You need to see / hear / go to this – all this artists playing the same sets each night
Tickets:
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Film
Well, last Friday was a blast in Ramsgate, a packed room with an up for it crowd is all you could want but to have that crowd open to experimental turntable jams was even better. Myself and PuttyRubber overcame our pre-gig nerves and rattled through an hour plus of the set with a few hiccups but ultimately a banging show. Andre, Al and Conner at the venue bent over backwards to make it as easy as possible for us and Pleistoscene Megafauna did a fine job warming up for us. They really have a great venue and a good scene going on down there.
Some great photos came out of this, not least the one above taken by Pete Woodward which has to be one of my favourites ever taken.
Here’s a short clip of an acid moment, also taken by Pete Woodhead, if you like what you hear then there’s some of this coming to my Infinite Illectrik label on Bandcamp in the coming months as I’ve been recording recently and have a bunch of stuff to finish that will be released digitally. There may even be a physical release too later this year…
Below are some more photos from my good friend Jude Greenaway, aka Scan One and owner of the Yellow Machines and Modified Magic labels, who’s a newly installed resident of the area.
We’re actively looking for gigs for this audio visual set up so please get in touch if you want to book us.
This Friday at Ramsgate Music Hall – the first full Quadraphon turntable set with PuttyRubber on visuals + support from Pleistocene Megafauna – A night of improv electronics and visuals
Tickets: https://www.ramsgatemusichall.com/tc-events/dj-food-quadraphon/
Below, mine and PuttyRubber’s set ups, they don’t all pack down to a handy travel bag.
I was watching a Jamiroquai video – NO, stay with me! Why was I doing that you ask? Well, the song is a bit of an electro pop banger and Jay Kay is some sort of robot coming out of hibernation in a post-apocalyptic world who just wants to see the sun. It’s supposed to be a warning against living a digital life and that we should get back to nature, which is fair enough really. To make you believe he’s an automaton (the title of the song) he has an automated headdress that lights up and at one point stops in a subway to focus on an old poster on the wall.
Weirdly it’s a joint Madam Tussaud’s / London Planetarium poster, designed in the style of Peter Max or Milton Glaser, that popular pop style made famous by Heinz Edelmann’s Yellow Submarine. I very much doubt it was done by either Max or Glaser because they generally sign their work but it looked cool enough for me to google it as I’d not seen it before. Typing in ‘Madam Tussauds Planetarium poster’ only netted two results, different shots of the same poster, on the wall in a subway in the disused Aldwych underground station. One of the shots, by Payne & Gunter, was very well framed so I downloaded it.
On close inspection it was pretty obvious that it was the same poster, so we all know where parts of the ‘Automaton’ video was shot at the very least. The wear and tear of time, coupled with what looks like a few people stubbing cigarettes out on parts of the image (that dates it!) mean that the poster isn’t in the best condition. So I couldn’t resist cleaning the image up and restoring it to some of its former glory. What an amazing design!
Talking of Milton Glaser, there’s a stunning looking book of his work coming out next month via Phaidon.
Pre-order here
And talking of Peter Max, I just acquired this set of his Book of Red, Blue and Yellow from the excellent Book Cellar in Camberwell. Max is sadly embroiled in a guardianship case in the US whilst suffering ill health, his daughter has been trying to extract him for some time now, for more info follow Free Peter Max
Footage from rehearsals with new collaborator PuttyRubber up in Bristol at the weekend. Shot at Stuart Warren-Hill‘s Holotronica studio by DJ Cheeba and re-edited to include some of PuttyRubber’s video feedback.
We’ll be debuting this partnership at the Ramsgate Music Hall on Feb 24th where I’ll be improvising with my 4-armed Quadraphon turntable and a bunch of locked groove records whilst PuttyRubber provides live video feedback visuals.
I just picked up two new upgraded tone arms for it from Ned Hawes at One_db in Staple Hill, long time coming, from sourcing the turntables, my dad helping make custom pods to house them and then Ned transplanting a tone arm into each pod. With a bit of additional fitting attention they’re now in place, replacing my earlier efforts which are now relegated to back up status. Also in the pic, new styli by 100 Sounds from Japan and custom slipmat by Sureshotshop
No idea how it’s going to fully manifest but it’s pretty exciting working it all out. Come and see if we crash and burn at Ramsgate Music Hall on Feb 24th
Tickets: https://www.ramsgatemusichall.com/tc-events/dj-food-quadraphon/
Last year I collaborated with the video game company DICE to compile and cut up a visual megamix of 30 years of their games footage for their anniversary.
The main thing I’ve been doing this year is learning new software, lots involving AI algorithms that still seem like some kind of strange magic.
It started last year with the Moises software that can split stereo sound files into individual stems which opens up all sorts of possibilities and continued with NightCafe Creator where you can create incredible images from inputting a line of descriptive text. This has yielded a huge bank of images to draw from, some that have already become record sleeve illustrations (I just didn’t tell anyone). It’s all old hat now because AI art is everywhere on the web with thousands of images flooding our feeds on a daily basis but when I first wrote these words in early 2022 it was extremely addictive, if at an infant stage in its development. Just in the last six months alone AI has taken huge leaps in definition and feels like a giant shift in the art of image-making even if still has trouble with hands, it’s certainly divided people’s opinions.
Another AI app is the Topaz suite of image enhancers, the foremost being Gigapixel AI, the best image enhancer / upscaler I’ve ever seen, this has become part of my daily usage now alongside Photoshop and Indesign as a necessary tool to clean up images along with its Denoiser and Sharpener sister apps.
I (finally) got myself an iPad so that I could learn Procreate and again, a whole new world opens up with the possibilities this incredible app gives you. I never could justify getting a tablet, but seeing one of my sons drawing on his, wanting to go digital with some of my comic-buying and having a decent surface to learn Ninja Jamm on made it a necessary piece of kit. Learning to paint on it with one of my sons was among one of my favourite moments this year.
In the analogue world another revelation was a record cutting process pioneered by Ben Soundhog at Plastidisc where software that can convert an image into a waveform then cuts that image as a playable disc. The possibilities are endless and you can make a record without even playing one note.
My own experiments with the refining of my Quadraphon turntable have made for a sleeker, more portable and adaptable design along with the fantastic 4 channel Omnitronic TRM-402 mixer and the Ninja Tune/Erica Synths Zen Delay FX unit. I can make analogue tracks via one deck on the fly and jamming with this set up can yield hours of material, a refreshing new way to make music. Also becoming an author on good old fashioned paper felt pretty good too, I think I might have the book bug now. I hope you all have a Happy New Year and a riproaring 2023…
Music:
Clocolan – Empathy Alpha LP (Redpan)
Brian Eno – The Lighthouse (Sonos HD)
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Omnium Gatherum LP (Flightless)
Twilight Sequence – Trees in General: and the Larch 12″ (Castles In Space)
WTCHCRFT – Drugs Here 12″ (Balkan Vinyl)
Ghost Power – Ghost Power LP (Duophonic Super 45s)
Dexorcist – Night Watch 12″ (Yellow Machines)
Project Gemini – The Children Of Scorpio LP (Mr Bongo/Garden’s End)
Regal Worm – Worm! LP (Quatermass)
The Advisory Circle – Full Circle LP (Ghost Box)
Fenella – The Metallic Index (Fire Records)
S’Express & Daddy Squad – Music 4 The Mind DL
Podcasts:
The Bureau of Lost Culture (Soho Radio)
Cartoonist Kayfabe (YouTube)
We Buy Records (We Made This)
The Jonny Trunk Podcast (Patreon)
Oh God, What Now? (Podmasters Prod.)
The Tone Generation – Ian Helliwell
Peel Acres – Tom Ravenscroft (BBC Sounds)
The Bunker (Podmasters Prod.)
Gigs / Events:
Lux @ 180 Strand, London
Victor Vasarely – Universe exhibition @ Selfridges, London
Premier of Who Killed The KLF? @ Leake St, London
The Orb play U.F.Orb @ The Fox & Firkin, London
Bring The Paint festival, Leicester
Staying in a restored Futuro House, Somerset
Fogfest @ Iklectik, London
Glissando Guitar Orchestra @ Club-85, Hitchin
Funki Porcini’s Lasarium @ Iklectik, London
Wheels of Light launch event @ Raven Row, London
The Trunk Groovy Record Fayre @ Mildmay Club, London
At Home With The Boyle Family film launch @ Iklectik, London
Magnetic Flow exhibition, @ LaVallée, Brussels
Design / Packaging:
Night Cafe / Midjourney – the most fun/frustrating web AI creation tools
Jed St. Christopher – The Further Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 10″ lathe cut (Buried Treasure) by Nick Taylor
Twilight Sequence – Trees in General: and the Larch 12″ (Castles In Space) by Zeke Clough
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Ominium Gatherum LP by Jason Galea
Sculpture – Malculus / Photo Synth 7″ + zoetrope pack by Rueben Sutherland
The Advisory Circle – Full Circle LP (Ghost Box) by Julian House
Clay Pipe Mini Pipe 3″ CD series by Francis Castle
Monochrome Echo – The City & The Stars LP (Castles In Space) by Nick Taylor
Drumetrics – Phuzzle 10″
Artists incorporating AI into their work:
Ko_Computer
Douggy Pledger
Alex Klim
Will Toulan
Scott Wetterschneider
Stuart Smith
Steve Scott (image below by Steve Scott)
Books / Magazines / Comics:
Grrrl Scouts – Jim Mahfood (Image)
99 Balls Pond Road – Jill Drower (Scrudge Books) – now reprinted in text-only paperback and retitled ‘The Exploding Galaxy: Performance Art, LSD and Bent Coppers in the Sixties Counterculture’ – an absolute must for 60s counter culture historians
Radio Spaceman – Mike Mignola & Greg Hinkle (Dark Horse)
Mental Hygiene – Kate Gibb
A-Z of Record Shop Bags – Jonny Trunk (Fuel)
Mud Sharks – Dave Barbarossa
Good Pop, Bad Pop – Jarvis Cocker (Vintage)
House Music – Andy Votel (The Modernist)
Judge Dredd – Brian Bolland (Apex Edition)
Contemporary Collage magazine (digital)
Defying Gravity – Jordan Mooney w. Cathi Unsworth
The Delaware Road deluxe edition – Alan Gubby, Dolly Dolly (Buried Treasure)
69 Exhibition Road – Dorothy Max Prior (Strange Attractor)
Judge Dredd – Mike McMahon (Apex Edition)
It’s Lonely At The Centre Of The Universe – Zoe Thorogood (Image Comics)
The Black Locomotive – Rian Hughes (Picador)
Film /TV:
The Book of Boba Fett (Disney+)
Get Back (Disney+)
Who Killed The KLF?
Pistol (Disney+)
The Boys (Amazon Prime)
In The Court of the Crimson King (Toby Aimes)
Another year over and what have I done?
Finished The Real Tuesday Weld’s ‘Dreams’ LP/CD and ‘Late Night Reveries’ cassette artwork
Appeared on the Bureau of Lost Culture podcast, 45 Live show, mixed an episode of new online show, Genius & Soul (still not broadcast)
Re-designed an old classic logo for The Herbsmen
Adapted The Designers Republic’s Humanoid artwork for a FSOLDigital CD release
Designed Hawksmoor’s ‘Head Coach’ CD for Spun Out Of Control
Recorded with Dave Barbarossa for a future music project
Finished and published the Wheels of Light book for Four Corners Books with press coverage from The Quietus, Shindig!, The Observer, Velocity Books, Moonbuilding, Electronic Sound, Creative Review and more.
Had a track featured on the Diary of a Madman compilation on Bibliotapes in aid of Ukrainian Red Cross
Refined my Quadraphon turntable into a Mk.3 version
Got featured in the 2000AD Summer Special, music edition, talking about my love of the comic
Made a record by etching a playable image into a disc
Compiled, remixed and edited 30 years worth of games footage for DICE’s anniversary, making an 11 minute version then condensing it into 90 seconds.
Redesigned The Cinematic Orchestra’s ‘Every Day’ LP for the 20th anniversary edition from original design concepts
Designed Stasis, AsOne, Paul ‘Damage’ Bailey and Humanoid 12″s and reinterpreted Mike Dred’s ‘OverMind’ LP art for De:tuned
Also designed the AsOne2 LP for De:tuned
Had a collage featured in Contemporary Collage magazine
Mixed a new religious-themed set for the Tales To Enlighten 2 Kickstarter
Reformatted Dave Barbarossa’s Mud Sharks book for publication.
Interviewed Zoe Lucky Cat Baxter, Andy Votel, Alex Paterson and DJ Format for Dust & Grooves book 2.
Designed The Real Tuesday Weld’s 3″ CD Xmas card.
RIP:
Sidney Poitier, James Mtume, Meatloaf, Barry Cryer, Ian Kennedy, Douglas Trumbull, Bamber Gascoigne, Betty Davis, Jan Pieńkowski, Philip Jeck, Chantal Passamonte, Garry Leach, June Brown, Jordan, David McKee, Klaus Schulze, Neal Adams, George Perez, Vangelis, Rat Records, Alan Grant, Bob Rafelson, Bernard Cribbens, Olivia Newton-John, Lamont Dozier, Raymond Briggs, Queen Elizabeth II, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Ramsey Lewis, Pharoah Sanders, Kim Jung Gi, Robbie Coltrane, Joyce Sims, Keith Levene, Nik Turner, Wilco Johnson, Tom Philips, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Manuel Gottsching, Terry Hall, Martin Duffy, Mike Hodges, Pelé, Vivienne Westwood, Anita Pointer.
Looking forward to:
The Out in 2000AD
Supporting the Art of Noise at the Jazz Cafe on Jan 4th/5th
Conform to Deform – The Weird & Wonderful World of Some Bizarre – Wesley Doyle (Jawbone Press)
The The – 1$ One Vote 7″ (Lazarus)
The conclusion of The Real Tuesday Weld’s Swan Songs trilogy?…
Tales To Enlighten: The New Testament
The Kevin O’Neill Apex Edition (Rebellion)
The return of Rave Wars
Spider-Man – Across The Spider-Verse
Furthermore to the fantasy film collaborations in the Tron / Jodorowsky post, here’s some more. “On the set of 1984 secret collaboration movie between Jim Henson Studios and HR Giger“ by Bruno Samper – many more on his Facebook. It’s funny to see some people getting really het up about the fact that people aren’t stating that this isn’t real and even more people are falling for it and thinking it is.
Douggy Pledger has been doing incredible work for the last year now and has really turned out some hilariously disturbing work including a book called ‘To Hell With AI‘. Here’s his take on a 1920’s version of the Star Wars saga, ‘Start War’ and it’s lashed together sequel, ‘Stop Wars’.
There seems to be a current trend in AI circles of mashing up film genres or visualising existent films either within different time periods or with different directors.
Johnny Darrell has imagined both Tron films as visualised and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky using the AI app Midjourney. These are all created by the AI app via prompts with only the typography on the posters being added later via Photoshop (AI still isn’t great at letter forms but is getting better all the time). These are only a sampling of the images he’s created, loads more on his Facebook page.
Another London-based light show event, the Boyle Family were some of the first artists to work with fluids and projection on the avant garde art scene in the sixties. Staged on Sunday Nov 13th at the now-endangered Iklectik venue in Waterloo with talks, music, film and projection performances. Go and support both the film and the venue.
More info here
Saw this doc on King Crimson by Toby Amies last night and boy, it’s excellent – highly recommended. Funny, insightful and touching, far better than the Bowie doc doing the rounds – various streaming events and showings are scheduled in the next month before it gets a release before Xmas. More info on the various contents and formats to be released here
Oh my word! Best use of AI so far, from the Wizard’s forthcoming album, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava, out on Friday, the first of three albums released this month(!)
Premiering this Friday (Sept 16th) is a film about Bowie that looks incredible – I’ve already seen it described as ‘the stargate scene from 2001 mixed with unseen Bowie footage’ which is good enough for me. The blurb states; ‘Told through sublime, kaleidoscopic, never-before-seen footage, performances and music, Brett Morgen’s (The Kid Stays in the Picture, Cobain: Montage of Heck, Jane) feature length experiential cinematic odyssey explores David Bowie’s creative, musical and spiritual journey. The film is guided by David Bowie’s own narration and is the first officially sanctioned film on the artist.’
The accompanying album features a lot of specially made mixes and mash ups for the film taken from throughout his career. I can’t wait to see and hear this. There are also some amazing posters for the film featured on Brent’s Twitter feed, sadly all at a tiny resolution for now.
Another AI-generated video using what looks like drone shots added into AI software for Hudson Mohawke‘s new song. The fascinating thing about this is that it’s still in its infant stages, in just a few years it’ll be better, faster, more detailed and adaptable. At the moment I’d wager this is at the same stage as, say, the cover of Warp‘s first Artificial Intelligence compilation in terms of computer graphics. I’d also wager that people will want to keep elements of the weird, almost horror elements that the AI produces in decades to come in the same way that we add grain, crackle and texture to digital recordings now. AI image making is creating a new visual language all of its own but I hope it doesn’t grow up and perfect things too soon, I like the alien-ness of it all.
This post is dedicated to Bob Rafelson, the director of Head, who passed away this week, RIP.
Back in 2001 I was asked to compose a turntable rescore for a film of my choice for a club night in Budapest, Hungary called Cinetrip. At the time I was really starting to explore psychedelia through digging trips in the US and Canada and thought this would an ideal way to soundtrack something weird and wild that would hold the attention without too much dialogue.
Sometime around the late 80’s I’d taped The Monkees’ freak film flop from TV as it intrigued me when reading the blurb. I was pretty confounded by it, this wasn’t the squeaky clean boy band with the ‘here we come…’ hi-jinx of their Saturday morning TV series. This contained cut up sequences, solarized freak outs, Vietnam war commentary and more fourth wall-breaking than you could shake the dandruff out of your hair to. It made no sense, consisted of an ever-changing series of completely different scenes designed to link songs and concepts together before looping back on itself and returning to the start. There was little plot to follow, just The Monkees as they jumped from genre to genre, location to location, costume change to character evolution.
Music choice ranged from present day right back to the 60s, a psychedelic flavour of course but elements of library, soundtracks, jazz, electronics, trip hop and spoken word to fill the few talking moments all fitted over an over-evolving selection that was refined each time I played it. After the initial performance I severely reworked the parts for The Big Chill Festival where it had evolved into a three turntable and FX performance that was so complex and stressful to perform that my legs weirdly seized up the minute I’d finished the set! I did another nine performances – mostly in the UK and Ireland but also playing at the Portuguese short film festival to a bemused audience – until it was retired in 2005.
After this I decided to preserve the set by making a DVD with both the original and my alternate soundtrack selectable via the audio menu, adding in some of the original film dialogue in the edit to mesh the sound and vision together a little more. The disc came wrapped in mirror board card to mimic the original soundtrack LP packaging and included a random flyer from one of the nine different cigarette card-sized ones made for the Dublin performance. These were sold online via the Ninja Tune forum and later on I uploaded the whole thing to the Internet Archive for posterity. This mix has never been put up solo on the web and I’ve never done a track listing for it, preferring for people to have to work it out. Sometimes it’s good to have a mystery to dig into, although a lot of tracks are fairly obvious to anyone with a decent musical knowledge. Also I sampled a few bits later on…
So here it is, sans the film of course, but that’s out there if you dig a little
This is a very cool little clip by Manalishi – “My good friend Matt Ford kindly lent me a shoebox full of his grandad’s 1940’s jazz magazines. I was so impressed by their condition and also the quality of the designs that I decided to animate my favourite bits.”
Matt Ford you may know by another name – DJ Format, here’s what he had to say about the clip. “I only recently discovered that my grandad used to run a jazz club in the Southampton area where I grew up. He was a massive hoarder and kept all his jazz magazines, records & gramophones until his death in 1983. My gran then kept all of these lovely items for the next 39 years and passed them on to me. It’s interesting to think that some of my weird/obsessive record collecting ways were inherited from my jazz-loving grandad!”
See more on Matt’s Instagram
Robin The Fog – not content with releasing a collaborative cassette with Ken Hollings (The Howling via The Tape Worm), creating episodes for MSCTY about tape music (see earlier post), gigging or holding workshops virtually every week as well as holding down a full time job – is also releasing a new album with the Buried Treasure label. For those paying attention over the last few years, a couple of limited lathe cut singles with BT have pointed the way, La Fog has been moving towards the heavier, noisier end of things of late. Pounding, industrial 4/4 beats are the order of the day in part on Trepass and Welfare with various phase-shifting motifs moving through the repetition to form new rhythms and patterns. This is very successful on opener, ‘Sonicjob Horsfunk’ where a buried vocal seems to intone different phrases as it’s filtered around the sound spectrum.
The album is out on CD & DL on July 29th and you can pre-order it here
Below is a short video made by the excellent Cinema Iloobia for the album closer, ‘Frosi’
And the week after release is the inaugural occurrence of Fogfest at Iklectik, another thing that’s eating up Robin’s time to organise. I’ll be joining the bill of Sculpture, Steve Davis, Franziska Lantz and Robin himself for music, drink and chat in Waterloo. Tickets available here https://iklectikartlab.com/fogfest/
I posted part 1 of this last May, here’s the latest episode from Robin The Fog – a 10 minute meditation on the art of feedback in composing. Episode 2 below as well…
Gary Hustwit (director of Helvetica, Rams, Objectified and more) has announced he’s making a film about Brian Eno. Not only that but, “Rich with access to hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, and unreleased music from Eno’s archive, Gary Hustwit’s forthcoming documentary Eno will be released in multiple versions and will employ groundbreaking generative technology in its creation and exhibition. Hustwit and his team have been granted unlimited access to Brian Eno’s vast archive, and have digitized and restored approximately 400 hours of material spanning 50 years: interviews, seminal early video art projects, lectures, performances, behind-the-scenes documentation of recording sessions, and more. Most of this material has never been publicly released.”
also
“Befitting its subject, Eno will utilize proprietary generative software developed by Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes to provide unique viewing experiences via multiple digital formats, cinema screenings and site-specific installations. “You can’t make a conventional, by-the-numbers bio doc about Brian Eno,” said Hustwit. “That would be antithetical and a missed opportunity. What I’m trying to do is to create a cinematic experience that’s as innovative as Brian’s approach to music and art.”
March 10th – 27th .EPOD presents his first solo show – DOPE. – at BSMT
DOPE will feature .EPOD’s largest works to date, the new canvases will be threaded together within the gallery space in both concept and design. Limited edition prints and collectible slipmats will also be featured as part of the show.
Private view 6-9pm March 10th
I’ll be performing on the opening night using my customised Quadraphon turntable, a brand new, unreleased 4 channel Omnitronic TRM mixer and the Ninja Tune Zen Delay.
RSVP essential: [email protected] for entry to the private view
BSMT 529 Kingsland Rd, London, E8 4AR
Sponsored by Vedett beer.