The latest issue of our magazine, Cyclic Defrost, is out.

Issue 22 has a cover by We Buy Your Kids. Plus interviews with Anonymeye, Knitted Abyss, Eugene Carchesio, Belbury Poly, Fennesz, Wavves, VVM, and Mountains.

There are also features on the DIY cassette scene and the tentative stirrings of a reborn electronic underground Sydney.

Plus our cover designers do a guest spot in the Sleeve Reviews section and author Christos Tsiolkas digs his favourite music in Selects.

Hassle your local record shop for copies or get the PDF.

If you’d like to get this issue and the following two issues to arrive in your letterbox without having to do anything else then renew your subscription with a new ‘donation’ then just subscribe, you’ll get a free CD for good measure.

I got an email out of the blue on Tuesday night, asking my five picks for the Sydney writers festival. Only catch, they needed them before work started the next morning.

I dashed out the following, and a sub-edited selection of three made it into the Spectrum section, in today’s Herald, alongside an interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

The other picks were from Susan Wyndham (SMH literary editor), Elizabeth Ann McGregor (MCA director), Sandra Yates (SWF chair of the board), Susan Hayes (OzCo literature director). Illustrious company, maybe they were after gender balance.

(Alex Ross – taken from Stop Smiling interview)

Alex Ross in Conversation with Ramona Koval: Hip-hop and Pere Ubu and Sonic Youth helped New Yorker music critic Alex Ross see classical music through a different window, and as an outsider to that world, it really changed the way I listen to music.

From Hot Copy to Hard Cover: Asa Wahlquist has spent plenty of time on the land as a reporter; her writing brings a dry, pragmatism to the environmental debate.

Rock’n’Roll Lives: Don Walker’s poetic reflections. Stephen Cummings’s tell all shock. In between, the warm Mark Mordue. Does it get better?

The Inside Out of Book Design: I know, I shouldn’t. But as a design lover, the cover catches my eye long before I open the pages. Shapes my opinions. I’m looking forward to an insider’s view.

Penguin Plays Rough: In a Newtown sharehouse, a clutch of Sydney writers and readers meet every month to read and rant their work. It’s wild and wonderful and this time the readers are Craig Silvey, Eddie Sharp, Lexi Freiman and Pip Smith.

Out of the Box with Christos Tsiolkas: OK, so I’m also doing something at the festival, which I’m nervously looking forward to. I’m interviewing the fantastic writer, Christos Tsiolkas, via his records. I’m comandeering the format of another FBI radio show – Out of the Box – to do it.

Suddenly it seems everything’s about Twitter. The mainstream press has caught on, running features on it, catching up with a phenomenon that’s been building for a while.

But there’s more to it than Aston Kucher and Hugh Jackman, and it’s not all about the Fake Stephen Conroy either.

So I went and asked a couple of media addicts – Stilgherrian and Stu Buchanan – why they tweet and wrote it all up for New Matilda.

It’s been quite a week.

Since last Sunday I have:

• Spent a week in Perth to attend the Greenhouse 2009 climate conference. No gambling. Chaired a session on climate change adaptation. Lived at Burswood Entertainment Complex – Perth casino – for five days. Did not leave. Oh, did leave one night, for Meupe night in town – got Pimmon CD and Wooshie seven inch single. Back at casino, found myself sitting at a parking station as it was the only place I could charge my laptop. Swum at Cottesloe beach on the last night with new and old friends, followed by fish and chips and Little Creatures beer on the beach. Flew back to Sydney after my longest time away from Nina Bea
• Appeared in the Sydney Writers Festival 09 program
• Program review at radio. All in order, apparently
• Skipped through traffic, petered out of petrol at Albion and Elizabeth Streets, had to push my scooter to the side of the road. The shame

I’m off to Perth next week for the climate change conference Greenhouse 2009.

But think Perth and it’s the Meupe record label that comes to mind – they’ve released great records by Stina, Pimmon and Dave Miller among others. I interviewed Traianos Pakioufakis, the guy behind Meupe, when he guest designed the cover of Cyclic Defrost, in July, 2006 (read here).

Here’s a recent taster from the label. Wooshie – Both Sides from the Natural’s Is In It 7 inch single – Meupe described it as follows:

Debut release from the mysterious sound wizard Wooshie (aka Dylan Michel). An ethereal balance of light and darkness, subdued chaos and forlorn rhythm. Cosmic waves crashing against a dark southern shore, Middle-Eastern-Soviet contemplation followed by futuristic erhu bossanova. A truly beautiful 45 that seems to consider the nature of chance, duality and balance.

First thing I did on confirming my trip west side, was check what’s happening Meupe-wise in Perth. And they’ve got a night at Spectrum Project Space in Northbridge. If I can tear myself away from the talks and things.