EP Corner: Latvia

It's time for another visit to EP Corner, and I'd like to kick off this latest edition with a tip for all up-and-coming musicians: if you name your album or EP after a particular place, you'll automatically be offered a gig in that place.

At least, that's what happened to Cardiff's own Local Sports Team. They decided, for whatever reason*, to dub their debut EP Latvia, and shortly after its release, they were contacted by an enthusiastic blogger from Riga, who sorted them out a headline slot in a local club. You can read the full story here if you'd like further proof that your own debut should be named Wembley.

A Conversation with Simon from Quiet Marauder

His was one of the brains behind my album of the year, and yesterday, Quiet Marauder's Simon M. Read very kindly gave up an hour of his time for a chat with me. As you'd expect, we spent most of that hour talking about MEN - the 111-track leviathan that pipped Okkervil River to my personal top spot last week - but we also found time to discuss The Magnetic Fields, the tragic life of Leslie Grantham, and, ooh, just about everything in between.

Here's how it went...

"I haven't murdered anybody - I want to make that clear."

Hi Simon. Are you doing anything good for Christmas?
I'm going to be in Plymouth for Christmas, seeing my family.

Is Plymouth your hometown, then?
Yeah, it's where I'm from originally. I don't go back there very much, and when I do go back it's changed significantly; it's got these big new shopping malls now. We only had a Virgin Megastore there when I was growing up, and we've got all the shops now. It's kind of exciting. But I don't know anybody there - apart from my family, obviously - so it's a bit dull. I tend to go down there just for a few days.

Wherefore Dinas Powys?

Dinas Powys is an album - the new album, in fact - by Andrew Paul Regan, a local musician who used to go by the name of Pagan Wanderer Lu. I bought this album for two reasons:

1) I heard APR play Time Crisis, 1982 in a session for The Waiting Room (it's a radio show, click the link and check it out) and really liked it. I leapt over to his bandcamp page but found that the song didn't appear on either of his albums to date; when I heard, some months later, that he had released a new'un, I checked the tracklist and, sure enough, there it was.

2) It's named after a station that I pass through almost every day en route to work. I'm not sure why that endears it to me - after all, that big Dinas Powys sign on the cover just reminds me that I'll be in the office soon - and to be honest, I probably would have bought the album with Time Crisis, 1982 on it regardless of the title. Still, Dinas Powys station is a tiny bit of my own life, and so I'm all the more interested in the CD that uses its name and likeness.