iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Pub band tonight playing lots of 80's synth pop, not really my style, but I'm glad someone is keeping this sound alive. Always good to hear something different.

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Pete Fraser @petefrasermusic.bsky.social · 15h

There’s so much extremism in this demographic they literally wouldn’t know where to begin. Seriously - if calls for the drownings of children & public executions of politicians were taken as seriously Islamic extremism, you’d be talking about a terrorist movement of a half a million in the UK alone.

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Cold War Steve @coldwarsteve.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

According to Suella Braverman not one of these ENGLAND players are English. FUCK HER 🖕🖕🏾🖕🏿🖕🏽🖕🏼

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Cindy Michels 🇺🇲🇪🇺🇨🇦 @cindymichels.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Right, off to the airport 😎✈️ This image really sums up the USA loss against Iran and its attack on human rights 🤔 Enjoy ❤️ See you Monday 👀

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Rachel @thameschoral.bsky.social · 09/04/2026

Rombaux, Bruges. Arguably the most beautiful record shop there is.

Rombaux Record Shop Bruges with mystery shopper.

Rombaux, Bruges. A cabinet filled with plaster busts and violins.

The entrance to Rombaux. A 100 year old record shop in Bruges.

The ornate art nouveau interior of Rombaux.

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Dominic Umile @dominicumile.com · 29/09/2026

Also linked in my notes on the sound of Cypress Hill's debut: a lengthy 2015 oral history of Ultimate Breaks and Beats compilations medium.com/cuepoint/ult...

medium.com

Ultimate Breaks & Beats: An Oral History

How one essential vinyl series helped funky beats conquer the world

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Mike @mike-solo.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Huge fan of the P, this is one of their best, and got me buying vinyl again!

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Helen Day @lbflyawayhome.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

There’s a Ladybird book for every occasion. “In 1850 there were quite a number of Football Clubs. Each club drew up its own rules at a special meeting. The rules were not the same for every club” From ‘The Story of Football’ Artist: Jack Matthew (Man City)

By the light of yellow gas lamps, a group of men with impressive sideburns sit down at a mahogany table, ready to write notes with quill pens

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Sian Berry MP @sianberry.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Oh I could not be sadder at this news. An incredible campaigning broadcaster. I remember vividly the impact of Childline when I was very young, and recently Dame Esther was a dedicated supporter of the assisted dying work I was involved in. Huge love to all her family. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cq...

bbc.co.uk

Dame Esther Rantzen dies aged 86

Her family paid tribute to her in a statement calling her the "most wonderful mother" and a "cherished grandmother".

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Mike @mike-solo.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Herring farts? God they must smell horrendous!

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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Pope Innocent III,who died in 1216, spoke of a certain kind of older man, who is "easily provoked", "will believe anything and question nothing", is "stingy and greedy" and "praises the good old days and hates the present." Reform UK's voter base has been knocking around for a very long time.

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Amon Warmann @amonwarmann.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I LOVE BOOSTERS: Boots Riley is moving like nobody will ever let him make a film ever again, and we are all the better for it. A weird, wild, and colourful blast, with beautiful anti-capitalist messaging to boot. (And the costume design is 🔥too!) #LFF

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Prateek Buch @prateekbuch.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Sham-pagne supernova

A BBC sport story saying that the word 'SHAM' is mentioned eight times in the Premier League's statement on the findings against Manchester City

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the Mountain Goats @themountaingoats.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

bluesky does not seem to really be talking about this but today Stevie Wonder unleased 4 songs that didn't make "Songs in the Key of Life." music.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

music.youtube.com

Songs In The Key Of Life - The EP

EP • Stevie Wonder

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M Meerkat @kackbro.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

THIS 👇 HERE.......

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Idu House @iduhouse.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

🚀 Artist of the Day: Sun Ra The cosmic jazz pioneer who declared himself from Saturn, Sun Ra reimagined what sound, and existence, could be. Through his music, he built worlds of freedom, blending ancient Egypt, space, and Black futurism into one infinite vision. 🗃️ #CreatorsAtWork #BlackSky #Art

Color film still of Sun Ra from Space Is the Place, shot in the Bay Area in 1972 and released in 1974. He stands outdoors in full cosmic regalia in front of a white car, with a dry hillside, road, trees, and an intensely blue sky behind him. His black-and-gold striped pharaonic headdress rises into a huge gold orb framed by two tall antenna-like prongs. A broad jeweled collar rests over a striped blue, red, black, and white tunic, while an enormous yellow-orange cape catches the wind and spreads across the frame like solar flame. His shoes echo the same saturated palette. The image captures the central visual idea of Sun Ra’s world: ancient Egypt, outer space, Black self-invention, and theater fused into one living language. Born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham in 1914, he remade himself as Le Sony’r Ra and insisted he came from Saturn. That claim was not simply a joke or stage gimmick. It became part of a larger philosophy in which myth offered Black people a way to imagine existence beyond the racial limits imposed by America.
Space Is the Place turned that philosophy into cinema. Directed by John Coney and co-written by Sun Ra and Joshua Smith, the film follows Ra returning to Earth and proposing another planet as a home for Black people, with music itself serving as a vehicle of liberation. In one of the film’s most famous exchanges, he tells young people that he comes to them as “the myth,” because a society that denies Black people full reality has already pushed them outside its definitions. The clothing matters just as much as the dialogue. Sun Ra rejected the boundary between costume and everyday dress, and the Arkestra’s handmade metallic robes, Egyptian forms, sequins, and space-age headpieces transformed performance into what he called cosmo-drama. Here, standing beside an ordinary car on an earthly road, he looks deliberately impossible. That tension is the point: the future is being staged in the present. The roadside becomes a launchpad for freedom.

Portrait of Sun Ra from the Space Is the Place era, standing against a deep, electric-blue background in a monumental red-and-gold robe. His body is almost completely enclosed by the garment, which falls to the floor in broad panels of crimson, bright gold and bronze. A black-and-gold striped pharaonic headpiece frames his face. Above it rises the same extraordinary emblem seen throughout this period: a large metallic orb held between two long upright prongs, glowing under the lights like an artificial sun. Sun Ra looks slightly upward, making the portrait feel less like a conventional musician photo than an icon from a civilization that does not yet exist. That effect was deliberate. By the early 1970s, Sun Ra had spent decades constructing a universe in which music, clothing, poetry, philosophy, theater, technology, and ancient Egyptian imagery belonged to the same project. He called his stage spectacles “cosmo-drama,” and he treated clothing as part of the sound itself, once declaring, “Costumes are music.”
The Arkestra’s garments were often handmade from metallic or found fabrics, assembled with the same experimental spirit as the music. This visual language reached one of its clearest forms around Space Is the Place. Sun Ra and the Arkestra recorded the album in Chicago in October 1972; Blue Thumb released it in 1973. The film, made in 1972 and released in 1974, translated his mythology into an Afrofuturist science-fiction story about Black liberation, interplanetary migration, and music as a technology powerful enough to change reality. Decades before the word “Afrofuturism” was coined, Sun Ra was already practicing it as daily life. The orb, pharaoh stripes, and cosmic robe were not an escape from Black history. They connected ancient African symbolism to a future in which Black existence could exceed the categories imposed on it. In this portrait, Sun Ra does not dress like he came from another world. He stands as evidence that another world can be invented.

Color performance photograph of Sun Ra and his Arkestra at Hill Auditorium in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 23, 1978 photographed by Leni Sinclair. Sun Ra stands near the front of the stage in a shimmering bronze-black robe, a beaded or metallic head covering framing his face. His right hand is raised as if cueing, blessing, conducting, or reaching into the air. Behind him, members of the Arkestra hold brass instruments, behind a steel sculpture of curved rods that arc overhead like trajectories, antennae, or orbital paths. Warm amber stage light turns the sculpture and Sun Ra’s robe into streaks of copper and fire against a dark background. The photograph captures the Arkestra at a moment when a Sun Ra concert had long since become far more than a conventional jazz set. Music, costume, movement, poetry, chanting, props, lighting, and spectacle were fused into what Ra called cosmo-drama, a ritual designed not simply to entertain an audience but to alter its sense of what was possible.
This performance took place during the 1978 Ann Arbor Jazz Festival at Hill Auditorium, a festival dedicated that year to Duke Ellington. That context matters. Sun Ra revered the big-band tradition, especially Ellington and Fletcher Henderson, while pushing it through free improvisation, electronics, unusual instruments, theatrical staging, and what sounded to many listeners like music from another century. His work was not a rejection of jazz history so much as an argument that its history already contained the future. The steel sculpture surrounding him makes that idea visible. Traditional brass players remain in the frame, but their stage has become a cosmic environment of curves, metal, shadow, and motion. Sun Ra’s raised hand sits at the center, directing both orchestra and image. By 1978 he had spent decades asking audiences to imagine Black life beyond earthly restrictions. Here the concert hall becomes his spacecraft, the Arkestra its crew, and performance itself the engine.

Square cover image for a 2024 reissue of Sun Ra and His Arkestra’s Jazz in Silhouette. A close portrait of Sun Ra fills the frame against a hot pink-red background bordered in yellow. His face is black-and-white, while oversized rounded sunglasses glow yellow-orange over his eyes. He wears a zebra-striped cap, a patterned collar, a purple metallic-looking top, and a large sun-shaped pendant at his chest. At upper left, bold yellow lettering reads “SUN RA,” with smaller text naming his Arkestra and the album title JAZZ IN SILHOUETTE beneath it. The psychedelic color treatment reflects the cosmic Sun Ra most listeners now recognize, but this is not the album’s original 1959 cover. It belongs to a modern 20th Century Masterworks reissue, released on blue vinyl in 2024. That distinction opens the deeper story of the record. Jazz in Silhouette was recorded in Chicago on March 6, 1959 and issued that May on Saturn, the independent label Sun Ra built with Alton Abraham to release music the established record business was unlikely to support.
The earliest-known sleeve was hand-screened and credited to H. P. Corbissero, a name researchers have suggested may have been Sun Ra himself. Musically, the album stands at a threshold. The Arkestra still swings with the precision of the big-band and bebop traditions Ra knew deeply, but compositions such as “Enlightenment,” “Saturn,” and the expansive “Ancient Aiethopia” already point toward stranger harmonic, rhythmic, and philosophical territory. Sun Ra was not abandoning jazz’s past. He was treating it as raw material for another future. Saturn itself was part of the experiment: records appeared in small runs, were sold at performances, re-pressed, relabeled, and sometimes given new handmade art. This modern cover therefore creates a kind of time fold. The cosmic icon looks back at one of the records where his musical universe was still taking shape, reminding us that the spaceship was being built long before most people noticed it.

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Andrew @ads60nyc.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Any excuse to post this.

Meme: Barn owls when humans invented barns:

“Oh yeah. It’s all coming together.”

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Rachel Abbey McCafferty @ramccafferty.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I will never not be amazed that there are people without a song stuck in their heads at all times.

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Stephen McGann @stephenmcgann.uk · 26/09/2026

A deeply underrated skeet.

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Johnny Mains @johnnymains.co.uk · 21/09/2026

Someone from Exeter was buried on Friday and one of their wishes was to have dinosaurs and the Grim Reaper present. Legend. Photo source: Exeter & Devon Crematorium and Memorial Gardens

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Jonathan Slater @jonathanslater.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

The Greenhouse from recycled church stained glass windows, also known as "Sacré Blur" was made by horticultural installation artists Heywood and Condie from salvaged 18th and 19th century ecclesiastical stained glass. London

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Michael Conley @mconley.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Does my oven feel ennui? Does my iPad anticipate and fear its own inevitable obsolescence? Can my calculator get a boner?

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Smooth Dunk @smoothdunk2.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

guy who fell into a coma after the last episode of fawlty towers wakes up and looks at the internet

5 panel comic

Panel 1: Purple Guy looks at a laptop and says “boy o boy! I wonder what my comedy hero’s up to”

Panel 2: A tweet from John Cleese that reads “This is where the Arabs were ahead of us

By castrating all their slaves, they made sure that there were no descendants who could claim reparations”

Panels 3-5: Purple Guy slowly closes laptop with a mystified look of revulsion

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Basingstoke police station.

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

So they're now talking about attacking the system of policing and law. Arrest these f*ckers. Stop bowing down to them and dancing around them.

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Mike @mike-solo.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Literally the same argument he uses about genocide.

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ET Heisenberg @utdheisenberg.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Man City announce new shirt sponsor.

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Glenn @frackpong.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Fans of every other club in England right now.

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Musa Okwonga @okwonga.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This AI discourse is amazing. "We've created this very dangerous thing, based largely on the mass theft of labour, that we should stop developing" - okay, so that means that you should be treated like social and economic vandals, not revered as sages on podcasts.

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Celeste Headlee @celesteheadlee.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

So, Banksy bought a used yacht, repaired it and retrofitted it to serve as a rescue boat to save migrants in the central Mediterranean. The whole project cost the artist $860,000. Since 2020, the boat has saved more than 3,800 people. londondaily.com/banksy-funds...

londondaily.com

Banksy funds refugee rescue boat operating in Mediterranean - London Daily

Exclusive: UK artist finances bright pink motor yacht that set sail in secrecy to avoid being intercepted by authorities

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Nome @nome.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Sure, we wind up with "Henry Ford funds square dance in schools because Jazz is a Jewish plot to indoctrinate kids into socializing with black people," but

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Jay Kaplan @jaykaplan.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Today is the birthday of both John Coltrane (1926) and Ray Charles (1930.) That this isn’t a national holiday speaks volumes about what’s wrong with our society.

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Albumism @albumism.com · 24/09/2026

Remembering John Coltrane today, born 100 years ago on September 23, 1926 album.ink/JColtraneHBD

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Peter Collinson @petercollinson.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Nix with the "underage girls". There's no such thing. It's a term contrived by rape enablers & apologists to diminish the seriousness of child rape. Underage girls are children. Trump and other wealthy people raped and trafficked children. Anyone who uses that term is themself an enabler.

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beetlejess @thejessness.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

claimin' they godzilla when they really godzuki

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Mike @mike-solo.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Music needs much, much more of this!!!! 👊🏽

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South Downs National Park @southdownsnp.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

“Autumn is my season, dear. It is, after all, the season of the soul” Famous words from the celebrated writer Virginia Woolf, who retreated to the South Downs for her literary inspiration and loved long tranquil walks in the chalk downland. 📸: Christopher Pearson

Sunlit woodland path carpeted with fallen autumn leaves leading into a misty clearing beneath arching, mossy trees with golden light filtering through the branches.

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Raider @iwillnotbesilenced.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Most Germans weren't Nazis They stayed quiet to keep their jobs, their safety, and their comfortable lives. That silence was the oxygen fascism needed to take root. By the time the horrors were undeniable, the trap had already snapped shut, and resistance meant certain death.

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Tom Cox @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The dawn chorus is so sweet in April but by late September it’s just six drunk rooks arguing in a dead tree.

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Mike @mike-solo.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

One of my favourite lps by The Roots, felt like they really came of age with this one. "What They Do" is one of their very best tunes.

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Helen Day @lbflyawayhome.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Beautiful everyday Ladybird things. Homepride’s Fred the flour grader, nestling among some of my books. (To add to his charms, he was manufactured by ‘Airfix’)

Photograph of Fred in his black suit and black bowler hat smiling out from a bookcase
Where he is surrounded by vintage ladybird books

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Astronomer Royal for Scotland | Catherine Heymans @astroroyalscot.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

NASA picture of the day today is a real 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿beauty! This is a composite image of the ~5000yo Callanish Stones on the Isle of Lewis. The amazing Giuseppe Petricca has only gone and photographed the Sun at noon there, every few days, for a whole year. #Dedication 🔭🧪👌 ℹ️: science.nasa.gov/image-articl...

The imposing Callanish Stones stand talk with their shadows spanning out across the glass. It's a super clear sky, but looks cold. Above the central stone is a strange figure-of-8 shape of dots. This is the location of the Sun, at noon, on various different days across the year.

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