Found in one of my kids’ books, love the poem and illustration.
My friend Elisa Parish is currently studying in Japan and posted these pictures on her FB – so jealous. 
I was lucky enough to hear this in full the other night and it is stunning. Straight up Hip Hop, the way you like(d) it but far from an old school nostalgia-fest. One producer, one MC and only one track featuring guests – it’s 10 tracks of no nonsense beats, rhymes and the odd scratch. Fast and funky as fuck with a Mr Krum sleeve to boot – another addition to the ever-growing list of great albums released this year. Out 28th October 2013 on Project Blue Book on Vinyl, CD and Download. Check out the video sampler below.
This is a pretty big deal for me, going to be special…
Those of you with a good memory might recall that I posted a short film nearly 2 years ago called ‘Keloid’ by the BLR_VFX studio – some of whom worked on District 9 and Elysium. BLR stands for Big Lazy Robot – check the out here. In the last 3 days they’ve updated it and all I can say is ‘wow!’ No one does mecha better, make a full length feature like this and I’m there.
A week to go until our gig in Bristol supporting DJ Shadow at the city’s official Solid Steel 25th anniversary date. Myself and DK will be joining Coldcut, DJ Cheeba and special guest Benji B to rip it up at Motion on October 11th.
For this I’ve put together a more dance floor friendly mix of releases than some of my recent offerings, taking in Mark Pritchard, Machine Drum, Om Unit, Reso and Drums of Death – the last three all of whom have appeared on the excellent Civil Music label who also have a room at the Motion gig too.
Jon Tye‘s Lo Editions series of online licensing albums gets another entry with a DJ Food sampler this month. This is music for TV and film use, fully licensed and ready to use if you’re signed up to Universal Music’s production music service. The tracks span from early ‘Jazz Brakes’ LPs up to ‘The Search Engine’ but all songs have any vocals removed as well as names changed from the originals.
Some are exclusive edits, instrumentals, reworkings and even unreleased in some cases. You can listen online and play spot the original but there won’t be a physical release because this stuff is mainly in the digital domain these days. Above is the cover image and below is an outtake from the design session which wasn’t chosen but that I particularly like.
The first collection of this is finally coming out very soon – perfect Xmas present for the ageing B-Boy. There’s also a great video overview of the project with Ed Piskor over on the Time Magazine website
One month until this happens, event page here…
Do you know about Trunk Records’ 50p Friday offers? Every Friday Jonny Trunk selects something from his digital-only catalogue and reduces the price to 50p. This week it was the turn of Russ Garcia‘s fantastic errr…. ‘Fantastica‘. Proper old school space music. You can sign up to the weekly newsletter here.
Love this flyer, sound like my kind of gig and reminds me of an old Stereolab tour T-shirt I used to have. That is all
The great Zang Tuum Tumb Records turns 30 years old this month and to celebrate they have a compilation out called ‘The Organization of Pop’. I’ll be reactivating my dormant Art of ZTT site to post a host of updates later this month too featuring exclusive images from some of the people who were there at the beginning.
The label issued a short press release last week with the phrase, ‘Today is officially the end of the beginning.”
Looking down the track listing there aren’t too many surprises in the form of unreleased gems but the inclusion of both Grace Jones and Seal as the first two tracks hopefully means that some sort of legal agreement has at last been worked out and we can expect to see proper reissues of their work in the future. Also note that this is the New York Edition – further London and Tokyo Editions are planned for next year…
ZTT Records Presents The Organization of Pop (New York Edition)
Music From The First Thirty Years of ZTT Records
Disc 1: The Organisation of Pop (the Action Series, from ZTT)
• Grace Jones – Slave To The Rhythm
• Seal – Kiss From A Rose
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Relax (New York Mix)
• 808 State – Pacific (Justin Strauss 0101 Mix)
• Art of Noise – Beat Box
• Propaganda – Dr. Mabuse (Abuse)
• Tom Jones – If Only I Knew (Cold Stop Version)
• MC Tunes vs 808 State – Dance Yourself To Death (Dust Brothers Radio Edit)
• Propaganda – Sorry For Laughing (Unapologetic 12” Mix)
• 808 State – Cubik (Pan American Excursion)
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Two Tribes
• Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor – Haunted
• The Frames – Star Star
• Art of Noise – Moments In Love (Beaten)
Disc 2: The Disorganisation of Pop (the Incidental Series, from Zang Tuum Tumb)
• The Buggles – We Can Fly From Here (Part One)
• The Frames – Say It To Me Now
• Shane MacGowan and Maire Brennan – You’ve The One
• Lee Griffiths – Sweet Baby James
• Das Psycho Rangers – Homage to the Blessed
• Art of Noise featuring Rakim – Metaforce
• Nasty Rox Inc. – Escape From New York (12” Mix)
• ACT – Snobbery & Decay (That’s Entertainment Mix)
• The Buggles – I Am A Camera (12” Mix)
• Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Welcome To The Pleasuredome (Fruitness Mix)
• Lisa Stansfield – The Moment
• The Buggles – We Can Fly From Here (Part Two)
• Andrew Poppy – Kink Konk Adagio
LaBoca on the design here, way too much info to cut and paste in here, just go HERE to get a load of the festival and what’s in store.
Awesome.
Full line up – just saying, not bad at all. October 11th, Motion, Bristol, tickets here
This is really blowing out the cobwebs…
Another mix from me this week on Solid Steel, this time it’s a continuation of the ‘O is for Orange’ mix I did some months back. You may remember that this was the Boards of Canada-inspired one for the night we did called ‘A Few Old Tunes’ that happened around their LP release.
Well, I had 30 minutes recorded left over from that initial mix so I’ve added to it to make a second part. I’ve worked pretty hard on this and there are a few moments in it that I think are among my best when it comes to placing music together. It’s probably going to annoy some BoC purists for several reasons, most likely because I’ve layered other elements over a pristine recording of the officially unreleased ‘XYZ’, of which I’m lucky enough to have a copy.
Unfortunately this time the set is not accompanied by a video mix of the same but I may get round to that later and the images above are taken from several tracks that I already have footage for.
I’ve been giggling along with these this morning with my kids who are extremely excited that Angry Birds Star Wars 2 is out today. This (in case you’ve been living under a rock) bolts the Star Wars franchise to the Angry Birds games and it’s done extremely well and with great humour in all the designs and promo.
It’s one of the SW franchise spin-offs that they got right and now it’s the turn of the prequel characters to get a turn. Which means you get to play as Darth Maul, General Grievous, Anakin and yes, even Jar Jar. Despite that there are some beautifully crafted promo films which I’ve honestly had more enjoyment watching that the whole prequel trilogy put together. ‘Boba’s Delivery’ has a brilliant moment with Vader and a carton of juice and Darth Maul‘s spot is just as cute.
Bonobo ‘Cirrus‘ – 12″ zoetrope picture disc and viewer.
A side: Video sequences by Cyriak, laid out to form a zoetrope by Openmind.
B side: Graphic by Leif Podhajsky
Available exclusively in the Bonobo online shop now…
Out now via Ninja Tune‘s Beat Delete repress label – the mix PC and I did in 1997 for a face-off between Coldcut and DJ Krush. It’s a triple disc with the mixes on opposite sides of each disc, if you have two decks you can even mix the beginning and end parts together to form the full thing.
I remember recording this in a professional studio somewhere in London’s West end, I think it took us less than a week after some initial ideas had been gone over in our own studios and a selection made.
The brief was for only Ninja and Ntone releases as this would be easy and quick to license. We did add a lot of spoken word from other sources though. We also made a conscious decision to include some of the more esoteric sides of the label as we second-guessed the kind of material Krush would go for. We were thrilled to have him as a part of it as MoWax was (and still is) one of our favourite labels.
This is the mix with the infamous ‘Bug’s Eye View’ spoken piece that I detailed the source of earlier in the year. We had an engineer recording and editing what we did the whole time, tracks would be mixed live and then sections edited together and overlaid if need be.
It was nice to give the artwork a good brush up and sort out the myriad of spelling mistakes that were on the original. I never liked what I did first time round and, whilst this isn’t a million miles from it, it’s a hell of a lot tidier and easier to read. The idea was that the cover could be placed either way up and that East met West from either direction, being that Krush hails from Japan.
‘Nightrous’ by Peezee was an exclusive track that only features here, PC pulled it out of the bag when we needed something to fit into a troublesome section. Listening back to the mix recently for the first time in 15 years I really enjoyed it as a time capsule of the label at a point where the Trip Hop thing was coming to an end and the label was set to branch out with the ‘Funkungfusion’ compilation the next year.
You can buy it now direct from Ninja Tune.