This afternoon I sat in on Jonny Trunk’s OST show on Resonance 104.4 FM with a show brought to you by the letter ‘S’ – that means Sesame Street / Star Wars / Lalo Schifrin and special guest Jonny Cuba from Soundsci. Library cues, exclusives, soundtracks, skits, samples and more including mic fluffs and badly scratched records.
Radio
Two dates for your diaries: June 25th I’ll be DJing with Jonny Trunk at Camberwell’s finest used record emporium, Rat Records. They recently bought in a really good selection of soundtrack, electronic, library and weird records which we’ll be playing selections from before adding them to the racks for punters to buy. Let US try, before YOU buy.
But before that – this Saturday to be precise – I’ll be sitting in for Jonny on his OST radio show on Resonance 104.4 FM from 4.30-6.40pm. There’ll be a theme to the show and I’ll have special guest Jonny Cuba from Soundsci talking about library digs and soundtrack finds. Listen here this weekend
I totally forgot to post this last weekend as I was away. After their storming gig in London in February I asked Tim Gane from COAM if he’d be up for a Solid Steel mix for us. Not only did he say yes but he delivered two exclusive hour long mixes titled ‘Whiteout Mix’ and ‘Blackout mix’ that parallel each other with some of the same artists appearing on both hours. As a result we gave the whole of last week’s show over to him.
“An abstracted trawl through some prized recordings. Music can be like a fever dream with no rational interpretations possible and all these tracks have given me that rush. Over the years they have shown me the door and window to another kind of sound and new forms of composition and an endless collage of possibility.Totally shocking listening to these tracks again and putting the mix together. I have included one of my own mess about loops from about 8 or 9 years ago.”
A few weeks ago, when I played the Resonance FM fundraiser at The Book & Record Bar, I gave Zoe ‘Lucky Cat’ Baxter a couple of Ultraman 45s from my collection as a present. I’d picked them up in Japan over 15 years before and had bought them in to an OST show with Jonny Trunk years ago, more to show him the sleeves than to play the music. I met Zoe for the first time there as she has the show before Jonny and she recently reminded me that she was wildly coveting the records back then as she loves East Asian culture.
They’d been sitting in my collection for years, unplayed and unseen, so I thought, ‘why not give them to someone who will appreciate them more than me?’, seeing as we were on the same bill. She’s already put them to good use by including them in an Ultraman special on her radio show and showing off the covers on her Instagram (see above and below). She has a wealth of information on the show and it’s nice to know that they’ve gone to a good home.
Thanks very much to Josh from Posthuman for putting me on his excellent radio show, there’s no chat in this one due to studio gremlins and my mix begins about 58m mins in.
The world’s first ever all 45 Acid mix? There’s a 7 day download link in the comments too
Taken from the Audio Arcana blogspot: this is an incredible find in the discography of Ken Nordine; a 7″ EP of the original Fuller Paint Company adverts that went on to form the basis for his classic album, ‘Colours’. These versions are markedly different from the ones on the Philips LP and a new track, ‘All Colours’ shows up at the end. More info and full download HERE
From one fundraiser for an independent radio station (Resonance FM) to another. This time it’s the turn of WFMU from New Jersey to appeal to the public, starting March 6th until the 20th. One of the items you can receive if you pledge money is a T-shirt with this ‘Space Vinyl’ illustration by Derek Yaniger on it. I love Derek’s work, in the traditions of artists like The Pizz, Shag or, of course, the originator – Jim Flora, painting that Tiki / Beatnik / Hot Rod / Rock n Roll thing with style.
I put this pile of 45s down in a mix last week, possibly the world’s first all 7″, all-Acid mix? I’ve been collecting acid tracks on 7″ for a while now and, when Josh from I Love Acid asked me to do a mix for his I Love Acid Radio slot, I thought this would be the perfect slot to showcase them. The mix is due to debut on March 10th, I’ll post a link here when it does. Pete Isaac from 45 Live is also a big acid 45 collector and we’ll be doing something in that vein later this year…
Acid on 45 is a pretty niche area, a lot of the releases are UK pressings as several tracks made the charts at the end of the 80s and record labels were still pressing 7″s alongside the 12s to get radio play. There are also a lot of european singles from around that time too, tracks that were big in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain but won’t maybe be known elsewhere. In the 90s a lot of acid on 45 is confined to the more uptempo almost gabba-techno kind and there are slim pickings to be had until the 00s when the sound made a resurgence back into techno.
The second part of Robin The Fog & Hannah Brown‘s ‘Neat Mint’ show for Resonance FM just aired tonight with the continuation of their peek into the odder end of my record collection. Hear what these records sound like below.
Also we’ll all be playing at The Book & Record Bar in West Norwood on Friday alongside the landlord Micheal (not listed below) and Zoe ‘Lucky Cat’ Baxter who, I just found out, is the daughter of Glen Baxter! Come down, the shop is less than a minute’s walk from the West Norwood train station. £5 entry in aid of Resonance FM who have their annual fundraising drive on at the moment to keep them on the air for another year. Some very unique prizes to be auctioned off in a very good cause, truly independent radio with no playlist.
For all those who won’t see the updated posts further down the feed; here’s last night’s new Resonance FM show, Near Mint, that I featured on with some highlights of my collection. Plus here’s the 45Live Radio Show I had an all-45s guest mix slot on with Greg Belson last Friday night/Saturday morning on Dublab.
I’m doing / have done a couple of things for Resonance FM – London’s great station of the weird, wonderful and avant garde. Last week Robin The Fog, aka Howlround, came errrr… round and we spent a hugely enjoyable three hours going through the odder ends of my collection. It rapidly descended into, ‘have you heard this? you haven’t? oh my god, check this out’ etc. etc. We’ve all been there but Robin’s and my tastes are quite acutely tuned to a specific end of the musical spectrum marked ‘miscellaneous’. This is all for a new series on his and station cohort, Hannah Brown‘s ‘Near Mint’ show about ‘excessive record collecting’.
He left with over an hour of audio and a lot more of me wittering on about German concept albums about the body, a children’s alphabet in space LP, one-off record booth finds and cut up psychoanalysis experiments. We touched on old favourites like Ken Nordine, John Rydgren and Marshall McLuhan too but our shared love of Sesame Street‘s more experimental side wasn’t discussed. Below are some examples of some of the delights we explored and you can hear the show next Tuesday, February 9th at 6pm. NOW! (Well, part 1 anyway)
The week after that I’ll be joining both of them. as well as host of the station’s Luck Cat show, Zoe Baxter, at the West Norwood Book & Record Bar to help raise money for the station as part of their annual funding drive. There will be a raffle with prizes, some from my own collection, but most of all, there will be great music (see flyer above for details).
The 45 Live crew notch things up a gear with the first release on their own label and a new bi-weekly radio show. Boca 45 takes the first release slot with a double whammy of ‘Soul On Top’ / ‘Diego’s Theme’. Listen and buy a copy here. Over in LA, 45 Live member Greg Belson has set up a radio show on Dublab that will air on the first and third Friday’s of each month and feature a guest mix from one of the 45 Live roster on each show.
A couple of weeks ago I was in Amsterdam, taking part in discussions about ‘The Art of Curation’ with Mixcloud co-founder Nikhil Shah. The chat was hosted by the electronics company Sonos as part of the annual ADE music conference that takes place there, the biggest in Europe. I chose five tracks that linked with the subjects of Music, Art, Sci-Fi, Comics & Design which largely tie into the things I collect and post about on this site. This is the part where the blog eats itself as I blog about myself talking about blogging and readers will hear some familiar names and sounds during the interview.
The trip was a fruitful one in terms of digging for new things in my time off and I went with a mission for 45s, underground comics and sci-fi paperbacks. Things got off to a poor start with my first stop at Record Palace (Op Art -themed wall display at the top) which is on the outer rim of the centre of the city. I’ve shopped there a few times and it’s always yielded treasures but this time it wasn’t to be. Of the two 7″s I bought (a substandard late 80s Dickie Goodman break-in record and Raze‘s ‘Break 4 Love’) when I returned home to play them I discovered that the disc inside the Raze cover was in fact a Thompson Twins single. My fault for not checking the disc but they were only 50c and there was a strict ‘no playing’ rule on records from the cheap bins. The only good thing about it was the Trevor Jackson-designed cover which, when you look at the ‘dancing’ figures, is actually quite dirty.
From here I visited Lambiek a few roads away, the oldest comic shop in the world if their website is to be believed and, on the strength of their stock, I can believe it. The shop is about to move to a new premises and their usual gallery space was now a large dumping ground for what looks like all manner of random stock. Very little of it was priced apart from the odd penciled number on an inside cover and many of the piles can contain anything, very little order exists as you can see below.
But there was some gold there and I soon had a little pile building, the owner unable to direct me to the undergrounds as everything was mixed up due to the impending move. They closed at 5pm and at approximately 4.45 I glanced under a shelf and saw a box that looked like it was exactly what I was looking for. Going through it my suspicions were confirmed and I started pulling out handfuls of British and American underground and independent press comix as fast as I could, some in not-so-good condition but still a lot that you only find on eBay these days.
This copy of Oz magazine was nestling in the box, looking like a Robert Crumb comic, copies usually go for £10-20 and up.
These three Subvert comics by Spain were a bit water-damaged but I’d never seen copies before aside from being reprinted in other mags.
No.s 1 and 3 of Mother Oats Comix by the late, great Dave Sheridan.
They had five copies of this Radical Rock comic, all badly water-damaged but readable. You can easily find these for about $5 on eBay, but the postage triples the price as they’re always from the States.
I wasn’t going to leave a comic behind with a cover like the Bizarre Sex one, the issue of Tasty has some really nice abstract acid trip visuals inside although the cover isn’t up to much.
That Dutch NIMFKE comic on the right is probably one of the filthiest things I’ve ever seen in comic form.
There was more but here’s a lot of it. I’d been tempering my choices, thinking that this was adding up to quite a bundle but some of this stuff just doesn’t come around in Europe that often, even in this condition. Upon taking them to the counter I couldn’t quite believe my luck when the assistant proceeded to charge me one Euro for each comic with only two for some slightly over-sized books like Imagine and Heavy Metal. Digs like that don’t happen every day.
On then, with a spring in my step, to a couple more comic shops further north near Centraal station. On my way I passed a shop with a big sign outside, ‘Used Books, English Language’, and took a quick peek to see what it was like. Once inside I inquired if they had any vintage sci-fi paperbacks and the guy at the counter pointed to eight large apple boxes stacked in the aisle. “Four for ten Euros“, he quipped, “How long until you close?”, “20 minutes!”. I probably got through about two thirds of them, given that they were two rows deep inside but it was worth it.
I’ll be taking part in this this coming weekend, an afternoon of interviews on the art of curation where I’ll be talking about the thinking behind this very blog and how I go about selecting its content. The interview should be streaming live but bear in mind that the Netherlands is one hour ahead of London.
We’re excited to announce a brand new radio show broadcasting live out of Los Angeles CA, on Friday 6th November, 8pm US PST (4am UK GMT) on the legendary Dublab.com featuring the entire 45 Live Crew!
‘The 45 Live Radio Show’ will be on air bi-monthly which will fall on the first and third Friday of each month. Your host will be soul, funk & gospel connoisseur DJ Greg Belson, and it’ll feature a guest on a rotational basis from the 45 Live elite (full roster here if you want to know who will be featured).
Don’t miss Jonny Trunk sitting in for Jarvis Cocker on his BBC 6 Music Sunday Service from last weekend. It’s available to listen to (region permitting) for another month or so and is well worth it. Photo by Eilon Paz from the Dust & Grooves book launch party in London last year. The record was a John Rydgren Silhouettes 45.
Two very different mixes feature on Solid Steel this week – black channels offer up a whole heap of spooky electronica including new material of their own in a mix called ‘Around You is The Machine’.
Mr Armtone’s ‘Σmotions’ collection goes for the dancefloor and adds a full AV mix to go with his selection
Delia Derbyshire‘s radio programmes with Barry Bermange from the mid 60s are great works of wonder, forward thinking and as relevant today as 50 years ago. Until now I was only aware of ‘The Dreams’ – an unnerving 5 part exploration of various themes people experience in dreams set to Delia’s dark ambient soundscapes. But earlier today I discovered there are actually four separate programmes, created in 1964 and ’65, on the subjects of God, The Afterlife and Growing Old.
Here is the second ‘Invention for Radio’ as the pieces are known, ‘Amor Dei: Vision of God’, a four-parter that pits believers against non-believers to show two sides of people’s perceptions of God and worship. Each is set against a minimalist soundtrack, choral and calming – an incredible work, originally created for BBC Radio 3. There’s more info on delia-derbyshire.net with links to the other inventions as well as pretty much anything else you want to know about her work.
Part 2.
Part.3
Part 4.
An extra 20 minute supplement to the ‘Cutting Up the Cut Up’ documentary that aired on BBC Radio 4 earlier this month.