mintybloggydiarythingy 2.0

Week from Monday 23rd February 2026 - I'm putting the finishing touches to another "HOT TICKLES" sampler. These are compilation discs of whatever 'proggy-but-mostly-King-Crimson-related' odds and sods I might have sitting around on the hard-drives. They don't come quite as frequently as they once did, but I've now reached VOLUME 169! It includes the last three or four "STORMY'S MONDAY SELECTIONS", some leftover 21st CENTURY SCHIZOID live tracks, the Bandcamp-only bonus tracks from the last SOFT MACHINE album, a couple of ambient soundscapey things and a PETER GABRIEL live track from WOMAD 1982, concatenated in a tastefully flowing manner... T-SHIRT WEATHER IN FEBRUARY...? brr! wot a scorcher! I ventured out on Wednesday, orf up the horsepickle to get yet another BLOOD TEST. There was a lot of folks in the 'queue' ahead of me, and they eventually split us up and dragged some of us upstairs for a leeching on LEVEL C... By the time I e...

Week from Monday 2nd February 2026 - I've been exploring some of the lesser known backwaters of BRAND X history, especially around the time of the lost album "MANIFEST DESTINY" (1997) and when Gong drum-meister PIERRE MOERLEN joined them for a tour at very short notice. Needless to say, I've been doing this through the medium of some pretty dodgy b***legs, but the music shines through ne'ertheless. On the last show of the European tour they even played cracking versions of a couple of MAHAVISHNU ORCHESTRA toons! I've also been digging (into) some of PERCY JONES's solo material from the nineties. I liked what I heard, but it's very much 'OF ITS TIME' (quite a lot of electric drums - there was one bit that even reminded me of SQUAREPUSHER!). There's also a few weedy vocal tracks that are best left on the shelf! I've dug out my quarter-of-a-century-old copy of COREL-DRAW to see if will run on m'LINUX lappy, via the magic of W.I.N.E...