The Quietus Radio

Opening Season 2 of gear-talk podcast Nuts And Bolts, improviser and sound artist Andrea Parkins chats with host Jessica Sligter about synths, pre- and post-sampler life, glitchy Goldberg machines, and more. Andrea Parkins has traded New York for Europe, and is an established part of the improvised music scene on both ends of the ocean. With a background not only in improvised music but also art school, Parkins also makes installations and compositions. A force of nature, combining performance, technology and traditional instruments seamlessly. Nuts And Bolts is hosted and made by Jessica Sligter, co-produced by Anne Gerd Grimsby Haarr, with soundtechnical advice by Bridget Ferrill. This episode was supported by NOPA and FoFoGoFo. Photography by Mark Poucher 

Welcome to The Best Of Times podcast brought you by Lush and The Quietus. The Best Of Times is a new podcast show presented by writer and broadcaster John Doran and over the coming months he will be talking to people about some of the best and worst times they have been through, and in the process, find out how these experiences have made them who they are today. The podcast is produced and engineered by Andrew Paine and co-produced by Matthew Shaw. The theme music is by Oh The Gilt. EPISODE ONE: The Best Of Times... with Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods Jason is one half of the electronic punk band Sleaford Mods, along with Andrew Fearn. He started making this inimitable brand of music in 2007, which felt like it was just in time for the banking crisis and the band went on to capture the zeitgeist as it exists at street level. Sleaford Mods have become the true poet laureates of broken, austerity, Brexit Britain. They are just about to release their 11th album, Eaton Alive.

Neil Tennant joins Michael Bracewell at EartH in Dalston to discuss his new collection of lyrics, 'One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem', in front of a sold-out audience. In a wide-ranging conversation they discuss the lyrics that made Pet Shop Boys one of the most successful pop groups in British musical history, with over 50 million records sold over a 13 album and 30 year career. The conversation ranges from the personal to the political as it includes the terrible impact of the AIDS crisis, what makes good pop music, the inspiration gleaned from the former Soviet bloc, and the songs Tennant is most proud of. One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem is out now on Faber.

For the last episode of Season 1 of Nuts And Bolts, our podcast dedicated to female* musicans and their gear, Norwegian artist Susanna talks to host Jessica Sligter about recording, doing it yourself, and more. Something of an institution in her homeland of Norway, American songwriter Bonnie Prince Billy recently covered Susanna's entire 2007 album Sonata Mix Dwarf Cosmos, released as Wolf Of The Cosmos. Susanna's work is focused, elegant and gloomy, as her most recent releases, Go Dig My Grave and Triangle, confirm again. Nuts And Bolts is hosted and made by Jessica Sligter, and co-produced by Anne Gerd Grimsby Haarr and Susanne Christensen.

Gear-talk podcast Nuts And Bolts is back with a third episode, where host Jessica Sligter meets with sound artist and improviser Danishta Rivero from Oakland, California. From Venezuelan folk to metal, Rivero's work brings her gear and her voice together in a visceral, noisy expression, in bands like Las Sucias! and VoiceHandler. This episode of Nuts And Bolts doesn't play - be ready to get exposed to the bear bones of sound and synthesis! Nuts And Bolts is created, hosted, edited and mixed by Jessica Sligter, co-produced by Anne Gerd Grimsby Haarr and Susanne Christensen. Technical advice by Ragnhild Nelvik Bruseth. Nuts And Bolts is supported by the Norwegian Arts Council.

More excellent new music and passable chat with Luke and John.

Nuts And Bolts' Jessica Sligter meets with bass-player and poet Guro Skumsnes Moe, Octobass player and frontperson of the band MoE.

Nuts and Bolts is a show produced externally by Jessica Sligter and will expose the gear-secrets of some of your favourite female* artists. The first episode features Jessica talking to Jenny Hval. Produced with funding from the Norwegian Arts Council.

This week the Quietus Hour brings you news that we're going to be launching a whole host of new programmes that you'll be able to listen to on our Mixcloud page, and subscribe to via iTunes. Alongside information on Hyperspecific, Anna's Alphabet and Nuts & Bolts, the Quietus Hour this week features the best new music and passable chat from your hosts John Doran and Luke Turner. We've brand-new, some barely-heard music from Apostille, Mouse On Mars, Pregoblin, Jockstrap, Miss Red, FLAME 1 aka The Bug vs Burial and an exclusive fifteen minute monster by GNOD. Also on the show are Black Eyed Peas and Janelle Monae PLUS the real reason why the NME went down as a print publication and advice on how best to deal with your trousers.

With Luke and John away, The Quietus Hour is taken over by Louise Brown talking to Rob Halford from Judas Priest about their upcoming tour and the announcement of Glenn Tipton semi-retiring from the band.

Today’s guest on this very special edition of The Quietus Hour is Matt Johnson of The The. John Doran, Mighty Seb White and Al Overdrive set up office for the afternoon round at his London gaff and, over a very nice cup of white tea, we put the world to rights. While listening to tracks from the Radio Cineola: Trilogy box set Matt talks about his uneasy relationship with celebrity, working with Johnny Marr, the new The The album he’s just started writing and how he feels about taking his group back to the Royal Albert Hall. We were joined unexpectedly by the Los Angeles based poet John Tottenham and found time to ask Matt a lot of your questions.

For the first time since the Inaugural Day Of Radio, Luke Turner and John Doran are reunited once more on the radio - together in scleretic dreams, both attending the non-stop neurotic cabaret, in tune with the OCD Soundsystem etc. - bound by the adhesive of passable chat and excellent new music. The Mighty Seb White has concocted a fiendish new segment from the show - The Chorus Interuptus - where he plays our hapless hosts snippets from CDs plucked from tQ’s postbag… without telling them who the artists are. On the chat roulette wheel this week - does John’s new beard make him look like Noel Edmunds and we say a tearful goodbye to Wild Beasts? Music this week comes from Kelela, Electric Wizard, Zimpel/Ziolek, Wild Beasts, Saz’iso, Snapped Ankles, James Holden and P!OFF

Friend of the Quietus Hannah Peel pops into tQHQ for a cup of tea and a chat about Barnsely-based cosmic explorer Mary Casio, the challenges of combining brass with synths and chooses all of today's records inspired by the Cassini Probe's death dive into the atmosphere of Saturn. With music by Jo Meek and The Blue Men, Moondog, Hawkwind, Cluster, OMD, Avro Pärt, Edward Artemiev, Tontos Expanding Head Band, plus a track from her new album.

Pinch punch - the first of the month... Last Friday was the start of September, and John and Luke were joined in tQHQ by Barry The Barber and Todd The Dog. Abandoning their usual tack of bringing you the best in new music, they picked a selection of ABCs (anthems, bangers, classics) which remind them of the history of the site. During the show John also had his haircut (but thankfully not like Phil Oakey) by Barry The Barber and the music came from Hey Colossus, Blacknecks, Erasure, LCD Soundsystem, The Ex, Gazelle Twin, Destroyer, NOMEANSNO, Kelala, Turbonegro, The Chromatics, Double S & Wiley, some madness to do with rollercoasters that Seb chose, Ibibio Sound Machine, Gravenhurst and of course The Fall. This show was just one of many on (what will hopefully be) the inaugural Quietus Day Of Radio. Thanks to everyone who was part of this 12 hour epic - especially Seb and Iain... we spent the whole period celebrating the best in underground, DIY and global music. We were also joined by Saul of Fat White Family, Nadine Shah, Steve Davis and Kavus Torabi and the Last Skeptic, it's no surprise we ended up trending on Twitter. And that's before we get to the mind expanding exploration of Japanese psych and foghorns by Jennifer Lucy-Allan; a trip round the extreme metal fringes of India with Pavan & Pravin Mukhi (aka Foreign Beggars); Ruth Barnes (The Other Woman) and Piney Gir playing indie, folk and exotica; the heroic and inimitable Lone Taxidermist, not to mention appearances from all the Quietus staffers. So even though it was the site's ninth birthday on Friday you might be forgiven for wondering why our celebratory mood has been tempered with anxiety - like Edvard Munch's The Scream in a party hat. This is because we're currently unlikely to make our tenth birthday - or even the end of the year - without some financial assistance from you, dear reader - and apologies if you've already read this once this week but it really bears repeating - we're facing closure. I have to say that I think it's absolutely crazy given we are Europe's biggest, fully independent music and culture website, reaching an annual audience of millions all over the globe, with a constant supply of high quality articles and content by some of the best writers in the game, and yet again this month we'll be having a whip round, reaching down the back of the sofa, taking the hammer to the piggy bank, emptying the penny jar and selling the prized vinyl on Discogs, just so we can make the rent. Because online magazines tend to be overly reliant on banner advertising (something we're working on a solution to behind the scenes) and we're not venture capital/ rich parent/ tax loss funded, we are being absolutely hammered by the recent catastrophic 90% drop off in online ad spend - not to mention the all-too-predictable chicanery by monolithic money hoovering digital monopolies such as Google and Facebook, which has amounted to an arsenic cherry on the cyanide birthday cake this year. If it helps you to visualise the problem, imagine an egg that a seven year old has painted the face of Jarvis Cocker onto. Now that you have conjured this image into being, picture a cyberman on shore leave pissed up at last orders. Now picture the cyberman - with a semi on and a heart full of hatred - punching the Jarvis egg with all of his terrible might. Do you see the problem? Now, undoubtedly, there will be some among you who cry: "Why should we care? What good are music magazines in this day and age when everything's already online?" This is a completely fair point, to which I have a simple response: "Have you found any music via the Quietus over the last 12 months?" And if the answer is yes, just give us a fiver if you can afford it (please don't give us money if you're from a low income family, still at school, a struggling student, on benefits,

Over the past few weeks The Quietus has been lucky enough to see Liars play live three times, at the Visions Festival, Green Man and last night at Rough Trade East, where Angus Andrew and his new bandmates managed to conjure a special energy that transported us somewhere weird of their own making - it was as if we weren't in a shop. After 15 years of operation the new Liars album TFCF is the first Andrew has made on his own, and it stands out as one of the finest in a remarkable set that few of their peers have come close to. On this week's Quietus Hour, Angus Andrew speaks to Luke Turner about 10 tracks that shaped the record, and gives insights into its creation out in a remote part of the Australian bush. He discusses how the sound of nature made it into every track on TFCF, the move from LA to his homeland, the separation from Aaron Hemphill... and why he's taken to wearing a wedding dress onstage. Subscribe to The Quietus Hour podcast here for all our past episodes including specials with the likes of Thurston Moore, Shirley Collins, Cosey Fanni Tutti, John Lydon, Gary Numan and more. Liars return to the UK this autumn including a date at Heaven in London on October 27th and Newcastle's Boiler Shop on October 29th.