The Sigla Blog

Anyone with 15 minutes to spare between 3.30 and 3.45pm every day this week should tune in to BBC4’s Afternoon Reading. This week, five writers work Alfred Hitchcock’s plot device ‘the McGuffin’ into five stories.
Hitchcock explained the concept in a university lecture in 1939 as:

“We have a name in the studio, and […]

Last week should have yielded a post about NaNoWriMo, which kicked off on November 1st but I’m feeling a certain amount of guilt for not signing up this year. Ann is taking part, so are Claire, Patry and thousands of other demented folk who’ve agreed to try and bash out a 50,000 word novel in […]

*The new Damien Rice album has been getting quite a few listens round this way and using every sop of my journalistic objectivity, it still sounds very like O. Instead of striving for a new direction on 9, Rice has adhered to the schematics of his debut, but it kicks off promisingly enough with […]

Thanks to You Ain’t No Picasso for this post, reminding me of how great XTC were and the genius that is Andy Partridge. The first album of theirs I bought was a cassette copy of Drums and Wires, fished out of a bargain bin in Crumlin Shopping Centre’s Golden Discs, now sadly defunct. Somewhere […]

A student researching an archive of Sylvia Plath’s work at Indiana University has discovered a previously unpublished sonnet by the poet. Entitled ‘Ennui’, it’s published today in American literary journal Blackbird. Written in 1955, it begins ominously:

“Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:”

The full text is here:

Irish label Osaka Recordings recently released Boamaster, an album by French singer Eglantine Gouzy. It’s gorgeous poppy electro stuff from the label who previously released Silver Thread of Ghosts, by Dubliner Thomas Haugh under the name Hulk. STOG was one of the finest Irish albums of last year fusing strands of electronic to classical structures. […]