streampunk

Fishing is one of my parallel universe hobbies. There's a universe, very close to this one, where a slight tweak of circumstances led me to angliing, spending happy hours in waders and the works of Izaak Walton.

(Just as there's another universe, a bit further over, where I'm a regular fencer and I keep an epee in my office and flex it, in a suave but intimidating way, at my employees. In that universe I have employees. And an office.)

In this universe, however, I just like the gear.

But I also like the look of Caught By The River, a book and website that's similar in feel to Roger Deakin's work, updating fishing/river literature for a generation who listen to Underworld.

But it's the Caught By The River podcasts that really get me. (iTunes link). They just sound lovely. I don't understand a lot of it, I mean I literally understand the words but it doesn't strike chords of recognition or anything. But the sound of the words is great - it's ambient language, like the shipping forecast or baseball commentary, like the audiobook version of Discrete Music.

Favourite bits so far are Bill Drummond on the Penkiln Burn (iTunes) and Roger Deakin's piece on Fenland skating (iTunes). Especially nice because they're produced by Chris Watson, perhaps that's a sign that podcasts are maturing, the new place where properly produced audio will appear.