An Introduction to the Repetitive Strain Newswire

Hello international PLUR network,

Welcome to The United Federated Forces of the Repetitive Strain Newswire Listener Crew. We promise one email a month only, which will include our monthly radio show and other nefarious audio referencing. This was born of deleting our Twitter Actually I Think It’s Called X Now account and a desire to get a little more up close and personal about things. Generally it’ll be the show and one or two other things. Short sharp shocks only.

Repetitive Strain on Balamii • June 2024

We’ve had a couple of guest shows this year - which were amazing btw - and this means we often end up with insane backlogs of stuff we want to play when we’re next on. I feel like this is one of those ones where we really hit what I would call “Peak RS”.

Personal highlights: finally getting to play Mosquito Farm (an incredible duo who make music from found garbage and handmade mechanics), returning to The Love Triangle’s “Secret Grip” (my own tape rip and maybe one of the greatest songs of all time?) and BP playing this Thomas Bush track that sounds like Bill Nelson in concrete.

Sort of butchered talking about it on the show, but I heard the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra track in the bar of 90mil in Berlin after VSP solo venture Vanity Crystal played with Special Interest for hardcore girl legend friend of the show BB’s SOLISPIRAL event. The DJ was wearing a mask and looked nothing like Oscar Atanga who was the billed DJ. Help me out here BB! They were so good.

We link to all the music we can on our Buy Music Club, a Bandcamp-centered list website co-founded by Avalon Emerson. Annoyingly talented person! Great job, click click. Full tracklist for this show is:

01. Hear The Children Sing - Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Nathan Salsburg & Tyler Trotter
02. Of Data & Delight - Slowfoam
03. Er Zog - Nina Harker
04. Under the Midnight Sun - Jeremiah Chu & Marta Sofia Honer
05. Face in the Water - Thomas Bush
06. Old World - The Modern Lovers
07. Omulangira Mpango - Nakibembe Embaire Group
08. Little A's Chant - Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra
09. I Sing Um The Way I Feel - J.B. Lenoir
10. Pipes - Mosquito Farm
11. Love Is A Mystery - Tropical Moon
12. Hotwire The Nite - Amery
13. Dancing With Ideas - A Popular History of Signs
14. That's Him On The Daft Stuff Again - Neutrals
15. Secret Grip - The Love Triangle
16. Osannomiya Juke - Paisley Parks
17. Shit Shot - Aroma Nice
18. Flow - Nu Jazz

All our Balami shows can be found on Mixcloud, Soundcloud or Balamii’s website.

Money Stinks, This City Stinks

We saw highs, and we saw lows - and god trying to put on a show in SE London right now is a joyless task 75% of the time - so we’re taking a break from events for the rest of the year. In saying all this, BP’s solo*(ish)* calendar empire Another Subculture will be hosting something in the late winter that is to be looked forward to. Keep it peeled!

No venues open past 11pm (The 24 Hour City, baby!) has officially caused a crisis (based on my cumulative 2024 experience) that punks under 30 DO NOT DANCE. Not going to put them on blast but this was best exemplified by a recent sold-out hardcore show in a gay club, where EVERYONE LEFT BEFORE THE DJs AT 11PM ON A FRIDAY. Don’t tell me these people are still pretending to enjoy Wetherspoons. We need to issue all these spindly little leather-clad children some Frankie Knuckles and get them into an Octo Octa show stat. Shake your bodies babies.

Venue not-news: Sister Midnight’s new community-owned venue marked for 2025 can’t come sooner. Did anyone else see the spot where Power Lunches used to be is vacant again? I have too many grey hairs, sorry.

It Is Easy, It Is Cheap, It Can Involve Anime Blingees

If you happen upon this at some point and don’t know us personally, you may not be aware of the time we have spent this year playing Total Idiot Noise Dirge across London as ½ of RUBBER. We recently ticked off some cool personal stuff, including playing hardcore at Cafe Oto after attending for a decade, and playing with turbo speed lobotomy rockers Judy And The Jerks. Playing music is good, and you can do it (especially when it involves putting a contact microphone in your mouth).

At the Judy show, we had a back and forth with someone ragging us for not having social media. This was the first time this has happened (with this band at least), so kind of interesting! Punk can bubble you in several ways, so I always enjoy someone challenging that momentarily, especially when everyone in our lives wants to dunk their phone in hydrochloric acid. Rather than lecture on our personal feelings on the non-starter of being “band with social media account”, here’s a counter-offer:

The RUBBER website is built on Neocities, an open-source version of Geocities we also used to build the Repetitive Strain website. There is basic HTML and Javascript CSS, of which everything is available using simple how-tos from stuff like W3 Schools.

The most complex thing on there currently is a GIF I made, pulled from a video filmed on a GoPro rented the same day from my university, and put together using a stolen version of Premiere Pro (cough cmacked cough). I had never used a GoPro before and only used Premiere for the first time in 2024. I mostly used Youtube tutorials.

As an aside, using Neocities connects you to its user community - one of the more insane and anime-Blingee-heavy online ones going. If you care about this kind of thing, the Rubber website currently sits at around 5,000 views (we have been an active band since late 2023 with no recordings). The Repetitive Strain one has just shy of 40,000. We are a small internet radio show.

Not hosted on there, but for a similar aesthetic quality I recommend Swedish catgirl hacker maia arson crimew’s website, where she recently a) hacked Samsung, b) uncovered that Israel’s national police has been trying to purchase spyware and c) hosts a 7GB sample pack of low-quality Samplefocus files.

Ⓐ Oi! from South London Ⓔ

Repetitive Strain is free every month, both in audio and writing. However, supporting helps us along with radio fees, technical stuff, non-alcoholic beers. Feel free to throw us a little if you wish.

Free The Filton 18