Category: CATALYST

  • Vocals From The Beyond

    Vocals From The Beyond

    In the age of Autotune, it’s sobering that some of the great songs of the last 30 years possess some of the greatest vocal performances unfettered by overdone effects, tone correction and just plain bad singing. Three of the best examples floating around the web are from three long deceased icons of contemporary music. First…

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  • The Tom Waits Map

    The Tom Waits Map

    If you’ve ever wondered about all those place-name references in Tom Waits’ songs––and who hasn’t––then the Tom Waits Map is here to help you impress your friends with your intimate knowledge of just why Tom ate fire and drank from the Ganges, or spent all his money in a Mexican whorehouse baby, across the street from a Catholic church.

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  • Ride Globally, Eat Locally

    Ride Globally, Eat Locally

    While we need to eat to survive, the things we eat and the way we procure and eat them do have some impact. Convenience for the consumer equals a convoluted and wildly impractical system of transporting food all over countries, and often across the earth. Add in the substantially negative health impacts of processed foods,…

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  • Scene: American Flyers

    Scene: American Flyers

    How many cliches can be fit into one scene? American Flyers may be the poor cousin to Breaking Away when it comes to cycling films, but it takes its rightful place in that rare niche of Hollywood feature film despite being inflicted with the Curse of Kevin Costner, who as a celluloid cyclist makes a great…

    Click or not: Scene: American Flyers
  • Deluxe X Martini

    Deluxe X Martini

    One of the most recognisable team liverys in motorsport, at least in the latter part of the previous century, was the Martini and Rossi colours. Most notable on the Porsche endurance racing cars, it was the Lancia Rally 037 rally cars that caught my attention, the white red black and blue Group B beasts thundering through…

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  • The Day Peace, Love And The Music Died

    The Day Peace, Love And The Music Died

    Setting out to watch Gimme Shelter, you don’t expect to experience anything more than a concert film of a band at their peak, thriving in a time of comparative innocence. Of course there was a lot of social upheaval happening at the turn of the 60s; Vietnam, civil rights and the misguided hippy culture which…

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  • The Duet That Created A Tempest

    The Duet That Created A Tempest

    To say there’s an air of excitement around the ChainSlap turntables right now would be a pretty large understatement. That we are going to witness live two of our all-time favourite artists within the space of a week seems at once both a dream and concurrently a little daunting. Will one overshadow the other? Or will the…

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  • The Importance Of Bad Brains

    The Importance Of Bad Brains

    Whichever phase of music history is on the table for discussion, there will always be a number of bands or musicians whose names will be thrown into the ring as seminal, hugely influential or outright important. Most will deserve the accolades, many will not. Just as the likes of Hendrix, Bowie, the Stones and Zeppelin…

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