It is that time again. A few favourite things from 2025.

✺✺✺ A book: Ocean of Sound, David Toop’s eccentric but unexpectedly easy to read 1995 study of the history of ambient music, taking an expansive definition of what that “genre” can entail. ✺✺✺ An essay: “House Arab,” through which Ismail Ibrahim unpacks his experiences as a former fact-checker at The New Yorker in the wake of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. ✺✺✺ A newsletter: Intervals. Yes, it is yet another screenings listings mailout. And while you always wonder how the operators of these things will be able to maintain the motivation needed to do the thankless hard work required to keep this sort of project going, at the time of writing, this one is still going strong. I liked their earnest scene report on BFI Film on Film festival, which somehow manages to be insidery but not at all snide. ✺✺✺ An exhibition: Noah Davis at The Barbican. I didn’t know anything about Noah Davis—a painter and the founder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles—prior to seeing this exhibit, including the fact that he had died in 2015. Learning that he had cancer through the wall texts accompanying the beautiful small collages he made from his hospital bed, I for some reason naively assumed that he survived. He of course did not, making the last room of the gallery a moving space to enter and the exhibition as a whole a lovely tribute. ✺✺✺ A concert: Actress and Suzanne Ciani at the Barbican. There is something delightful about an intergenerational collaboration like this. Seeing two people with a mutual respect bouncing off each other, smiling through the dry ice and strobes, making strange noise. ✺✺✺ A meal: the fish pie at Sweetings, a 100+ year old restaurant housed in a grade two listed building, open only weekday lunchtimes, staffed by octogenarians and frequented by some of the most evil businessmen in the city. ✺✺✺ A television programme: Civilisation, a 1969 BBC TV series hosted by Kenneth Clark that gives a crash course in western art history since the dark ages. ✺✺✺ A record: I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America, 1950-1990. I have a soft spot for new age music, and have been looking for this boxset for a while. I saw it in a shop in Hackney one day after getting my hair cut and grabbed it. I love music that is both background and foreground, and this is exactly that, expanding and unfolding more and more on return listens. ✺✺✺ A mixtape: “Ghosts of the Haight,” in which Tarotplane, a hobbyist compiler of arcane audio materials, surveys 1960s psychedelic music from America to create a compelling picture of that place and time. “Ghosts Of The Haight focuses in on the hippy dream that turned sour and was capped off by Altamont. The news reports and spoken word bits focus in on that aspect of the time. There is an awful lot from my standpoint that is similar to the dilemmas we face today,” he writes. ✺✺✺ A radio programme: “Game Over,” in which show host Robert Ashley talks to members of a cancelled live service video game about their experiences losing their work and livelihood on a project that they spent years working on, only for it cruelly to be shuttered weeks into its release. ✺✺✺ A video game: Baby Steps, the most irritating and enlightening experience in video game design of the year. ✺✺✺ And, last but not least, my annual roundup of my favourite films and music, over on my website’s blog page. ✺✺✺