Dymphna's Archive

13/09/2026

For techno and house music fans, a short history.

In the mid-1980s, a young Detroit DJ named Derrick May drove to Chicago with a Roland TR-909 drum machine in his car. He was short on rent…

06/09/2026

I have just published an article on Hammer Film Productions, check it out along with other article on film, including on Steven Soderbergh and Andrew Arnold

Film · Film critique and genre discussion · 5 stories on Medium

04/09/2026

Continuing the ordering my Medium page into 'lists'.

This list is of philosophy primers I have composed:

03/09/2026

I have a 3-part series on the development of architecture and the concept of the 'house' on Medium:

Part One: Storage, Worship and Structure (c. 6000 BCE — 300 BCE)

03/09/2026

I have ordered Dymphna's Archive's sprawling page on Medium into 'lists'.

This is the link to the 'list' for articles on music

Music · Band biographies and label lore · 13 stories on Medium

03/09/2026

This is on my mind...

Listening Party from TekAction Records.

02/09/2026

Includes a link to the crowdfunder for support after Eugene's stroke

"There is a particular kind of performer who makes an audience uneasy not through volume or aggression but through unpredictability — the sense that anything might happen next, including something the performer himself hasn’t decided on yet. For over three decades, that was Eugene S. Robinson’s stage. As the frontman of the San Francisco noise-rock band Oxbow, he didn’t so much sing songs as detonate them, veering between a lounge crooner’s control and something closer to a controlled collapse, sometimes within the same verse. Audiences who came expecting catharsis often left with something closer to disorientation. That was rather the point.

Robinson is not a household name, and he would probably tell you that’s correct — that the work was never built for mass legibility. But across music, journalism, fiction, memoir and competitive martial arts, he has spent nearly four decades doing something more interesting than chasing recognition: building a body of work defined by a stubborn refusal to settle into any single, safe version of himself."

There is a particular kind of performer who makes an audience uneasy not through volume or aggression but through unpredictability — the…

01/09/2026

A short piece on HG Wells

"On the night of 30 October 1938, a CBS radio drama interrupted its own dance music to announce that something had landed in a field in New Jersey. Over the next forty minutes, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air walked American listeners through a Martian invasion using the vocabulary of breaking news: eyewitness reports, dying correspondents, martial law. The source material was HG Wells’s 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, relocated from Woking to Grover’s Mill and told entirely through the format of live bulletins.

The story that followed — that the broadcast caused a night of nationwide hysteria, with Americans fleeing their homes en masse — is largely a myth, and a well-documented one. Ratings data from the night shows barely two percent of the national radio audience was even tuned to the broadcast. The scale of the “panic” reported in the following day’s newspapers rested on thin, largely anecdotal wire copy, at a moment when print media had every incentive to portray radio, its new and threatening rival, as a dangerous, uncontrollable force. Contemporary historians researching the affair have found nothing resembling the coast-to-coast hysteria that later became folklore — though the picture isn’t perfectly clean: some scholarship argues real, if localised, panic did occur in pockets, and the debate over how much is still active.

What matters more than which version is true is that the perception of mass panic became, almost instantly, the story itself — repeated, embellished, and eventually treated as historical fact for decades. Wells’s Martians didn’t cause the event that made his name a byword for media panic. The newspapers did that, using his plot as raw material. That distinction is the real hinge on which this story turns: not “Wells predicted the future,” but Wells’s fiction became the first modern demonstration that a mass medium could manufacture its own reality, independent of what actually happened."

On the night of 30 October 1938, a CBS radio drama interrupted its own dance music to announce that something had landed in a field in New…

30/08/2026

More on of the primer on Classical Greek myths, plays and philosophy!

"Part 1 of this series ended with a handoff: the same mythic material — houses, curses, family lines already fixed by epic — taken up by Sophocles and staged in front of an audience being asked, for the first time, to argue about what the stories mean rather than simply receive them. That’s the shift this piece traces. Tragedy doesn’t discard mythos. Oedipus’s fate is exactly as fixed at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus as an oracle said it would be at the start. What’s new is the posture the audience is put in toward that fixed material — watching a man reason his way toward a truth they already know, and finding that the reasoning matters even though the outcome never was in doubt."

https://medium.com/.kemp/the-same-stories-cross-examined-sophocles-and-the-birth-of-ethical-argument-f2d8a4c345c7

30/08/2026

I couldn't access Facebook for a bit, but I have been publishing on Medium, I might be posting two articles a day for a while!