.machine.animal (Skirted Records/digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Now this is interesting: a kind of interface between technology, humanity and plants which attempts to answer the question – in a free improvisational way – what would it sound like if we could communicate with plants and fungi? What would we hear if we could listen to them? Recorded in 2024 at a Sonic Artist Residency with drummer Kieran Monaghan and a... > Read more
Water From Your Eyes: It's A Beautiful Place (digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
This left-field indie outfit from Chicago – signed to Matador after a brace of self-released albums – was first heard by Elsewhere on the album of Howe Gelb/Giant Sand covers Sandworms. That was just a fortnight ago and we speculated most our our readers wouldn't have heard of them either. Here's them with Gelb's Warm Storm. But we do... > Read more
Spaceship
Mild Orange: The//Glow (digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
We were so impressed by the previous album Looking For Space by the Dunedin-founded and globally ambitious Mild Orange that we ran a track-by-track account written by their mainman Josh Mehrtens. It confirmed they were as smart a band as we thought. They arrive at this fourth album of gently assertive dream pop somewhere adjacent to the Church of the 1990s and... > Read more
My Light
No Cigar: Under the Surface (digital outlets)
25 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Although No Cigar have made an impression on the local charts we get the impression they are still not as well known as they should be. We have always rated them in our other life reviewing singles for The Listener, for example when writing about their recent, menacingly chugging single Clean in advance of this album we noted they had two solid albums behind them and... > Read more
Merci Merci
Bob Dylan: Tight Connection to My Heart (1983), Someone's Got a Hold of My Heart (released 1991)
25 Aug 2025 | 3 min read
Bob Dylan is famous -- some might say notorious -- for revisiting his songs and revising them, changing lyrics and reinterpreting them musically. We've previously singled out the two versions of a song which was released as Brownsville Girl but began life as New Danville Girl. Here's another one which comes in two versions, and it is the shift in tone as much... > Read more
MONEY DON'T GET EVERYTHING IT'S TRUE: What it don't get, I can't use
24 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
In a Mumbai bar a guy from Amsterdam tells me (from New Zealand), about an American television programme. Despite the cultural collisions of that, he's got a good story. Apparently the host – Jimmy Kimmel or maybe Conan O'Brien, he couldn't remember – went into the street and asked passers-by whose face was on the dollar bill. Rather than admit they... > Read more
You Never Give Me Your Money, the Beatles
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Minuit: The 88 (digital outlets)
24 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this which now comes as a double album with four additional tracks added to the original album. Check out Elsewhere's other Recommended Record picks . . . . Even band member Paul Dodge admits the electronica trio are “supposed to be retired”.... > Read more
Cautiousness
THOSE TRIPPY HIPPIES ON THE SCREEN (2025): Posters for psychedelic films of the late Sixties and beyond
20 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
For our own amusement recently we showcased posters for biker movies which all promised menace and general badness. Now we turn our attention to the subject of hippies and how they were portrayed in quick-fire cash-in movies of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Sort of menace and general badness, but in more colourful clothes. So here we go, let the posters... > Read more
Within You Without You, by Spottiswoode
Favourite Five Recent Releases
Paul McLaney: The Daylight Moon (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | 2 min read
Regular readers of Elsewhere will be very familiar with Paul McLaney if not the remarkable breadth of all his work, which we have covered quite extensively. Our interest in this polymath from Auckland is because there is a keen guiding intelligence behind his projects, in whatever form they arrive. The Daylight Moon fits somewhere into his folk-ambient output... > Read more
The Feelings Remain
RECOMMENDED REISSUE: Bennie Maupin: The Jewel in the Lotus (ECM/digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
When ECM founder Manfred Eicher launched his jazz label in the late Sixties (with Mal Waldron's Free At Last) he had to look around for American talent because most of it was signed to major or independent labels. He was canny because he alighted on great musicians who were sometimes band members in groups lead by Miles Davis (Keith Jarrett the most notable example),... > Read more
Past is Past
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . CARL T SPRAGUE: At home on the range in the Eighteen Seventies
18 Aug 2025 | 5 min read | 1
Some musicians are so close to the source they are almost part of it. The young Rolling Stones -- despite their cultural, emotional and physical distance from American blues – heard that music speak to them and, in their emulation of their heroes like Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Willie Dixon and others, located themselves as part of the lineage.... > Read more
Utah Carrol
Roei Hermon: Dálum (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | <1 min read
According to Israel experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist Roei Hermon the title track here comes from a Polynesian word for inside the mind, and he drew inspiration from Ornette Coleman's Lonely Woman. We buy the latter but suspend judgment about that former claim. The accent above the “a” raises a few alarm bells in itself not to mention the letter... > Read more
Sunshine
Various Artists; Antone's 50th All Stars: 50 Years of Blues (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | <1 min read
As many will know, Antone's is a legendary blues club on Austin's famous 5th Street. Rather than go into names too much it's easier to say just about everyone of any note – from old guys like Pinetop Perkins through BB King to Stevie Ray Vaughan – has played there. This 41 track collection is such a monster we're simply going to mention some of the... > Read more
Lead Me On, by Ruthie Foster
Favourite Five Recent Releases
Paul Weller: Find El Dorado (digital outlets)
18 Aug 2025 | 1 min read
Although El Dorado is a mythical place made of gold and somewhere in the jungles of South America (possibly given extra embellishment by local tribes to throw off Spanish invaders) it seems Paul Weller is intent on finding it. But his gold are songs that he unearths and covers for this album. Let's be honest however, with a few exceptions – Bowie's Pin Ups,... > Read more
Small Town Talk
The Herd: From the Underworld (1967)
18 Aug 2025 | 1 min read | 1
It's not often Greek mythology cracks the top 10, but the Herd managed to do it with this song from the autumn of love (September '67) which is based on the Orpheus and Eurydice story. After the death of Eurydice, Orpheus travels to the underworld and by using music he melts the hearts of the gods down there. They agree to let the missus come back into life. The deal... > Read more