Not for general sale but I bet there will be a few out there as journalists hear it, go ‘WTF?’ and sell them to their local record store. The 12″ should be at the label later this week, full photos when I get it. This is the final of 3 EPs and is released on 12″ and download on Nov 7th. ‘The Search Engine’ album will be out Jan 16th, 2012 and features versions of 12 tracks taken from the EPs, plus some exclusive bits.
A couple of projects JG has been involved with recently have really caught my eye on the artwork front, both have a medical angle and lean on the black, white and red colour palette.
The first is Manorexia – ‘Dinoflagellate Blooms’, a double disc pack with X-rays and syringes. Click for larger versions. Buy it from JGT’s site here. It’s a double CD with regular and 5.1 surround sound version.
The second is a lovely 4 track 10″ under the name Hydrose Plus, a collaboration with Fred Bigot. The cover shows a face from a medical encyclopedia in profile but when you take the clear vinyl 10″ out of the sleeve you realise that the eyeball is printed on the label and fits perfectly into the eye socket on the front. Not only that but you also get an insert with the inside of the face cut away.
Buy it directly from the label here.
The 64 Bar Challenge mix I did has finally gone up, 29 tracks in 52 minutes, the brief was for each track to be 110 beats per minute and last 64 bars. The series was originated on the Ninja Tune forum by Kovas and driven over 6 different challenges with entries from all over the world.
The quality was really high, largely leaning towards the electronic end of the spectrum, and with roughly 50/50 of the entrants being unsigned or never having released anything. Take a listen and see what you think and contact Kovas at [email protected] if there’s anything here you’d like to know more about, we’d both like to see some of this talent get a lot further. If you go to mixcloud you can see who did what as it scrolls through the mix.
.
•
I love The Orb, one of my favourite groups, and here Alex Paterson goes on a 3 hour mission with all sorts of rare or unheard versions, mixes and the like from their back catalogue. That unreleased remix of U2‘s ‘Numb’ that there are only 2 acetates of? He plays a lot of it here. Unreleased mixes from ‘…Ultraworld’ or a 2010 remix of ‘The Blue Room’. You can listen to it here on The 180, a monthly mix show from Music For Listeners on KRTU in San Antonio. Alex’s is July’s mix and Junes is System 7 whilst August is Thomas Fehlmann with exclusives all round.
•
.
Yes I can hardly believe it myself, I’ve wanted to have a flexi disc with my music on it for as long as I can remember and today they arrived. The fact that the last major manufacturer of flexis shut up shop in 2001 didn’t deter me from looking all these years and I finally found someone who had restarted the process late last year. David Read over at Vinyl Record Guru in Nanaimo, Canada is the man to speak to and they do a wide range of coloured inks, several different disc colours and both 33 and 45 rpm.
This little beauty will (somehow) be given away with a limited CD of my album sold via the Ninja Tune online shop later this year. More details when I have them (and better pictures too!) I’ve been planning to showcase my flexi disc collection for a while so I might do one a week starting next year in a ‘Flexi-stentialism’ section.
This is wonderfully done – Andrew Kolb has illustrated David Bowie‘s ‘Space Oddity’ as a children’s book. If you go to the Comic Alliance site you can play the song and read the book lyric by lyric (don’t skip to the end and spoil it).
Unfortunately he’s been sent some sort of cease and desist by the song owners and has had to take the book off his own site for fear of a law suit.
I love his take on the Beach Boys‘ ‘Pet Sounds’ too.
Stones Throw have started a new series of direct to disc live albums – the band or artist performs live in the studio and the record is mixed and cut as they play. White label copies are pressed up and sleeved in hand stamped covers in a limited run, unavailable digitally. So far Rick, Gary Wilson, The Stepkids and Major Hawthorne have contributed.
1 & 2 arrived, there’s still time to support by subscribing to the series or buying individual CDs.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5AINIO4eFc&feature=player_embedded#at=200[/youtube]
A new Facebook group popped up this week reminiscing over the club at the centre of the mash up / bootleg / bastard pop craze of the early 2000’s. This short piece by a Swiss film crew was posted that I make a brief cameo in. The King Of The Boots/Bastard nights at the Asylum are some of my fondest clubbing memories (as a punter and a DJ), genuinely insane, hilarious as well, as each new mash was greeted with a roar of approval. There was a real shock of the new in some ways, you could hear the scene unfolding month after month, incredibly exciting as well as being some of the silliest, dance-on-the-table-shit-faced nights out.
I found this in the Music & Video Exchange last summer, the packaging was intriguing enough for me to part with £1 for it. On closer inspection I noticed it was designed by Pete Fowler, I like the way he’s used the title as a springboard for the way it unfolds.
Having a hard drive clear out / clean up, things might get a little random this week…
Loved Skylab‘s output, some truly wonderful records made by Mat Ducasse with some help from Major Force West and Howie B along the way.
Andy Votel and Doug Shipton’s Finders Keepers label was also affected in the PIAS fire earlier this week, they have responded by putting together a 10 CD series of compilation, curated by various friends like David Holmes, Jarvis Cocker, Gruff Rhys and Demdike Stare.
You can buy individual CDs or downloads or subscribe to the entire series upfront by visiting their website. Please support this excellent label and all its offshoots as they consistently amaze with their releases.
My third EP will be called ‘Magpies, Maps and Moons’, featuring 5 tracks with a vocal collaboration from JG Thirlwell and a musical one from 2econd Class Citizen. It will be out Oct/Nov, on 12″ and DL, not entirely sure the exact date yet, with the album to follow shortly afterwards.
…only the Eagles of Death Metal will do
Poster by Michael Hacker, ed. of 71
Excellent promo video for Pendulum‘s ‘Coffin’ by Jude and Jolyon Greenaway.
I can’t seem to embed the video here so you’ll have to click the link, they are also doing a 360 degree film presentation for Ron Arad at the Roundhouse next Wednesday.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwbR8ubfHtY&feature=youtu.be[/youtube]
The ever reliable Stones Throw label have their new signing – The Stepkids – coming to the UK this week for the first time. Lots of people including Gilles Peterson and The Guardian have been raving about them and they live up to the hype. If you like Rotary Connection, Charles Stepney productions and psychedelic soul then this band is for you. They play Cargo in Shoreditch, London on Wednesday the 3rd August, tickets are £5 in advance and £8 on the door and they play around 8.30pm. They’re also playing the Big Chill Festival Friday 5th but I’m not sure the exact stage and time yet.
The song everyone is raving about is ‘La La’, available on the B-side of this gorgeous splatter vinyl 12″, but everything I’ve heard so far has been great (check the ‘Wonderfox’ video I posted earlier)
The Stepkids – La La by stonesthrow
I’ll be mixing the last selection of tracks submitted for the 64 Bar Music project early next month. Here are some previews of some of the 30 odd tracks submitted, mainly via the Ninja Tune forum. The standard is very high for the sixth installment, the brief being to write 64 bars at the tempo of 110 beats per minute in any style although the prevailing style seems to be very electronic.
64:6 promo tracks by 64barmusic
Musically it’s not my bag but the cover is great, reminds me of Trevor Jackson‘s work for Soulwax a few years back. New 12″ ‘Black Waves’ EP on Civil Music.
Funki Porcini aka James Braddell (disclosure: very good friend of mine, I’ve designed several of his record sleeves over the years) is putting out some sublime music right now through his own channels. His Bandcamp page is seeing regular updates of new tracks and there are some real gems emerging, the latest being his ‘Six Minutes In Manchester’ single, complete with 9 Lazy 9 remix. Also check out another recent track ‘The Devil Drives’ below
[youtube width=”640″ height=”480″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3zoRYoNw1M[/youtube]