Subject: P.J. Harvey competition

I would like to say how much I enjoyed the latest issue of Clicks and Klangs. However I am afraid I must take issue with you over a number of points in your review of the latest P.J. Harvey album....

Firstly, I actually own a record with concentric tracks - in fact I believe I'm right in saying that it was the first one ever released.... I refuse to tell you what it is however, because I know you'd only take the piss out of me unmercifully for owning a 12" single of Pop Muzic by M.... D'OH! Anyway, the way this was arranged, was that although the two tracks were parallel, they were NOT equidistant; so when you dropped the needle on it there was a far higher likelihood of it paying the A side rather than what was the B side on the more mundane 7" version. The upshot was that I can't even remember the B side, because I got to hear it so seldom due to a combination of the fact that the odds were so heavily loaded against it being played and the fact that the A side itself was so intensely irritating.

Secondly, I don't believe that your CD player actually checks how long each CD is when you put it in - I think you'll find that all the information about the number of tracks and their respective lengths is actually encoded in some sort of a "header" - so I'm sure the record companies *could* fix this and actually conceal these tracks a bit better if they wanted to. Do you have Lumpy Gravy on CD? My CD player actually shows the track numbers as 1.01-1.12 then 2.1-2.10. Of course, particularly as it's only half an hour long, I reckon the whole of Lumpy Gravy should have been included as a "hidden track" on the end of We're Only In It For The Money anyway.

There is also supposed to be a *genuinely* hidden track on the CD of 1977 by Ash, which apparently you can only access by pressing the "previous track" button twice at the end of the first track.... I say "supposed to be" advisedly however, because I've never managed to access the fucking thing on my copy. Besides, it's probably shit anyway.

Also worthy of note is The Lemonheads' Come On Feel The Lemonheads CD, which actually pulls off a double-bluff - 10 minutes of silence after the last track, followed by a minute or so of crap - so far so predictably tedious - but then there's *another* five minutes of fuck all followed by yet another "hidden" piece of shite.

Anyway, my personal theory is that the principle reasons for having tracks "hidden" at the end of a long silence at the end of albums are: (a) to fuck up people who tape albums for their mates by making them think they need a longer tape than they really do; and (b) to piss everyone off in the pub when some joker deliberately chooses to put a track on the juke box which (s)he knows includes this "feature".

No-one took up the challenge of persuading me of the value of hidden track apart from Stewart, who clearly failed miserably.

Subject: Commendation

yer magazine was brought 2 my attention after reading a reference in greil marcus' column for salon online (now theres a reference!). "music is an adventure, not a commodity" hell, im shaking as i write! hope the word keeps spreading round the world.

thank god the internet eases our evolution!

Supercaletic

That's the idea, thankyou.

We are having extraordinary trouble getting our website picked up by the major search engines and we were wondering if there was a website host which specialises in music/publishing or anything of that ilk. Do you have any suggestions, please?

We are very green at this, but have found other similar sites to ours have many thousands of hits but ours has just over one thousand in over 5 months. We have the sole distribution rights to the Phil Collins Big Band arrangements, and feel that if our site was picked out by the search engines more regularly, we would be far more profitable. Those who have found us have been ecstatic.

Any help you may be able to give would be greatly appreciated. Kind regards and seasonal greetings.

I so nearly replied with an attempt at helpful suggestions and then the the words "Phil Collins" jumped out at me like a great big "NOOOOOOOO!!".

You say that those who have found you have been 'ecstatic'. As Colin B. Morton so frequently and befittingly reminds us, these people are all serial killers. Tread with great caution and try listening to The Boredoms instead.

Hey, is there an archive for previous radio show playlists? Wonderin'.

Not at the moment, but I will consider making one available someday when time allows and if there is any demand for it. Cheers.

Hi there, I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your work on both clicks-and-klangs and the radar station - two of my most important bookmarks! :-)

And I just *love* your selection of music! Have you ever thought of playing Birth Control's "Gamma Ray" on clicks-and-klangs? In my opinion that's krautrock at it's best.

Thanks! Holger.

Well thakyou Holger, I'm very pleased you enjoy it. I'd actually never heard Birth Control's "Gamma Ray" but have since dug it out and, just for you, have played it in the current edition (3rd Feb).

O'Neil kindly sent along a link to an obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle for Milan Hlavsa from The Plastic People Of The Universe who sadly died at the beginning of January from lung cancer.

See Jason Gross' article about the Plastic People of The Universe in issue 4 of Clicks and Klangs.

On Saturday nights we play Connect 4 with our kids, whilst listening to clicks-and-clangs. The kids always win. The radio show is our only consolation. Keep up the good work

I'll be rooting for you this Saturady evening.

Subject: Gender

I saw your article on gender and appreciate the approach and the attempt to answer the question. You raise some good points. Acouple of comments:

1. I think the nature/nurture question has to be positioned before anything else, otherwise women as a social construct and women as a biological category continually elide, this renders any conclusion very uncertain since one doesn't know where to apply it.

2. Maybe a useful approach to add to your sociological observations would be to take both sides into account. I mean, when you want to understand why women don't get involved in certain activities, question the ones who do. They sometimes offer the most fruitful insights.

I say this because Henry Cow was equally split male and female (this extended to our road crew too) and both Fred and I at least have always worked with women in the majority of projects we have initiated, so I know there are plenty of world class women musicians around, and quite as avant garde (not that I'd use that term) as anyone else. The question to ask maybe is why 'avant garde' men mostly persist in ignoring them. There is a disproportionate number of all male groups, with occasionally a woman singing. As a female, this is not a role model that would attract me to a concert. Women feel excluded very often because they are excluded, and it's not so much that they don't want as that they are not wanted. If this is the case, as much as why don't women participate, the question should be, why do men work so hard to keep the thing to themselves. Pious talk cuts no ice, Don could have got some women in his group - except they'd never have stood for it, and neither would the guys. Don wanted women as passive attendees, he kept any egalitarian ideas in the realm of words. You give him too much credit, I think; he didn't try so hard, unless you think moving to stereotypical softness and accessibility is somehow feminist?. At least Henry Cow took the rhetoric to the field of action. And that's the only way I think that anything is going to change. And when there are more women on stage, I wouldn't be surprised if there were more women in the audience too.

Best Chris Cutler