Peripherique Issue #4
May and June 2025
Well it’s somehow July already. Let’s not dwell on how that’s possible. I spent plenty of May and June listening to great music and reading great words, which, it turns out, is a pretty effective salve for the many and varied horrors going on out there in the world. As ever, I’ve saved some of the most therapeutic to share with you all, and bundled them together in an XL edition of Peripherique.
Made you a mixtape — May
May’s obsessions:
// Pale Seas - Something or Nothing // Alex Cameron - K Hole // Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings - Pass Me By // 亲爱的艾洛伊丝 (Dear Eloise) - 过客 (Passerby) // Quickspace - Coca Lola // Dara Puspita - A Go Go // Dirty Beaches - True Blue // Azusa Plane - Every Wave Has Its Own Integrity // Deafheaven - Near // Linda Smith - I So Liked Spring // Mt. Egypt - St. Augustine’s Road // Joan of Arc - Psy-fi/Fantasy // Graypine - Last // Piero Piccioni - Mexican Dream // Curtis Mayfield - The Makings Of You // Burial & Four Tet - Nova // Jalen Ngonda - That’s All I Wanted From You // Pure X - Easy // Broadcast - The Black Cat // Shame - One Rizla // Whirr - Play The Slow Ones // Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Grey Rubble - Green Shoots // The Knife - Parade //
Listen for: Chinese teenage shoegaze, blissed out instrumentals, sad boy acoustic guitar, the liltingly beautiful score to a forgotten Italian B movie from the 70s, Indonesian 60s girl group garage pop, a post-rock celebration of resilience and hope in the face of genocide in Gaza, and obligatory Swedes.
Made you a mixtape — June
June’s obsessions:
// Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 // The Beach Boys - Feel Flows // The Concretes - Diana Ross // The Microphones - Sand // Broken Social Scene - 7/4 Shoreline // Polvo - Tilebreaker // Panchiko - D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L // Burial - Shell of Light // Advance Base - Love Goes Home to Paris in the Spring // Tim Key - Dead Claire // Japanese Breakfast - Say It Ain’t So // Karl Blau - Slow Children // Nuyorican Soul feat. Jocelyn Brown - I Am the Black Gold of the Sun // Beach House - Sparks // Stereolab - If You Remember I Forgot How to Dream Pt. 1 // Nils Frahm - Kanten // Guided By Voices - If We Wait // The Field Mice - Sensitive // Pavement - Major Leagues // The Seeds - Can’t Seem To Make You Mine // Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Promise // Ganglians - Cryin’ Smoke //
Listen for: new wave ultraviolence, the melancholy of the ocean, $500 rent anthems, an awkward conversation over curry, string quartet Weezer, blissed out summer soul, classic garage noise, and more obligatory Swedes.
Wish I wrote that
A curated selection of the pieces of writing I’ve envied these past couple of months.
If you’re anything like me, current events all over the globe have left you despairing of late. My friend Ellen Kate Boyle shard her tips on how to deal with a terrible world and feel a little better in it. Read for the shifting Overton window, some of the issues we face, and how you can help.
(And you can read here for a bonus post from Ellen, including the story of my pet mouse, Vladimir.)
I grew up in Woking, a town so dull that H.G. Wells invented an entire genre of fiction after living there for a year and a half, just so he could imagine it going up in flames. So I really enjoyed this piece by Sam Jordison on the undeniable cultural impact of The War of the Worlds. Read for the intersection of science and fiction, late Victorian arrogance, and a literary bike tour.
I’m a great enjoyer of Austin Kleon’s “ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication” and this round up post contained a piece of wisdom that really struck a chord. We often talk about how hard writing is, but maybe it’s not supposed to be easy. Maybe the hard work results in the only things worth reading. Read on for appreciating life today, because tomorrow isn’t promised, creating the conditions for a creative home, and notes on how to make a mixtape (a topic close to my heart.)
The lovely Tom Wentworth of The Dressing Gown Draft shared this thoughtful essay about his inheritance of a great aunt’s journals, and sharing them as a historical artifact at a VE day event. As a fellow posthumous recipient of some writing by a great aunt (perhaps I’ll talk more about this another time), this was a great reminder of the importance of custodianship. Read on for the mundanity of the day to day, even in extraordinary days, pearly queens, and a higher standard of handwriting.
And finally, slacker king of copywriting Andrew Boulton joined Substack, sharing, amongst other pieces, this essay on the creative importance of a light touch. Read on for the folly of effort, the appearance of seriousness, and laissez-faire thinking.
Notes of note
Silly little posts that I enjoyed, but the Substack algorithm did not:
Paper cuts
Because staring at a screen is bad for your eyes.
Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer
The novel on which the 2018 film with Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tessa Thompson is (very loosely) based, Annihilation is a shifting, formless thing, never quite settling on any one genre, instead flitting between several: literary horror climate thriller science fiction? It’s all of those and none of them. Diagetically, the book comprises the field journal of a biologist sent on a dangerous expedition to uncover the secrets of an abandoned stretch of coastline known as Area X. But the literal here is dwarfed by the metaphorical, as the novel explores the existential horror of change in all its forms: changing others’ minds through force, feeling yourself changing as a person in a domestic relationship, and change on a cellular, oncological level.
Building this Roman
A Novel Solution, the story so far:
Prologue | I’m writing a novel // Chapter 1 | So what’s it about? // Chapter 2 | Best laid plans // Chapter 3 | The tyranny of the blank page // Chapter 4 | What is litfic, anyway? // Chapter 5 | Laying it all out // Chapter 6 | A museum piece // Chapter 7 | What does a novel sound like? // Chapter 8 | Promotional material //
Sundowner
One last song for the road. One that you can’t find on Spotify.
Ahmad Jamal - Soul Girl
Sounds like the score that plays in your own personal movie when the love of your life sways into the room, shot in soft focus on black & white film. Jamal was an incredibly prolific jazz artist, recording and releasing music from the early 50s right through to the 2010s. He died in 2023. This track is nestled towards the end of the critically panned release Ahmad Jamal ‘73, overlooked by the techbro tastemakers over at Spotify HQ. Their loss.
Periphionneurs, I hope, as ever, that you’ve discovered something new and cool and exciting in this post, and that that thing is a particularly effective prescription against all that ails you. We’ll reconvene back here next month for another dose. In the meantime, hit that orange button for more pieces about writing a novel in the internet age.
Bis dann,
Ed
Ed! SO thrilled to be included in this wonderful selection, thank you. I’ve been ill and not on top of things so this has cheered me up no end! Means such a lot to be amongst such talent.
What an honour to wriggle my way on to this excellent list, many thanks Ed!