January 2026

Hello.

Technically this isn’t the first newsletter at all. Not by me and not even under the name [Indistinct Chatter]. I toyed with a Substack of that name and there are some ghost posts over on that platform. Ultimately though, I am looking for a place to write that doesn’t fill me with the dread, paranoia, rage and self-hate I used to encounter when I engaged with similarly shaped social media spaces. However creative and helpful in terms of making connections they were in their prime. I enjoy much writing emerging from Substack, but it’s not for me. It is for Dario though. He’s going great guns, so check him out.

So, welcome to my new/sletter. I’m using Buttondown because one of my favourite writers, Sasha Frere-Jones does. There will be two posts a month consistently. One will be a reflection on my cultural month. One will be discussion of a music film I’ve seen (and possibly other music film related chat). Both will be as short as possible without being meaningless. Because there is so much to read already right? I want to make these two elements the focus because I will miss the cultural reflection aspect of doing a monthly newsletter for Patreon members of the podcast. Hello to those who have come over. Also, because while in Berlin in November 2025 talking music films for a book event (my book) at a music film festival there, Soundwatch, I realised I miss watching and thinking about them with purpose. So this will hopefully provide a space for me to do that. I will also, where appropriate highlight and reflect upon upcoming events and travels where you may be able to find me IRL.

The title of this missive comes from something I read towards the end of December. It was a phrase that reworked something the musician Joe Ely said about touring the great, flat expanses of the USA, how the there is so much nothingness that its strangeness verges on the psychedelic. I read this the day after driving from Cornwall to North/West Norfolk to visit family for Christmas. I felt that strangeness, that almost psychedelic otherness, in a smaller dose admittedly, as I crossed the Fens, en route to Kings Lynn and Downham Market.

I loved the phrase the Psychedelia of Nothing when I read it, and it reminded me of the [now deleted] monthly blogs I would upload while writing my book on music films. Each month the title would come from something I heard in a film, or a bizarre short watching note I’d made. It also resonated because it seems as though culturally psychedelics are having a moment, at least in my orbit. That orbit is partly due to Mark Fisher and how the ideas he was working on before he died, most notably Acid Communism, have been picked up by others.

The idea of psychedelics as a counter to capitalist tyranny, both explicitly and ideologically (a move from neo-liberal individual to connected communal), appeared in a book I read this year, by one of Fisher’s former students, Matt Colquhoun’s egress: on Mourning, Melancholy and Mark Fisher, and it will form part of a public keynote that will feature in the 2026 British Popular Culture(s) Conference I’m co-organising at Falmouth for June. It will be delivered by Oli Mould, whose 2018 book Against Creativity, has had a profound effect on my thinking and teaching since I encountered it. Now, some delights I encountered and re-encountered in December 2025.

A Man on the Inside

I am always wary of consensus hype [I am still, in many ways, a snob] but always on the look out for television that is kind, lovely, and nice. I appreciate the lovely in film and television, not agreeing with the oft held view that art always needs to be hard o’er soft. I also love Ted Danson. Beth and I watched the first two seasons of this show, having had it recommended by everyone we talked to about it with. It is an absolute delight. Funny, sweet and moving, exquisitely cast, and I love how the ‘crimes’ at the heart of the first two seasons’ mysteries are not really that at all. They are something else and other. Subtle subversions of genre expectations without being smug. Just like the ‘crimes’ are in the shows my kids watch sometimes, in particular Odd Squad.

James Yorkston

There is a delicacy to Yorkston, whose work I first encountered when I was sent 2006’s The Year of the Leopard via a DJing list I was on. That delicacy should not necessarily be taken as softness. There is a deep sense of love, sadness and resolve in his work that I adore. While driving to Norfolk for Christmas I spent some time with his solo records, and also 2025’s collaborative record, Songs for Nina and Johanna, working with musicians Nina Persson and Johanna Söderberg. This encounter while travelling also revealed new layers and intimacies with some of my favourite of his songs, and songs period, ‘I Awoke’ from The Year of the Leopard, and ‘A Short Blues’ from 2012’s I Was A Cat From A Book.

Conspirators of Pleasure

This was a recommendation from a student of mine. We were discussing their frustration with their peers around not engaging with the cinematic opportunities afforded by the film course, or being adventurous or curious with their viewing while studying. Rather than have the conversation focus on the negative aspects of being a film student and being frustrated by an uncurious environment, I asked what one of their favourite discoveries was during their studies so far. They suggested this hypnotic, rhythmic ode to fetish and pleasure by Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer. Having not seen it and discovering it on YouTube I decided to watch it.

As the student suggested, it is a deeply strange and also lovingly rendered portrait of the inner lives made exterior through various fetishistic engagements of several characters. The links between are gossamer thin narratively, but closely shared in terms of a commitment to individual self-expression. There is no dialogue, just non-verbal sound, flashes of animation, and the music is also very weird, incongruous really. I love that I have no idea if it just the music Švankmajer intended or if it was the soundtrack added to accompany the upload on YouTube. I hope to see it via official channels one day to compare, but also I kinda don’t wanna.

Links to Stuff I’ve read online this month and enjoyed -

Barry Gifford on David Lynch[Artforum]Olivier Assayas Interview[Cineaste]Letters for Peter Watkins[e-flux]The Last Video Rental Store is Your Public Library[404 Media]Eyes Wide Shut: A Sword in the Bed[Criterion]The Eyes Wide Shut Conspiracy[Vulture]Durga Chew-Bose[This Long Century]Dario Llinares on Film Manifestos & Manifesto Thinking[Substack].

2025 [Semi] Collected…

Some writing and talking on my favourite films of the year, along with the last ever Cinematologists episode, can be found here -

Directors Notes (Written)

Cinematologists (Audio)

Here are the places I saw movies and bought records this past year -

And here are albums I enjoyed enough to write them down, twice -

Events, Gigs & Travels in January

January 10, Newlyn - I am hosting a [sold out] Q&A at the Filmhouse, with Falmouth graduates for the Sound/Image Cinema Lab supported documentary The Lost Boys of Carbis Bay, which is playing venues across Cornwall in January.

Events & Travels Further Afield in Time & Space

London - February 25 - Mar 1

Sydney, New York, Los Angeles - June [Dates TBC]

Berlin - November [Dates TBC]