My older cousin who lived with my family for a year when I was a kid, could really draw. He became an architect, but for me his most exciting will remain the hand-coloured-pencilled sleeves he did for pirated C60s - Midnight Oil, Dire Straits etc.

But this is seriously cool. A french site archiving home made record sleeves - smudgy biro and fading felt tips. Also, manipulated covers in the 'just add moustache and glasses' vein. Well worth a look.

Two takes on acid house have randomly cropped up in the last week - it must be the new black?

First, Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller's work The History of the World explicates the connections between acid house and brass bands (um, whistles...?). True to his work, he had a brass band play acid house anthems at the opening.

Secondly, in this interview with excellent remixer, producer/dj and former Cultural Studies lecturer Ewan Pearson, he describes the music he plays as acid house, qualifying this by saying '[i]t's a non-descriptive term... an attitude or an approach, rather than anything strict like "it's got to have a 303".'

Also, from the same interview, I like this (with regard to eclecticism in a DJ set):
'I get really bored listening to the same things for hours on end. I'm not very good at doing the same thing for more than about 15 minutes. I don't understand people who are militantly into their little [dance music] niches, I've always tarted about basically.'