Little Atoms

Rana Dasgupta won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book for his debut novel Solo. He is also the author of a collection of urban folktales, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi is his first work of non-fiction. Born in Canterbury in 1971, he has lived in Delhi for 13 years. Also this week, writer Sarah Ditum talks about Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review,Icon, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain. His latest books are Landscapes of Communism, and The Ministry of Nostalgia. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A special edition of Little Atoms for Resonance FM’s fundraising week. Recorded live at The Slaughtered Lamb on 10th February 2014.Is Music Journalism in a Critical Condition?The UK music scene once supported four weekly music papers, which wielded the power to form the musical agenda in a way that’s unimaginable today. Of these, only the NME staggers on in managed decline, along with an ever dwindling number of monthly magazines. The changing ways we consume music and the rise of the internet have radically changed the musical landscape, and perhaps this is a good thing. Those weeklies were notoriously bad at covering certain genres, and the internet has enabled a much wider range of writers to share the music they love. On the other hand it has yet to find a reliable way to pay them to do so. Are the days of making a living from music journalism over?Joining Neil Denny of the Little Atoms Radio Show to explore this question, and to share tales of private jets and rainy nights at the Northampton Roadmender, are the journalists Andrew Mueller, Charles Shaar Murray, Jude Rogers and David Stubbs.Andrew Mueller is a rock critic, travel writer, foreign correspondent, columnist, pundit and author. He is a Contributing Editor at Monocle, and also writes for The Guardian, The Telegraph, Uncut, and The New Humanist among others. His latest book is the memoir It’s Too Late to Die Young Now. When not writing, Andrew Mueller is the singer and songwriter with alt-country band The Blazing Zoos. Defunct music papers he’s written words for include Melody Maker, Vox and The Word.Charles Shaar Murray is an author, broadcaster and former NME journalist. He is the author of several books, most recently Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and Post-war Pop. A founding contributor to Q and Mojo magazines, he made his print debut in 1970 in the notorious “Schoolkids Issue” OZ. Currently he’s a regular contributor to Madam Miaow’s Culture Lounge on Resonance FM.Jude Rogers is a columnist and music writer for The Guardian, Observer, The Quietus and the New Statesman. She’s the co-founder of quarterly magazine Smoke: A London Peculiar. She’s been on the Mercury Music Prize judging panel since 2007. Her radio documentary Mad About the Boy was on Radio 4 at the beginning of February.David Stubbs joined the music magazine Melody Maker in 1986, where he worked for 12 years. His most famous creation, Mr Agreeablehas recently reawakened over at The Quietus. He has also written for The Guardian, NME, The Wire, When Saturday Comes and Uncut, and was a presenter of the Resonance FM football show Café Calcio. David is the author of numerous books, including the upcoming Future Days, a history of Krautrock which is published in August by Faber. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Aleks writes for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and hosts Tech Weekly, their technology podcast. She presented the Emmy and Bafta-winning BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution, and more recently the BBC Radio 4 series Digital Human. Her first book is Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You. Also this week, critic Matthew Sweet on the Ealing WW2 propaganda film Went The Day Well? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

James Bridle is a writer, artist, publisher and technologist usually based in London, UK. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. He has written for WIRED, ICON, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic and many other publications, and writes a regular column for the Observer newspaper on publishing and technology. In 2011, he coined the term “New Aesthetic”, and his ongoing research around this subject has been featured and discussed worldwide. His work, such as the Iraq War Historiography, an encyclopaedia of Wikipedia Changelogs, has been exhibited at galleries in the Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, and has been commissioned by organisations such as Artangel, Mu Eindhoven, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC.Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist and writer. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Her work is transdisciplinary, using everything from electronics, software, and paint to social rules and words as media with which to explore and shape our interactions with the world. Her focuses include the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience, the humanity of objects and the built environment, and systemic resilience and conviviality. Eleanor is Principal Security Engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP), directing the OpenITP Peer Review Board for open source software and working on adversary modeling. She is also Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), a member of the advisory boards at Geeks Without Bounds (GWoB) and the Calyx Institute, and works on occasion as a Senior Security Associate with Stach & Liu. She is a founder of the Constitutional Analysis Support Team (CAST), previously co-founded the Seattle-based Public N3rd Area hacker space, and works on the Trike and Briar projects. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Irving Finkel is an archaeologist and Assyriologist, currently Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. He’s also an expert on the history of board games, and the founder of the Great Diary Project. Irving is the author of numerous books, most recently The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Also on this week’s show, astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewsbury are one half of 65daysofstatic, an instrumental band from Sheffield, as comfortable crashing samplers to mine glitches as they are putting guitars through too much distortion. Influenced by a technologically dystopian present and an apocalyptically likely future, they tend to be found filling venues, galleries or headphones with different kinds of noise in their ongoing efforts to find the limits of what ‘being a band’ can mean.The Space Lady is a street-performing singer based in Colorado, USA. Originally beginning on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, she has recently begun playing again. Often seen performing in 1980’s Boston, and then a decade later in San Francisco’s Castro community – where she would play and sing for hours on end for the gay scene, and got her apt moniker – The Space Lady’s winged helmet and setup of a Casio battery-powered keyboard, vocal mic and echo & phaser controls became a small but striking phenomenon. Her sound is a blend of synth-laden pop and proto-techno that evokes the iconic soundtrack artists and early electronic composers such as Suzanne Ciani. The Space Lady has been recognised alongside Daniel Johnston and Jandek on Irwin Chusid’s seminal Outsider compilation Songs in the Key of Z, and her lo-fi synth minimalist interpretation of Peter Schilling’s Major Tom featured on Erol Alkan’s Bugged Out mix last year, as well as John Maus’ 2011 Rough Trade set. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Born into a showbiz milieu in Sydney, Tim Baker left Australia to travel in his early 20s and lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about music and worked in film. He later ran consular operations in France and North Africa for the Australian embassy, liaising with international authorities on cases involving murder, kidnap, terrorism and disappearances. His fiction includes the collection of short stories, Out From the Past, and his film work includes writing the feature film Samsara. His debut novel is Fever City. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Fleetwood is the founder and director of Hide&Seek, a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. Hide&Seek started life in 2007 as a festival of social games and playful experiences on London’s South Bank, and built into a studio occupied a unique position in the UK, creating innovative games, installations and events with organisations including Film4, the Cultural Olympiad, Tate Modern, Warner Bros, Gâité Lyrique, Nike, Sony, the Royal Opera House and Kensington Palace.Anab Jain was born and educated in India (NID), with an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art, and founded Superflux in 2009, leading the Consultancy’s client partnerships whilst balancing the Lab’s self-initiated conceptual projects. She has lead multidisciplinary design, strategy and foresight projects for businesses, think-tanks and research organisations such as Sony, BBC, Nokia, NHS, Design Council, Forum for the Future, Qatar Foundation and Govt. of UAE. Honoured as a TED Fellow, she is the recipient of several awards, including the Award of Excellence ICSID and Apply Computers, Innovation Award, Chicago International Film Festival and the UNESCO Digital Arts Award. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA New York, Apple, Mattel Toys, Tate Modern, Science Gallery Dublin, National Museum of China and the London Design Festival. She is on the Board of MzTek and Broadway Cinema and Media Centre, and is a guest lecturer at the Royal College of Art, VCUQatar, Architectural Association, Goldsmiths, Dundee Innovative Product Design and CIID. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Olivia Laing‘s first book, To the River, was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Olivia is the former Deputy Books Editor of the Observer and writes for a variety of publications, including the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. She’s a 2011 MacDowell Fellow, and has received awards from the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation. Olivia ‘s latest book is The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.