Moon Wiring Club does it again with another package – this time on CD and Cassette only – no vinyl. I’m not quite sure what the difference in names means between the two formats but I’m assured they are different in sound as well as shape. Order here, there are three new prints too…
Music
We’ve all done it – made cassette tape ‘covers’ for our taped compilations of yesteryear. I first got a tape recorder around the 1980 mark and here are some of my designs from the following decade. Note the attention to detail with the backwards ‘D’ on the ‘Adam’
This Frankie compilation was supposed to reflect the different singles left to right: Relax, Two Tribes, Power of Love, Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
You can see how much I was into the design work of XL back then and, subsequently Accident (the same team under a different name) for 808 State later.
I loved Sigue Sigue Sputnik‘s info-overload graphics, the Hockney-esque polaroids and the futuristic sense of it all, something The Designers Republic took to another level later.
Love this oversize clam shell cassette packaging and design from Andy Votel‘s Cache Cache label. The artist is Clone – aka Gary Sloane of last years ‘Harmonitalk’ and this is 26 minutes of electronic jam sessions from 1976 supposedly. Inside each box is a bonus plastic skeleton to keep with the Halloween theme. Still in stock over at Finders Keepers but limited to only 100 copies.
Available now via their FSOLDigital site is the next installment of The Amorphous Androgynous‘ Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble project. Instead of a compilation of others’ music they’ve made their own in the form of 2 CDs worth of freaked-out Blacksploitation cop soundtracks called ‘The Cartel’ vol. 1&2.
You can download it now or pre-order CDs from HERE and there will be a third volume next year with remixes, one of which I have been very excited to contribute. There’s also the rumour of a mix forthcoming on a certain radio show in the not too distant future too…
Posthuman and Balkan Vinyl have put together a new charity compilation of electronic music, raising money & awareness for Médecins Sans Frontières. If you like high quality techno and electronica then this is your bag, barely a duff track on it, which is rare for comps like this where artists are giving work for free. This is no collection of off-cuts with stand out tracks by Shadow Dancer, Posthuman, B12, Jokers of the Scene and Radioactive Man.
Médecins Sans Frontières – also known as ‘Doctors Without Borders’ – is an impartial, independent, and neutral organisation that provide medical and humanitarian aid wherever needed, across the globe. With the current civil war in Syria, much of the media focus has been on the political aspects, often forgetting the tens of thousands of victims and refugees. Médecins Sans Frontières, and their volunteers, are still on the ground in the region providing aid.
It’s available on a ‘pay what you choose’ basis – you can download for free or any amount you decide at the balkanvinyl bandcamp page and they will donate here (and claim gift aid) on your behalf or you can go to Just Giving.com and donate directly. All profits go directly to MSF. All of the artists have contributed their music for free. It is entirely digital to ensure as much money as possible goes to charity
Artists on the 18 track compilation include: Posthuman, Hrdvsion, Echaskech, Trackman, Global Goon, B12, Plaid, Milanese, Radioactive Man
Beautiful new sleeves for a slew of releases on Finders Keepers and associated sub-labels like Cacophonic and Cache Cache. Explore for more here.
Out today, another Hip Hop sureshot from DJ Format, this time teamed up with Phill Most Chill for a straight up rap album, the way they used to make ’em. Here’s an exclusive peek at the back cover artwork below by the on-the-money Mr Krum, love the biro touches.
Available on vinyl LP or CD here or all good records shops and for download from the usual sources. Format will be doing an exclusive mix for Solid Steel in the coming weeks mixing new and old UK and Philadelphia rap to mirror the sources for the album.
Robin The Fog has just released the follow-up to ‘The Ghosts Of Bush’ LP on his Fog Signals label which I’ve featured previously on this blog. ‘Secret Songs Of Savamala’ was recorded entirely in the flooded basement underneath a ruined customs house in Belgrade.
Like ‘Ghosts…’, it was made using reel-to-reel tape machines with all artificial and additional effects strictly forbidden. It’s a short, three track affair with a beautifully desolate haunting ambiance that’s already drawn comparisons to Philip Jeck, Morton Feldman and, bizarrely, the sculptures of Rachel Whiteread. I will be purchasing a copy forthwith, you can too as a download or LP but vinyl is very limited.
Among the many other areas he specialises in, Robin also writes, and his recent piece on Public Information Films (PIFs) had me literally crying with laughter. I didn’t know that a new attempt had been made to reach kids and teach them on the dangers of the railway, you have to see it to believe how wrong they got it and Robin’s gently mocking tone makes it all the funnier.
I once took on a jigsaw of a Jackson Pollock painting, I forget which one exactly but it took me something like three months to finish, slowly chipping away every day, finding where the next blob of paint belonged. The same day I placed the final piece it seemed like a burden was lifted and I started and finished a vintage 500 piece Vaughn Bodé jigsaw in a few hours. This book was the Bodé puzzle equivalent after finishing Julian Cope‘s monster-sized book from the previous post.
Up until this point, Cope had been the clear front-runner for book of the year, his exhaustive, multi-genre compilation easily fending off all others by size and heaviness alone (of the Rock kind as well as weight). But John Higgs‘ far-reaching yet concise, ‘The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned A Million Pounds’, is going to pip him to the post by sheer force of ideas and vision.
My love of the KLF and all things related is well documented in the hoax soundtrack and visuals I created with Mr Trick some years back so it’s no surprise that this was on the reading list. The e-book version emerged a year ago to great acclaim and a printed edition followed shortly after with many trumpeting it as a unique view on their well-worn tale.
Rather than trot out a regular history of the duo, detailing all their adventures, hits and misses, Higgs chooses to expand outwards from the band, both back and forward in time. If there’s one event that the book centers on it’s the burning of a million pounds and from there he draws clear lines to Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea, Alan Moore, Ken Campbell, the number 23, Dr Who, magical thinking, The Dadaists, the Devil, Discordianism, the assassination of Kennedy, Wicker Men and the banking crisis of the late 20th Century.
Not your average KLF biography then? Higgs places the band in amongst all of these and more, highlighting the synchronicities and coincidences surrounding them and showing you a bigger picture which may or may not have influenced their actions. He’s also not a fawning fan boy ready to mythologise their back catalogue with rose-tinted spectacles either. He describes their first album, ‘1987’, as ‘shit’, ‘Doctorin The Tardis’ as ‘a novelty record’ and wonders if Drummond and Cauty aren’t just ‘attention-seeking arseholes’. On the first two counts he’s mostly right.
No more to say, I don’t want to spoil it, go and find the book and I guarantee you’ll see the band in a different light, even if you’re the most hardened fan. Also check Higgs’ website as it’s full of great articles related and unrelated including an automated, self-referencing tumblr dedicated to quotes from the book that generates random gifs regularly.
This book has taken me the best part of the year to finish, it’s been sighted in most rooms in the house since Xmas and probably has more soup and cereal encrusting its pages than any other book I own. It’s a huge 700 page collection of Julian Cope‘s album reviews from a decade of writing for his Head Heritage site and it’s easily one of the books of the year.
If you’ve never read Cope before he’s in a different league from any other music critic you’ve ever read. Frequently laugh out loud funny, researched up to the hilt and with a Hunter S. Thompson-esque sense of urgency that swings between over-excited teenager making their first discoveries to seen-it-all-before-couldnt-give-a-fuck posturing. His prose is peppered with references to Norse mythology so he invokes Loki and Odin constantly whilst lovingly referring to the reader(s) as ‘children’, ‘babies’ and ‘motherfuckers’. He casually drops anecdotes about all and sundry from the Liverpool scene and knows his shit inside out. The great thing about this is that you can drop in and out of it with ease and each page, let alone each chapter, will have you scurrying to Google to look up records he describes that cannot possibly live up to his out of this world comparisons.
He starts at the end of the 50s with some Lord Buckley and proceeds, decade by decade, to rifle through the forgotten, the neglected and the just plain unknown music that he deems at least worthy of the same accolades afforded the Mojo-endorsed rock gods we all see peering out of Classic Rock-type magazines every month. Most of his sentences are really long too. After the 00’s (sorry, I can’t say ‘noughties’) we get condensed versions of his Krautrocksampler / Japrocksampler format for Detroit Rock, Post Rock, Hard Rock, Glam Rock and Dansk Rock (Danish in case you were wondering).
For serious music fanatics wishing to read an alternative take on the history of rock in the 20th Century rather than those wanting a light read, this will come to be seen of equal importance as ‘Krautrocksampler’ in time. If you still need convincing then read what the Quietus had to say about it and then Treat yourself.
Not one but two albums were just released by JG Thirlwell aka Foetus / Steroid Maximus / Manorexia etc. etc. The first is ‘Soak’, continuing the tradition of four-letter titled LPs, and is an 11 track follow up to his last Foetus album, ‘Hide’.
The second is his original score for the Eva Aridjis film ‘The Blue Eyes’. You can listen and buy over at the Foetus shop now. I’ve not got them yet but I buy everything the man does and have rarely been disappointed in over 25 years.
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.
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
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.
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
Awesome.
Genuinely saddened to hear of the demise of Berlin’s Equinox records, the label run by DJ Scientist who we featured with his ‘Soviet Solid Steel’ mix earlier in the year on the radio show. Not only has it produced some great music from the likes of Deckard, David Vangel, DJ Scientist himself and of course 2econd Class Citizen, whom I collaborated with on my last record. But it has consistently gone way above and beyond with the artwork, formats and packaging, creating an instantly recognisable look with heavy use of its signature brown card amongst the mainly black and white design work. I’m a sucker for circular designs and Equinox was the king of the design mandala with always inventive typography treading a perfect line between brand new and vintage.
Always pushing for new formats, they did everything from clear 7″s to etched 12″s, 5″ records and cassette box sets in sometimes miniscule runs. I remember Gunter – the label boss, aka DJ Scientist – being one of the first people to contact me when he learnt that I had found a place to press flexi discs after years of searching. He was also the first person I saw do a postcard record set and I was very proud to have my mix of 2econd Class Citizen’s second album appear as a limited release on the label last year.
I’ve featured several of the releases before on this blog but if you want a refresher of what’s been and gone then go here, here and here. The remaining stock is still for sale on the Equinox website and they recently posted the entire catalogue for free. Scientist has written a long piece about the label and both 2econd Class Citizen and David Vangel have shared reminisces and photos on their sites (Aaron’s photo is one that I nicked above). David’s album ‘Breadth Control’ is up for free download for another day and all the prices in the Equinox shop have been lowered so grab those last pieces quick.
The final release – ‘Counter Future’, a 3 LP and flexi disc compilation of the label’s roster – is a beauty to behold and listen to with many of the artists presenting original tracks unavailable elsewhere.