Very proud to be on this line up for our Solid Steel 25th anniversary gig in Bristol, first time sharing a bill with Shadow, another one ticked off the list.
There are also many more on the line up, not sure why they couldn’t fit them on the flyer? In the Civil Music room there’s: Om Unit, Débruit (live), Reso, Brassica (live) and Civil Music DJs. In the Inflect room there’ll be: EAN, Adam Elemental, Wascal, Daffy and Kensei
Get tickets here.
Just saw this on a blog – 2011 Mondo poster apparently – but look at that gorgeous type! Wow. By Aaron Horkey and Vania Zouravliov Title: Dracula Size: 23.75″ x 36″ Edition of 330 Mondotees Numbered Edition Screenprint. Just too many talented people out there. Long gone and $500 minimum on eBay…
By Robin Davey
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.
At long last, after featuring it here months ago and then a pressing plant quality control issue meaning that the release was delayed, it’s finally here. The Simonsound‘s new single, ‘The Beam’ in all its 10″ clear vinyl, ‘Pilot Pack’ space age glory. After the wait it more than lives up to the expectation, this is one of the most amazingly packaged records I own, how much it must have cost is beyond me.
Designed by Emily Macaulay at Stanley James Press who has done all the artwork for the band so far, the photos here really don’t do it justice. Firstly – the material the sleeve is made of is a silver textured card with a silky smooth finish, I’ve never seen a record jacket like it. The cover is plain with a high quality sticker wrapped around it and reminds me of an instruction manual from the 60’s, which I’m sure is the intention.
Inside the gatefold you’re treated to several pockets, each holding a different item, before we even get to the vinyl: A NASA-styled Simonsound Transit Authority embroidered patch, a numbered, signed ticket to ride, a double-sided tour map of the Monorail route, a 20 page booklet about the Monorail and, last but not least, a unique tape loop from the project.
The attention to detail here is absolutely stunning and spot on for the subject matter, the blue, white and silver colour scheme is the perfect mix of transport design meets pilot of the future uniform. When we finally get to the 10″ record – extractable via a tasteful thumb cut in the back half of the sleeve – lo and behold, it’s on clear vinyl! A great final touch but one that delayed the original release date because of warped pressings from the original plant tasked with making them.
What about the music though? ‘The Beam’ is a modular trip through different worlds via the Monorail at a fantasy science park, taking in Outer Space, Robot World, Underwater World and more. The tour guide takes you through the different stages and the soundtrack changes to suit (the original idea was to get Ken Nordine to narrate but he wasn’t available). Simon has used the manufacturing delays to recut the vinyl with more material than the original pressing so we get a montage of various sounds and effects he’s generated on the reverse of the disc in addition to the second track.
The B-side is actually my favourite, ‘In The Shadow of the Skylon’, an ode to the iconic structure that was built for the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s Southbank. This track has shades of Kraftwerk circa Man Machine with a definite feel of ‘Neon Lights’ about it, my only criticism is that it’s too short. It was commissioned for Musicity – a location specific music project featuring tracks inspired by buildings and structures around the World. The track itself is also accessible on the site where the Skylon used to stand, using the free Musicity web app.
You can read more about the release and score yourself a copy (sorry, the Pilot Packs are all gone) on The Simonsound blog and Bandcamp page.
I’d also recommend checking out the video for ‘The Beam’ below as it really fleshes out the concept of the whole thing being that it’s a soundtrack more than a club track.
and there’s more – The Simonsound live at Herstmonceux
A few weeks ago, I journeyed down to St. Leonards-on-Sea for an event called Kosmic Krash at the Herstmonceux Observatory where Simon was playing live inside one of the domes with his new Buchla modular synth. He has kindly put up a 45 minute excerpt of the set on his blog for us all to enjoy, it was the highlight of the evening for me, sitting inside one of the domes next to a giant telescope, listening to this electro musique concrete.
Can never resist a bit of orange! Here’s the original teaser image for Steve Cook‘s ‘Sophie’s World’ exhibition which opens this Thursday at the Orbital Comics Gallery in London. Sophie is Sophie Aldred aka Dr Who companion Ace from way back when Sylvester McCoy was the current incarnation of the Doctor.
Steve once worked as a designer for the Doctor Who magazine and was one of the first people to photograph Sophie and the show will feature many unseen images plus some surprises. Seeing as it’s the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who this year it’s a trip back in time in more ways than one.
The exhibition runs from September 5th – September 30th and Sophie will be signing on Saturday, Sept 7th, 12pm – 3pm. There will be prints for sale of several of the images too and you can find out more about the event on the Facebook page and from Steve’s Secret Oranges site.
One of the internet’s most valuable resources IMO, we mostly look at Wikipedia but now you can listen to it too.
I missed this earlier this year – a film about a record shop opening in Belfast in the 70’s and the punk scene set amongst the Troubles.
The film got great reviews and Julian House did seven different poster designs for it. There’s a seller on eBay who currently has all 7 designs for sale at £40 each.
Love this old sleeve design for The Yellow Moon Band album by Luke Insect I discovered the other day. The record isn’t bad either although it only seems to be available on CD.
It’s easy, in this daily avalanche of media, to hype something to the stars and proclaim it the greatest thing in the universe. People are paid to do it for a living regardless of the content they’re pushing but I will only feature items here that I truly think measure up.
As it’s the aforementioned 25th anniversary of Solid Steel, we’re pulling out a lot of the stops this year to bring the very best mixes to the show in the sea of free that is the web these days. We’ve had Coldcut meets The Orb, Kirk DeGiorgio embracing ambiance, classic albums by De La Soul and Public Enemy reconstructed by United States of Audio and DJ Moneyshot respectfully and that’s just the first half of the year.
So it’s a great moment when the creators of the show, Coldcut, step up with the first part of a new mix series – ‘2 Hours of Sanity’ – the first part being a mix ruminating on ‘Love’, and it’s up there with the best. This has been germinating for 3 years, I’ve heard it in various forms for at least the last year and it’s fantastic to finally have them share it with everyone. The word ‘masterclass’ has been bandied about a lot in the few days since this debuted and it’s used with good reason.
The art of the mix is about layering, combining songs, sounds and speech in new ways, in a coherent flow and creating something new from old and new. Many mixes are one song after another, beat-mixed into each other to form a perfect linear trip from A to B. It’s my opinion that the best mixes throw tempo, genre and linearity to the wind and travel from A to Z. You’ll know many of the tracks here if you’ve listened to the show over the years but you won’t have heard them like this before.
Not to forget show producer DK holding up the rear of the show with a solid (pun intended) selection and a rather tasty ‘Bollywood Steel’ mix from collaborator 2econd Class Citizen.
The Solid Steel team got this lovely message and set of images from Andreas Mass thanking us for our work over the last 25 years on the show.
“I’ve been listening to the Solid Steel Radio Show for many years now. You never failed to make my day, or at least make it a better day by bringing out a new mix.
To all who are responsible for managing the Radio Show and of course to every regular and featured DJ, big props for creating, evolving and keeping it running!”
Andreas is a graphic designer and 3D artist working in Cologne, Germany and you can see more images and his artist profile on Behance.
On a personal note it’s kind of crazy to think that I debuted on the show in the summer of 1993 – 20 years ago! I had just left graphic design college and was asked by Matt Black to guest under the Openmind name with one of my flatmates at the time, Mario Aguera.
Since then, having been asked back again and again, I became one of the team and have lost count of the amount of mixes I’ve clocked up on the show. It’s sometimes easy to forget that I have a platform at my disposal as and when I make mixes and that that platform has a growing numbers of fans every week. I don’t make as many mixes as I’d like these days but I spend much more time than I ever did on the ones I do to ensure they at least come up to standard with the rest of the content.
I’ve not even heard the whole album yet but I know I’m going to love it. As the description says: “Studio wizard Chop pulls out all of the analogue stops on the Motorik highway to Cybotron by way of a Tangerine Dream on his debut album for Now-Again. Album out NOW; download a free track at the link!”
Buy: Chop ‘Illuminate’ on iTunes
Download: Chop ‘Building Blocks’
Video By: MR.IMD
Chop website: here
This is going to be one of the compilations of the year, if you don’t know or have this stuff already then you need it if you like unhinged, leftfield comics of any kind. (Not sure who laid out that poster though, shocking!)
I saw ‘Elysium’ earlier today and loved it. The design, acting and pace were all spot on, the cgi was incredible and, despite some seriously implausible technological aspects, it was excellent, easily my favourite film so far this year.
Comparisons with director Neill Blomkamp‘s earlier ‘District 9‘ were obvious but it definitely isn’t a retread as some reviewers have called it. The overall design is fantastic, especially the weathered, beaten up older tech on the ground and we were spoiled with both that and Syd Mead‘s shiny new designs for the rich living above the earth.
This is rather good, the BBC have produced a new radio play, ‘Darkside’, written by Tom Stoppard. He apparently wrote his dialogue over Pink Floyd‘s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, using it as a kind of “emotional underscore.” It’s going to be broadcast at 10pm next Monday on Radio 2 and Aardman Animation have created this trailer for it.
The last showing of ‘The Search Engine’ 360 dome show is on this Thursday at Birmingham’s Think Tank planetarium. The remaining two shows have been cancelled as there has been a reshuffled in personal so August 22nd is the last date on the cards to see it at this moment in time. Dome Club will continue but outside of Think Tank in various other ways but with Mario Di Maggio at the helm.
(disclaimer: I started writing this over a year ago and it’s sat on another machine for a while, I’ve slightly updated it but imagine it would have been published 18 months ago. Photos from my scrapbooks of flyers, cuttings and memorabilia)
90’s nostalgia
In recent months I’ve felt the first genuine pangs of nostalgia for the early 90’s, a time I generally think of as ‘the last decade’. Of course, it’s no longer the last decade, the beginning of the 90’s being 23 years ago. It’s a time I hold very dear as it shaped my life and career as it is today and the person I started out as in 1990 was very different to the one that saw in the new millennium fireworks over London in 1999.
For me, the 90’s was a decade of music, upon music, upon music. My teenage years in the 80’s were a diet of pop (80-85) and Hip Hop (85-90) – almost exclusively, aside from forays into more guitar-orientated material and the House /Acid /Dance explosion at the end of it all. The 90’s seemed to herald a new music style every year: 90: Rave, 91: Ambient, 92: Intelligent Techno, 93: Jungle, 94/95: Brit Pop, Trip Hop & Drum n Bass, 96: Turntablism & Indie Hip Hop, 97: Big Beat and the resurgence of Lounge and Easy Listening, 98: Post Rock and Krautrock’s reappraisal…
In between all this I was steadily helping build the house of Ninja and getting to travel the world for the first time, acquiring huge amounts of new music in the process. I practically bought my Jazz and Funk collections in the US and Canada in the 90’s, along with plenty of Soundtracks, Moog, Easy Listening and Spoken Word records. Europe yielded Music Concreté as well as yet more Jazz and Japan gave up it’s vintage Hip Hop treasures, at double the price they would have no doubt paid for them elsewhere. All the while back home labels like Mo Wax, Warp and of course, Ninja Tune were pumping out classic after classic alongside a revitalised US Hip Hop scene that had managed to extricate part of itself from gangster-ism with labels like Fondle ‘Em, Stones Throw, Def Jux and Sole Sides. The UK Rap scene was also getting itself together with Sound of Money, Bite It, Jazz Fudge and Big Dada.
Late last year (2011) I did an interview with Joe Muggs for Word magazine about the differences between the world and the music industry in 2000 (when ‘Kaleidoscope’ was released) and how it stands today, now that there’s finally a new album out. The contrasts were, of course, quite stark, being that the music business has gone through one of the most radical upheavals in memory in the last 10 years.
At one point in the conversation though, we went off on a tangent and discovered a mutual love for an early 90’s breed of music he’d christianed ‘Drug Dub’. Never a real scene at the time, more a hybrid existing in those transitional moments of fallout after one musical movement and the coalescing of another. In the music world nothing is ever cut and dried and many strands are working simultaneously in different areas, when these veer into each others paths, you usually find a new style emerging at the crossroads they’ve created.
If you had to bookend the schools that spawned this music you’d probably peg the resurgence of ambient after the acid house come down of the late 80’s at one end and Trip Hop in the early to mid 90’s at the other. Inject a heavy does of Dub into the mix via post-‘Screamadelica’-era Weatherall remixes and acts like The Orb and the On-U Sound stable but bypass the resurgence of Jazz and and Soul and any uptempo Rave tendencies you might have. This is electronic stoner music pure and simple, the big come down after the hedonism of the ecstacy-fulled 80’s all-nighters and the, then current, rave boom. This is B-side music, those odd, experimental tracks tucked away on the reverse side of the club bangers on a Rising High 12″ or on compilations by fledgling labels scraping together an ad hoc roster.
It was mostly faceless, save for the odd name artist like Depth Charge, Coil or Meat Beat Manifesto straying into the territory. Odd tracks here and there by John + Julie, Halftone, Aquamarine, Friends, Lovers & Family, Digidub or The Moody Boys. Whilst the KLF, The Orb and The Shamen were giving the charts a major kicking where dance music was concerned and the Rave tours of the Prodigy and 808 State were in full swing, an underbelly of post-club ‘chilling’ (always hated that word) was happening in the early hours. Coldcut were already mining some of this when I first joined them on their Solid Steel show and one of the first tracks I played was ‘Sexy Selector’ by Original Rockers – one of the tracks Joe had selected for a compilation he’d put together, called, you guessed it… ‘Drug Dub’.
A few weeks later (now 2012) we did a Stealth special on Solid Steel where we talked a bit about what went on back in the day at the Blue Note club in Hoxton, the place where it really kicked into gear for Ninja Tune in the mid 90’s. PC played a set entirely made of tracks we used to play at the time and the rush of nostalgia was almost too much, I found myself grinning from ear to ear for the whole hour as it came flooding back. I’d had to delve into this era two years previously for the Ninja Tune 20th anniversary book but that didn’t involve music, only imagery. The reason we did a Stealth special in the first place was to give listeners who were new to the show a bit of history, because, as one person at the station put it, “now that we are into a full-blown 90’s revival…”
It feels like we’re still at the early stages of the 90’s with The Stone Roses reforming, The Orb celebrating 25 years and Primal Scream having done ‘Screamadelica’ in full last year. Classic House and Rave sounds have been coming back into production and the resurgence of the Amen Break in the last year or so seems to indicate that we’re at roughly ’92-93 currently. Can the Trip Hop revival be far behind? Talking of which, I have an even older, longer post about that coming soon…
Looking back over the last few posts it all seems to be nostalgia here at the moment: Bambaataa, Duck Rock, Star Wars figures, Boards of Canada represses and old copies of Sounds magazine. I guess it’s pretty obvious where my tastes lie right now, although that’s not to say I’m not loving any current music. But, since I don’t do any current charts here any more I thought I should maybe put together a list of (new) things that I’m loving at the moment.
Sinoia Caves ‘The Enchanter Persuaded’ – this is actually from 2006 but I totally missed it at the time, discovered because Jeremy Schmidt (aka Sinoia Caves) did the soundtrack to ‘Beyond The Black Rainbow’ last year
Dharma Protocol feat. Boy George ‘Coming Home‘ (Psychemagik remix) – no one is more surprised than me that I like this, incredible slice of classic House
Black Moth Super Rainbow ‘Dandelion Gum’ LP – again, a few years old but new to me, beautiful summer analogue lo-fi on LSD
Melt Yourself Down ‘Melt Yourself Down‘ LP (Leaf) – Pigbag meets Fela Kuti meets Liquid Liquid with a drop of acid electronics, the most exciting new band this year.
Chop ‘Mutant’ EP (Now Again) – Formally Mr Chop, also awaiting the ‘Illuminate’ LP to drop through the letterbox
Boards of Canada ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ (Warp) – still on rotation
The Simonsound – ‘The Beam’ / ‘In The Shadow of the Skylon’ 10″ (Project Blue Book) – new monorail-themed single from Brighton’s finest
Four Tet & Rocketnumbernine ‘Metropolis’ (Text)
Lone ‘Airglow Fires’ (R&S)
Mark Pritchard ‘Lock Off’ EP (Warp)
Ras G ‘Back To The Planet’ LP (Brainfeeder)
Dawn Day Night ‘Higher Plains’ (Astrophonica)
Yosi Howikawa ‘Vapor’ LP (First Word)
That’s some of it anyway, there’s more that I’m waiting on like the Dark Seed 12″, the ‘Cosmic Machine’ compilation and I’m going to need a new tape player before I can hear the ‘Diabolical Melodix’ Beat Tape that Andy Votel just put out. As far as my own output, the summer holidays have slowed things down somewhat with children to look after etc. but I just remixed a track for a Playstation game and subsequently had it turned down so that was a waste of time. I’ve also just finished an epic Four Tet interview for the Dust & Grooves website, not sure when it will be published but it is HUGE and was a lot of fun to do.
I know I’ve already posted about this before but the Egotripland blog has a feature on Bam’s collection with more photos and guess who turned up in them?
Check the link above for many more photos which concentrate on the defacing of some of the sleeves, below are my highlights.
Nice interview with Nick Egan over on the Album Cover Hall of Fame blog about the design process for Malcolm McLaren‘s ‘Duck Rock’ LP. Easily one of my favourite records of all time along with being a pivotal influential moment in my musical upbringing. With artists such as Dondi White, Keith Haring and Vivienne Westwood‘s wares vying for space on the sleeve it’s a wonder it all hangs together but somehow it does. I wish the interview had gone into the making of the ‘Duck Rocker’ boombox a little as I’d love to know who made it and where it is now.
The mystery revealed: Ron West – who made the original Duck Rocker(s) posted this on his Facebook page at the end of 2020. It’s lost its horns and the graffiti is in a drawer but that is a copy of the original from the LP cover. Apparently Malcolm lost the original in the States and asked Ron to make a copy for promo purposes.
