Interview on Contemporary Talks

I did a rather long and in depth interview with Elinros from Contemporary Talks the other week about pretty much everything really, music and design of course but we also ventured into motives, methods of creation, my childhood and how things ended up the way they did.

If you want to know what a Telepathic Fish is, if I’ve ever touched a sound or what I consider my best work then head over here, maybe have more than 5 minutes to spare though.

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Kraftwerk month #31 Kover Kollection 7

To finish the month off here’s something that’s been in the pipeline for over a year – KKK vol.7. This took far too long to do and I completely redid the start three times before I was happy with it.
I already have over three and a half hours worth of tracks mapped out for vol.8, which will concentrate more on piano and jazz versions but I’ll let the dust settle for a bit as you can have too much of something. Thanks for all the suggestions and links to tracks or versions, some of them even made it onto this mix.


A quick word on the multitude of cover versions – the images below are just a few of the whole albums dedicated to Kraftwerk covers available, let alone all the single tracks scattered about various artists’ discographies. Every time I do a Kover Kollection, and use the web to research the tracks I’ve used, I find even more out there.

As with all covers, there are more misses than hits, although the Senor Coconut album does deserve singling out as a work of genius. Another that I recently acquired is the Mencshmachine ‘Hand Werk’ CD from Germany, an excellent album of jazz-based covers with a twist in the tail. Unlisted on the CD, and hidden after 10 minutes of silence once the last track has finished, is one of the most sublime covers I’ve yet to hear – the track ‘Spacelab’ from the ‘Man Machine’ album. It’s not on the web that I can find but the band have several tracks on their soundcloud page and I’ll be putting more of their music into the KKK8 mix, which will be better suited to their sound, more acoustic than electronic.

Before I sign off I’d like to thank everyone who’s logged on, checked out the daily content and listened to the mixes. It seems it all went a bit viral around the third week and made Metafilter, with volume 3 clocking up over 50,000 plays!

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Solid Steel – Yppah 1981 & DJ Food KKK7 preview

Mine and Yppah‘s mix from last night’s Solid Steel – without chat, you can listen to me and Jon fluff our lines over on StrongroomAlive if you want. Yppah’s mix contains tracks all released in 1981, and, coincidentally, ends with Kraftwerk’s ‘Computer World’ before we get a taste of half of the Kraftwerk Kover Kollection vol.7 which debuts here tomorrow in full.

Record Store Dude #5 & 8

[youtube width=”640″ height=”450″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFEm4R8Ac4g&feature=BFa&list=PL3F8822D16A24AAE2&lf=plcp[/youtube]

[youtube width=”640″ height=”450″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWazkdpt8j4&feature=share[/youtube]

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Kraftwerk month #29 Tommy Vance interview & more…

The month is nearly up and there’s still so much that could be posted.

In 1981, BBC Radio 1 DJ Tommy Vance saw Kraftwerk play the opening night of their ‘Computer World’ tour in Manchester, England. Afterwards he interviewed Ralf Hutter for his Friday Rock Show and managed to get quite a revealing response, including some uncharacteristic humour. I’ve edited out the music as tastefully as I can and cleaned up the audio but the quality isn’t great to begin with.

Rare European 7″ sleeves for the singles ‘Kometemelodie 1’ and ‘Kometemelodie 2’.

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Kraftwerk month #27 Neon Lights 12″

The legendary 12″ of ‘Neon Lights’ issued in the UK on luminous vinyl in 1978, backed with ‘Trans Europe Express’ and ‘The Model’. This copy was given to me recently by Steve Cook who’d had it tucked away in his collection for decades, hardly played. You can see what great condition it’s in and he’s even kept the price sticker on – £1.49 from Allders of Croydon – that wouldn’t even get you two downloads these days let alone a beautiful item like this. I tried to test how luminous it was and photograph it in the dark but had no joy, I like how you can see little bits of grit in the vinyl too where it wasn’t entirely pure. Thanks Steve!

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