Fat Roland is musing in a slimmed-down way. On his mind this month (as far as we can tell): New Formats
You can trust Electronic Sound. It’s reliable, like SI units, our planet’s gravity, or Push our editor’s ability to nail a backflip even when shashed on Jaffa Cakes. Record company fat cats don’t have their cream-sodden pawprints on these pages. No, not here. If the pages do feel damp, that’s for an entirely different reason and I’d rather not talk about it, thank you very much.
OK, granted, there’s the subliminal advertising. We now admit that the 16-page feature about the Guggenheim diorama of Aphex Twin Y-fronts was secretly a commercial for drain cleaner.
Yes, the text in this month’s cover feature is indeed a covert acronym plugging shoe horns designed by Lorraine Kelly. And last month’s write-up about the techno clog dance-off was really a plug for a slightly bigger and more commercial techno clog dance-off. Hey – gotta pay the bills…
Same reliable Electronic Sound – but a new format for this column. Banging On has transformed into something more compact, like a horse becoming a pony, a sycamore becoming a bonsai, or our once great nation becoming a post-Brexit hellscape of cheap plastic bunting and stale sausage rolls. Fear not, sweet reader. Good things come in small packages. Just ask Kylie Minogue, or my cardboard cut-out of Kylie Minogue which is three inches shorter than the real Kylie Minogue. Rest assured, I will continue to brandish my trademark wit, about which Creative Whelk Monthly once remarked, “Is he still writing that? I thought he was dead”.
Format changes are not new. Do you remember DAT tapes, or to give them their full name, Doomed Alternative To tapes? Or how about the Sony MiniDisc, which was a smaller version of a better thing, like three-pack Oreos, the Winter Olympics or S Club Juniors. And records used to be 78s, not just 45s and whatever the other number is, and 78 made sense because it was the average age of the people who owned them. See? I’ve thoroughly convinced you that the format change is good, and you are enthusiastically nodding like a Churchill dog having a colonoscopy on a rollercoaster.
In fact, this is the best format change since MP3s. Modern streaming may have all the audio quality of a ZX Spectrum loading screen played from the bottom of a well, but at least without the clutter of vinyl, I have shelf space for my techno clog dance-off trophies. Seriously, it’s given me a whole new lease of life. My feet look so sexy in them.
Aren’t clogs great? Clogs. Lovely clogs. Clogs, clogs, clogs. You really should buy some Fat Roland clogs. Now available from Primark in Daft Punk orange and Skrillex mauve. Push, if you could pop a subliminal link here, that would be great.
Nailed it.
