Time move too fast. Sun up, sun down. Rain all day, everyday. You blink and it’s Sunday February 22nd but it still feels like 2026 has only just begun. All I’ve done this year so far is move home, and now that is finally winding down a bit I’m starting to think about doing things again, about redefining a sense of myself beyond man who folds and packs cardboard boxes and talks weirdly smugly about the structural integrity of that fold you do where you tuck all four flaps under each other to strengthen the base. “It’s all about the X,” I said to CQ. “It’s like bridge building, where the cross strengthens the straight lines. Didn’t you do that exercise at school where you split into two teams and compete to make a suspension bridge using cardboard tubes and parcel tape?” No reply. I then proceeded to lecture her on the importance of labelling each box with a description of its contents, pointedly scrawling “MT comics #4” on a box in thick blue sharpie.

One thing I love about this new flat is that there is a school behind the garden and visible over the fence is the top of a teepee. For some reason, this school has a teepee in the playground and because of this the skyline outside the window is punctuated by this peculiar looking triangular peak. It is distinctive, and feels meaningful somehow, suggestive of something I have not yet identified. Now we are mostly all set up, I can see that, in regard to just about everything I was doubtful about, CQ was correct. All of my many books fit onto the built-in shelves. The records look good on the long open unit. The spinny round thing gives easy access to the spice jars at the back. I have sent a few people some photos of the new flat. They say, “looks nice!” I reply, “CQ’s vision.” They say, “yep yep!” Taste can’t be taught: it’s innate. If I look at too much Instagram, I start wanting that metal MUJI rack that the coffee men on there all have, or one of those stupid orange mushroom lamps. But this isn’t what you need. You need to inherit your grandma’s runner. You need the Frog Doorstop that called to you from inside. You need to find your own way in the world, because the online men all algowarp the same.

Things are settling, and the place is starting to become lived in rather than just unpacked. I squeegee the shower glass and suck up crumbs with the new cordless hoover we got. I drink my coffee and listen to my little new age cassettes. I make the tomato pasta and watch Arsenal mess up on the TV. And at some point AF will come round with his uncle’s impressively large drill. Last weekend I walked the length of Wood Green High Road carrying a 65 litre bin on my head. Three people cheered me along my way, and, at one point, a group of teenage girls mocked me, saying something that I couldn’t quite hear. This parade felt like a seismic event somehow, the marking of my arrival to the area and my reception from the citizenry. CardboardBoxMan unpacks his things and becomes HeadBinMan, needing somewhere to put all of these collapsed pulped trees. Walking the chaotic high street, he becomes WoodGreenMan, huffing, puffing, assimilating into the terrain.

LISTENING

The only newsletter that I currently pay for is Futurism Restated, written by the great music critic Philip Sherburne. Now that there is no Tiny Mix Tapes and Tone Glow is inactive, this newsletter—along with Andrew Ryce’s mailout, Futureproofing, and whatever Boomkat choose to promote on BlueSky—is my only tether to the world of new music. I am very grateful for it, because I do want to keep up with what is going on. As well as constant great recommendations, all beautifully described, he wrote a very moving post at the start of the year, about returning home to Portland, going through old boxes, and his mum’s struggles with dementia. I love the music write-ups, but this also reminded me why I love newsletters as a format (blogs too, admittedly). You get whatever you came for, but a glimmer of the person also slips through, and, over time, you start to build a picture of someone through the fragments that eventually become the stuff of a lifetime. Sherburne is just such a good writer, and if you care about music I would recommend you also pay him for his newsletter as the landscape for these things is so barren and decimated. It would be great if there were publications still (should I get a subscription to Wire?), but sort of thing is pretty much all that is left.

There are a few mixes Sherburne has shared recently in the newsletter that I keep returning to, and I’ll quote him on each of them because it’ll give a sense of his ability to describe what things sound like, his effortless way with words. There is this one by Dave Huismans, which he describes as “two hours of deep house and deeper techno, with copious forays into squirrelier, more esoteric fare, and a particular emphasis on opalescent synths and drums that bounce.” Then this six hour DJ Harvey and Andrew Weatherall one. “It starts slow and atmospheric, then gets increasingly audacious as it goes. Around 40 minutes in, there’s an unaccompanied, extended spoken-word… chant? prayer? invocation?...that must have seriously fucked up anyone who found themselves at the precise moment of coming up; they follow that with a 15-minute edit of Fred Wesley and the J.B.’s “Everybody Got Soul” that had my daughter nearly losing her mind in the car. (Extreme musical repetition: a hurdle for 10-year-olds.) Things stay funkily low slung for a long-ass time; by hour three, we’re not even up to 120 beats per minute yet. Around three hours and 47 minutes in, they follow a passage of dubbed-out minimal techno with a Mulatu Astatke edit, of all things.” Then you have this hour-long Shinichi Atobe one, which, for Sherburne, “emphasizes both the smoothness and the otherworldliness of Atobe’s music: In tempo, density, and energy, it paints a nearly unbroken horizontal line, dutifully planting one boom-ticking foot in front of the next, but that consistency is precisely what invites you to sink into the warmth and weirdness of his chords, which seem to harbor untold mysteries in their translucent layers.” Lastly, this Loidis mix, which he reminds him of “a stoned, lazy afternoon at Club der Visionäre in 2009.”

On Futureproofing the other day, there was a good interview with Matthew Kent, who did the Blowing Up The Workshop mixtape series and now runs a new label called Short Span. It’s a great interview. Kent talks about moving cities and locating himself within different histories and scenes, setting up his studio using “mud, gnarly twists of metal sprue, and archeological fag ends,” working with designers on record sleeves, and other topics. He’s just a total head, but also super low key and unassuming. The interview also links out to a mix he made last year, described by Ryce as being made of “fashionable ‘00s minimal sounds,” which I enjoyed. Kent’s page description for it is funny too. “A few tracks [are] from ‘00s era CDs i’ve found forgotten about in a weird/cool CD only store in Sheffield that has that satisfying ex-HMV racking you can flip through at high speed. no greater feeling than leaving there after an hour with a little envelope sized brown paper bag containing a saint etienne cd, some terrible/great chillout compilation, and a ken ishii thing you’ve not heard before for all of £10." Great!

PLAYING

It’s only February and I’ve already played what might well be my game of the year: Perfect Tides: Station is Station. It’s a point-and-click adventure game with old style pixel art in which you play an eighteen-year-old girl, Mara, who is at college and has aspirations of becoming a writer. The game runs over a few terms of college as she goes back and forth between her coastal hometown and the big city where she is studying. Over this time in her life, she moves through a few relationships and several assignments, getting a better sense of who she is through her developing writing, though her engagements with the city, and through her fractured romantic entanglements with three different men. Made by a webcomic creator called Meredith Gran, the game’s form is memoir, building off the game-maker’s own experiences growing up in New York in the period the game is set in: circa 2003. The writing is sublime, and among the best I have encountered in any game. The attention to detail in terms of period detail is fastidious, both in terms of nostalgic specificities (Rotten.com is referenced, and early Pitchfork also factors), but also in the general cultivation of vibe. But what stands out is the way it treats the main character’s interiority: Mara is flawed and relatable, and, overall, feels very, very real. The character is not sure of her feelings, and it is only through thinking them through do they crystallise, a process which plays out through dialogues in which the player must make periodic choices to progress the story. It also feels very cinematically framed, with several big emotional moments, set to music, that conclude chapters and resolve mounting pressures within the narrative of the game. Mara realises her long term boyfriend’s inadequacies, understands her grandmother’s frailty, or progresses her thinking as a writer, and you share in these developments as the player, witnessing this complicated young character evolve. The art is beautiful. The story is short enough to not drag, but long enough to have the beats and progressions it needs to feel relatively deep. The world is limited in scope, but feels varied and lived-in. And the writing is, at all points, spot on. It moved me a great deal.