Just before Christmas, I heard word of a supergroup of sorts, Rangda, featuring Sir Richard Bishop and Ben Chasny, along with Chris Corsano on drums. Rangda are named after a Balinese goddess, if Wikipedia is to be trusted, which makes sense given some of the esoteric concerns Bishop investigated during his long stretch in the Sun City Girls.

Trio release 'Sisterworld' this March

Bad weather forced the Sheffield man to reschedule

A vague New Year’s Resolution for 2010 – not a big one, admittedly – is to try and write about more African records in Wild Mercury Sound, after embarrassingly never getting round to blogging on the likes of Tinariwen last year (and on Toumani Diabaté’s “Mande Variations” the year before, come to that).

He's also without a record label at present

White Stripes man hints that he may get around to releasing it this year

There’s a very interesting feature on Vampire Weekend in last week’s New Yorker, which includes a brilliantly ridiculous encounter while the band are on tour in California. With a documentary crew in tow, Vampire Weekend set about interviewing a bunch of allegedly notable Californian musicians, and fetch up at the operations centre of Blink 182’s Tom De Longe.

He's set to play material form his new covers album

Albums by Led Zeppelin, Blur, Rolling Stones, New Order feature on new stamps

Happy New Year everyone, and apologies for not having posted anything earlier in the week (though I was sorely tempted to write something gloating about Jermaine Beckford and so on, off topic). Snow notwithstanding, it’s approaching business as usual here now, hence the longish playlist I’ve managed to assemble over the past couple of days.