Matt Nida

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 09:46:45 +0000

My pal Ben Howard is a podcast pioneer, launching the definitive cult movie show Mondo Movie over twenty years ago. He’s back with a brilliant new Youtube channel, turning his attention to horror, crime and genre fiction. Subscribe here for crucial intel ahead of your next charity shop haul.

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:45:14 +0000

The Really Strange Record Club - my bi-monthly music social for adventurous listeners - is back at Dreamhouse Records in Leyton, 12th March, 7:30pm. Bring a record you love, or just come along to hear new sounds and meet new people. Email if you’d like to reserve a 15 minute turntable slot!

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 19:01:12 +0000

My article for the latest edition of The Fence - about the life, death and afterlife of the comedy panel show - is now online at their website!

Listening diary: weeks 3-4, 2026

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 09:16:58 +0000

RIP Ralph Towner. The only album of his I actually own is the quasi-new age Blue Sun from 1983, but the playing is gorgeous and the deluxe production hits the spot in the way that only 80s ECM can.

I bought Sherriff Lindo & The Hammer’s Ten Dubs That Shook The World after hearing a couple of tracks on Dublab. It’s fantastic, but also serves as a proof of concept for digi-dub in how bone-dry drum machine tones are transformed into swirling psychedelic clouds.

The aforementioned launch of New York Television took me back to Time Wharp’s 2022 album playful yet vulnerable Spiro World, and I fell in love with it all over again. There are whole worlds to explore here; I hear Steve Reich making jazz on a laptop but you may encounter something completely different.

My favourite media art project right now is Daniel Chamberlin’s Inter Dimensional Music, a mix series of deep drone, dub and black metal accompanied by a newsletter with Daniel’s idiosyncratic writings about Zen. This is the kind of work I’d never be able to find without the internet and yet paradoxically the economics of the internet make it hard to sustain, so you should chuck him a few quid if it adds as much value to your life as it does mine.

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 08:24:36 +0000

New York Television is a new online community television station from @kaye.bsky.social (who records wonderful music as Time Wharp). This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time.

Listening diary: week 1, 2026

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:48:38 +0000

This album of Finnish folk songs by Teppana Jänis & Arja Kastinen is utterly arresting in both concept and execution: wax cylinder recordings from over 100 years ago by the former are blended with modern recordings by the latter to dazzling effect. One of the most beautiful things I’ve heard in a long time.

I like it when ambient artists show their teeth a bit, and this new collection from Loris S Sarid delivers absorbing, blissy atmospheres whilst also offering a barbed commentary on the appropriation of the genre by corporate streaming culture. A welcome corrective.

I was somewhat distracted while listening to the excellent second album from SML until it hit me - surely this is the album that 2008-2012 era Yellow Magic Orchestra would have recorded if they’d taken their touring outfit into the studio?

Listening diary - 2025 roundup

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 14:30:35 +0000

My listening was all over the shop this year, with as much time (if not more) given to radio streams, online mixes and podcasts than full-length albums. I managed to log almost everything I listened to via Last.fm, meaning I’ve got a pretty accurate list of everything I hit play on. Filtering out the archival jazz LPs and deep dives into the Beach Boys and Warren Zevon back catalogues, here are five albums released in 2025 that are still striking a chord with me at the end of the year.

Spike - ST (Gob Nation). I came for the audacious synthpop Werewolves of London cover; I stayed for the originals, which more than match it. I caught Spike live twice this year, and she opened the second show with the old VHS anti-piracy jingle. No record brought me more joy this year.

Jefre-Cantu Ledesma - Gift Songs (Mexican Summer). “Ambient jazz” felt a bit played out to me this year, but this improvised, acoustic drift offered a balm that I returned to many times.

Postcards - Ripe (Ruptured). This dreampop album was my entry point into the fantastic Ruptured label from Beirut, a community making fantastic music in terrible circumstances and knocking it out of the park every single time.

Nico Georis - Music Belongs To The Universe (Leaving Records). Heat-friend ambient psychedelia that plays out like a West Coast version of Oxygene.

DJ Dadaman & Moscow Dollar - Ka Gaza (Nyege Nyege Tapes). Technically a reissue but new to me thanks to Nyege Nyege’s reissue - a collection of Bacardi / proto-amapiano that became my most-played album this year.

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 11:41:21 +0000

I’m in this month’s edition of The Fence, writing about the life, death and afterlife of the comedy panel show. Buy a copy online, or even better, pick one up from a cool newsagent. (The rest of the issue is fantastic too.)

Listening diary: weeks 49 & 50, 2025

Sat, 13 Dec 2025 11:39:12 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I dumped every FLAC in my library tagged “2025” onto my phone in a bid to get ahead of year-end season. The io release on No Part of It is patient and enveloping, setting a tone then iterating on it very gradually. The Lia Kohl album is a trove of exquisite miniatures that ends in an emotionally arresting place. Nyahh Records' Fiddlers comp has an unfussy approach to presentation and recording that succeeds in making these performances feel like a living tradition rather than a period/heritage piece. The BlankFor.ms and Nico Georis albums continue Leaving Records endlessly winning hand, and the Emerald comp on Moon Glyph suggests that they’re the only contemporary practitioners of kankyo ongaku-esque new age you need to bother with.

Erasure’s Christmas album from 2013 is legitimately great. It adheres to the cardinal rules of a Christmas record in that it brings seasonal themes into the artist’s existing practice, rather than knocking out a lazy Spector pastiche. But it’s also audacious and beautiful, and the vocal arrangements are amazing. In a parallel universe, they do their lovely version of Silent Night on Christmas Top of the Pops 1987 and it’s now part of the canon.

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 15:09:05 +0000

New/old music from me, collecting festive tunes I recorded between 2010-2014. Available as a pay-what-you-want download from Bandcamp; any and all money I receive from this release will be donated to Not A Phase so please give generously. Listen and buy here!

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 09:19:03 +0000

Come deck the halls with us at the Really Strange Record Club Christmas Spectacular - Thursday 18th December, 7:30-10:30pm, at Dreamhouse Records. Christmas records not compulsory, but if you’ve got something festive lurking on the shelves bring it along! More details on the site here.

Listening diary: week 48, 2025

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 16:52:46 +0000

Listened to a lot of radio this week, so not many albums logged to my Last.fm account. But I loved the Gina X compilation on Dark Entries. No GDM was and remains a total banger that first crossed my path in the electroclash days, but this comp shows that Gina and collaborator Zeus B Held had plenty more in the tank, even if they didn’t really diverge from their winning formula that much.

I might be on the verge of a Glenn Campbell deep dive. Yesterday When I Was Young is a relatively recent discovery for me, but it hits the same emotional and existential crescendo as Wichita Lineman (the other song of his I know). Further investigations to follow.

Listening diary: week 47, 2025

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 09:49:31 +0000

I generally think Depeche Mode peaked as an albums act in the 90s, and listen to their 80s material through best ofs, playlists and live records. Construction Time Again is aimed far more directly at the dancefloor than I recalled, while also being the most overtly concrète they ever sounded. An amazing record with phenomenal low-end.

David Byrne’s stock as an artist has never been higher, even as his new records are received with little more than a shrug. I think Who Is The Sky is delightful; like post-60s Brian Wilson, your response to this will depend on whether you read its disarming literalness as radical and heartfelt or lightweight - childlike vs childish.

When I was a kid I had a tape of Tim Hart and Maddy Prior singing nursery rhymes. Listening to Steeleye Span properly for the first time in middle age connects to something very primal and formative in my brain. Ten years ago I’d have found this naff beyond belief; now I think I need it.

My pal John sent me the Cesar Mariano rec. It has the greasiest keyboard lines I’ve heard all year.

When the temperature drops, I turn to late 70s Tangerine Dream. I’ve been listening to Rubycon regularly for 20 years now, and the experience is different every time. This time, I noticed the relative density of the drifty passages, and then how almost everything else falls away to let the sequencer lines shine, like they’re rightly proud of them.

Listening diary: week 46, 2025

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 13:59:23 +0000

I went to see Laurie Anderson at the Roundhouse in London last week, and it was an incredible show - galvanising and deeply moving in equal measure. The Ugly One With The Jewels is my favourite Laurie Anderson record, for how it presents her practice in its most distilled form: strange, funny, haunting stories that reveal an undeniable truth even as the meaning slips out of your grasp.

Erik Hall’s ongoing project to record the canon of minimalism by himself shows an admirable commitment to the bit: Music For 18 Musicians (performed by one); Music For A Large Ensemble (solo). I find this funny, just as much as I find the work enchanting, his painstaking assembly of these musical patchwork quilts revealing little details in the individual lines that are obscured on more traditional recordings.

Listening diary: week 45, 2025

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 09:44:53 +0000

The lovely new claire rousay record is a return to her trademark palette of quotidian sounds, conversational snippets and ambient washes, to a degree that might appear formulaic if it wasn’t so emotionally affecting. The magic of her music lies in the sense that you’re never quite sure what she’s up to, only that she’s doing it with astonishing precision.

Every six months or so, I text my friend Gareth a Bandcamp link with the caption “Is electroclash back??”. (We’re both hoping the answer will be yes.) New York offer not just the requisite octave basslines, but also the dislocated weirdness previously found further down the tracklist of a Fischerspooner album.

Vaporwave is often weaponised nostalgia; I don’t like the idea of nostalgia but I’m often moved by it anyway. I was completely transfixed by metra.vestlud’s pitch-perfect evocation of the Wii menu screens, until a baffling porn sample in one of the later tracks broke the spell.

The Ensemble Basiani album was selected entirely at random from an Apple Music search for Georgian polyphonic singing, after reading Steve Hauschildt’s description of it in a recent interview with Philip Sherburne and wanting to know what it sounded like. I was absolutely flabbergasted by this.

To have Leslie Keffer back - and on such excellent and prolific form - is a joy.

Listening diary: week 44, 2025

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 09:25:57 +0000

I spent last Saturday at the Gob Nation all-dayer at the Tuffnell Park Dome, and loved it. Spike’s self-titled EP is one of my favourites of 2025, and her live show suggest there’s even better songs to come; my favourite discovery of the days was trash-punk duo Grazia.

People rarely talk about Greatest Hits albums in the age of the playlist, but Warren Zevon’s makes an incredible case for his singularity: these songs are packed with highly detailed Cold War intrigue, they’re full of pathos, and they’re incredibly funny.

I’ve only explored a fraction of the Sun City Girls extended universe, but I love the new Sir Richard Bishop album and its hack-and-slash approach to acoustic folk. The urgency and vitality here is infectious.

I have a long and slightly tangled history with Depeche Mode and only recently realised that they might be my favourite band. The new concert film M is a wonder to behold, a stunning document of an act that have always been interesting to listen to but have never been more interesting to look at too. The new song, played over the end credits, continues Memento Mori’s hot streak.

Listening diary: week 43, 2025

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 12:48:39 +0000

Here are some records I’ve listened to over the last week.

The most interesting thing about my relationship with Bob Dylan’s music is that I’ve hitherto managed to avoid having a relationship with Bob Dylan’s music, and only recently thought about starting one. I’m listening to his early albums alongside the Never Ending Stories podcast’s excellent Do Look Back mini-series on this period, as a way of getting to grips with a body of work I mainly know through cultural osmosis. At this point I have nothing insightful to add about one of the most analysed discographies in music history, other than to say - these records are good?

Kelly Moran’s music means a huge amount to me personally; I’ll write more about this in future but this is another lovely record full of cascading sheets of piano, with enough experimental grit in the oyster to stop it being too easy on the ear. Oneohtrix Point Never’s new LP is shaping up very promisingly, a return to the tight sound palettes of his mid-period work (although I have enjoyed the more elaborate follies he’s embarked on recently).

RIP Dave Ball from Soft Cell - an underrated figure in electronic music circles, whose work still seems utterly of the moment. The Necks are one of those bands I’ve encountered on paper for years and thought “that sounds like hard work”, until I bothered to press play and discovered how devastatingly blissful their music is.

Want You Back In My Life Again by The Carpenters is a total jam. The Enya-does-Spector synths of Brian Wilson’s debut are incredibly comforting to someone of my age whose childhood was soundtracked by digital simulacra of acoustic instruments. The last two tracks of Surf’s Up remain his most jaw-dropping achievement.

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:29:30 +0000

My bi-monthly music social - The Really Strange Record Club - returns to the wonderful Dreamhouse Records on Francis Road in Leyton on Thursday 6th November, 7:30-10:30pm. Bring a record that means something to you, or come down, have a drink at the bar and we GUARANTEE you’ll hear something new. To bag a 15-minute turntable slot, ping us an email.

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 17:56:03 +0000

This week on I Am Prime Minister - the wonderful Cally Beaton, who has some jaw-dropping stories about mansplaining she’s encountered as well as a powerful argument for the four-day week. Stream below, or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 07:00:00 +0000

Last year, comedian Matt Richardson asked if I’d be interested in helping him reboot and relaunch his podcast. Fast forward to today, and we’re very happy to unveil series two of I Am Prime Minister - now a Wild Ambitions podcast! - in which Matt sits down with a very special guest who’s suddenly and unexpected been elected Prime Minister, to find out how they plan to transform the country. We’re kicking off the run with a sweet and silly chat about toilets, billionaires and citizen MPs with the very funny Carl Donnelly - stream below, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 19:13:20 +0000

We Made It Funny! Thanks to everyone who came down to last night’s BAFTA/OKRE collab event, where we managed to cook up a pretty good idea for a climate-themed sitcom in front of a live audience, as well as hearing from an audience member who once ate a jellyfish. (Photo: BAFTA / Jack Hall)

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 08:00:00 +0000

I’m on stage at BAFTA in Picadilly tonight for Make It Funny, a collaboration between BAFTA’s Green Light season and Laughing Matters, the comedy and climate programme I’m running at OKRE. I’ll be joined by an incredible line-up of comedy creatives as we attempt to workshop a new climate-conscious comedy series… live in front of an audience. This members event is sold out, but I’ll post some clips later in the week.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 16:16:43 +0000

Welcome to my refreshed corner of the internet - a new home for my various work projects, podcasts, events and more. Drop me an email and say hi!