Sculpture – print & spin zoetropes and ‘Slime Code’ 12″


Sculpture recently posted these zoetrope designs on their site, if you print them and spin at the right speed you can get some amazing animated effects. The complexity of these blows my mind, there’s so much doing on I could look at them revolving forever it seems. The Digitalis label are releasing edits of ‘Slime Code’ (a tape-only release in an edition of only 7 copies (!) from earlier this year) and you can listen to excerpts here. I’m hoping that at least one of these designs will be on the vinyl release in November.

They also have a new Tumblr too.

Posted in Art, Design, Film. | 2 Comments |

Playgroup back catalogue available digitally

Trevor Jackson‘s Playgroup recording project now has its entire back catalogue available digitally via Juno with an extensive list of remixes and versions of several tracks. Exclusive unreleased mixes and acappellas are up for sale including a track with Madlib that didn’t make the album and the ‘Hooked On U / Mad Love’ ‘release’ above. Trevor has also just designed the DJ Shadow compilation ‘Reconstructed’ with its lavish box set, seen here on the Creative Review blog.

 

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Fulldome UK, National Space Centre, Leicester

DJ Food ‘The Search Engine’ live at SAT, Montreal from Solid Steel on Vimeo.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be bringing my revamped full dome show back to the UK this November and showing it (remixed yet further) at the third Fulldome UK festival at the National Space Centre, Leicester on November 16th.

Tickets can be bought here (my show is on the 17th) and a list of contributors is here – full schedule to be determined.

In other dome news, the Search Engine show at the SAT in Montreal has just had its run extended by another 2 weeks until the 26th of October.

Posted in DJ Food, Event. | No Comments |

Mr Armtone AV mix, DJ Food & Ill Chemist on Solid Steel

Mr Armtone – Time Machine from Solid Steel on Vimeo.

St. Petersburg’s Mr Armtone returns to Solid Steel this week, with an AV mix no less, full of great material and up to our usual high standard both musically and visually. The overall theme is Time Machines so watch and listen out for various references cropping up throughout.
The second hour features both my recent DJ Shadow mixes and the guest mix debut of NYC’s Ill Chemist aka Alan Friedman, friend of Steinski and one time Break Beatle. His mix is a stunning gallop through all music styles from BeBop to Hip Hop, Jazz takes on the classics and a whole lot more, could this be the show with the most tracks squeezed into it?

1/12th scale Ma.K. Krote upcoming from 3A

I know, what the hell does that even mean?

Ma.K (aka Maschinen Krueger or SF3D) = Vintage line of Japanese toys by Kow Yokoyama and was one of (if not THE) originators of the weathered, realistic looking mechs and vehicles.

3A = Ashley Wood and Kim Fung Wong‘s toy company who have taken inspiration from Kow amongst others and raised the level of toy making higher than most in recent years.

Don’t ask when these will be available or how much they will cost because I don’t know, you just have to keep an eye on the 3A blog or sign up to their newsletter.

Drumsound & Bassline Smith cover

Love this cover and I was talking to the photographer who shot it the other week because he was explaining that it’s all real, not CGI as some people might think. They’ve been lugging it about all over the place photographing it in different locations but I’ll be damned if I can remember who it was I was talking to? Frazer Waller maybe?

Posted in Design, Photography. | 2 Comments |

Kid Koala Vinyl Vaudeville gig tonight

Kid Koala tonight – DAMN! – way to build a show around a turntable blues record with an average bpm of 80. Dancing girls, puppets, giant record deck, paper planes, kazoos, audience participation and crowd surfing.
And that’s not even everything, in the middle of the show he plays a particular track, one I never thought I’d hear him play, those that have seen it will know what it is but I won’t spoil it. He plays Bristol tonight and Manchester Saturday, make sure you see it, he only does these shows once.

If you can’t then do the next best thing and buy his new ’12-Bit Blues’ LP which melds The Blues with Turntablism perfectly and also comes with a DIY turntable and 5″ flexi disc.

Posted in Event, Records. | No Comments |

Kid Koala Vinyl Vaudeville gig tonight

Kid Koala tonight – DAMN! – way to build a show around a turntable blues record with an average bpm of 80. Dancing girls, puppets, giant record deck, paper planes, kazoos, audience participation and crowd surfing.
And that’s not even everything, in the middle of the show he plays a particular track, one I never thought I’d hear him play, those that have seen it will know what it is but I won’t spoil it. He plays Bristol tonight and Manchester Saturday, make sure you see it, he only does these shows once.

If you can’t then do the next best thing and buy his new ’12-Bit Blues’ LP which melds The Blues with Turntablism perfectly and also comes with a DIY turntable and 5″ flexi disc.

Posted in Event, Records. | No Comments |

Limited edition Herbaliser LPs stencilled by Snub23

Incredible stencil work done by Snub23 for the ultra limited edition (and sadly sold out) deluxe LP bundle for The Herbaliser‘s new album, ‘There Were Seven’. You can however buy the regular vinyl (but not for long as that’s a limited run too), designed by yours truly, from the Herb’s online shop, (click the red ‘store’ button top right for a pop up). Each one comes with two printed heavy card inners inside a screen printed PVC sleeve with a downlode code too.

 

Kid Koala tour trailer + promo images by Pat Hamou

Kid Koala‘s ‘Vinyl Vaudeville’ tour comes to London tomorrow at the O2 Academy in Islington and I can’t wait to see it judging by this short film they made last week in Paris.

Check these two promo images drawn by Pat Hamou as well, perfectly fitting in with Eric’s new album, ’12-Bit Blues’. I think this is his strongest record to date (well, it’s a tie with The Slew LP) and the inclusion of a 5″ flexi disc and DIY turntable in the package just seals the deal for me.

Posted in Art, Film, Gigs, Ninja Tune. | No Comments |

Record clear out #3

This little lot left the studio today, a raft of Hip Hop, Trip Hop, Turntablism and other assorted breaks and beats that I can live without for the moment. I’ve not had a good sort out since the mid noughties and it really is time. I said last year in the Record Collector piece that I had spent 40 years building up a collection and was planning on spending the next 40 dismantling it. Well not quite but boiling it down to essentials is the main thing for me now, I have too much, some of it hasn’t aged well and I only have so much space.

It’s a pretty satisfying experience to be rid of this much in one fell swoop too and, again, going through the shelves I’m reminded of several things that I’d forgotten about. Divine Styler’s little known ‘Spiral Walls of Autumnal Light’ album, J-Live‘s second album, Broadway Project‘s first, ‘Compassion’ – all solid records that may have taken a few listens the first time and still contain forgotten treats. Those Lemon Jelly singles with the crazy denim, leather and sack sleeves, hand-painted promo 12″s, and designs for lesser known releases like this Kid Acne cover for Rex Records.


One thing that’s a godsend and will be sadly lacking for future generations of music fans, historians and librarians is the record sleeve. Not just for the obvious large canvas that the cover affords and the packaging opportunities but for the small print and credits on the back. Several times whilst going through records I’ve flipped over a sleeve to discover someone was part of the process that I never realised, little messages that flesh out the release, lyrics and thank-you’s. I kept records where I had a thanks, a cover design was just too nice to part with or, in the case of most of the Finders Keepers releases, the sleeve notes are an education in themselves.
The art of finding samples is all about reading the small print, noting engineers, producers, player, studios, labels and year of issue wherever that is hidden on the recording. Now without sleeves, labels and inners that is being lost – iTunes doesn’t even have a box to add the label to the mp3 info and how many of your files are tagged with the year they were released? What about mixes? All those tracks, sitting together without a tracklist let alone the writer, label and year of issue. We’ll have a situation similar to the taping of mixes off of radio years back where you’ll never know what track 4 was, I suppose Shazam could come into play here.
It does bear thinking about though, not only are we entering a time where music is becoming faceless, it’s also becoming credit-less too. Instead of a quick flip of the sleeve we’ll have to consult the web to find info on tracks in the future, pdf ‘booklets’ with albums is all fine and well but how many of those do you have? People need to tag their files with as much info as possible but I doubt many are going to include the publisher, the engineer, who worked the desk or the equipment used. Should a site like Discogs ever disappear, (surely the no.1 music info resource on the web?), what would we be left with?

Posted in Records. | 2 Comments |