Revolver

Rave Wars – The Acid Awakens and more…

RW 1
The new Rave Wars 7″ suddenly appeared today, I wasn’t prepared for it, nor for my track to be revealed but then nothing is normal about this release.

RW 2
3 different covers (maybe 4?)
3 different tracks, pot luck as to which 2 you get
8 different labels
Multiple different vinyl colourways
1 of 80 different random original SW figures
Vinyl package of the year?

RW 3
This must have been in the works for over 2 years now, glad to be a part of it and have it out in the world. To top it all I found a nice little Lego Stormtrooper mech in the charity, must have been a sign. Order a copy from HERE

RW 4 RW 5

TF CD promos
It’s been very quiet on here because I’ve been doing so much I’ve not had the time but I’ll spare you the carboot sale trips, Tate Modern gig with Doug Shipton and Mixmaster Morris and venue location scouting. Press for the Telepathic Fish release has started and I spent a few days hand-making some promo CDs with tracing paper covers for a lucky few. The Openmind exhibition in Folkestone came and went and will be arriving somewhere new soon hopefully.

Blech Warp
I lent Warp some bits and pieces for their show at the Barbican this past weekend too and I’ve been co-ordinating getting the first wave of Acid Endless lathe cuts out to people in the UK.

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AL 2
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The pre-order for the second run of those ends at the end of the month and they will be cut to order so contact me if you want one and you’re in the UK.

Last week saw a visit to the Royal Albert Hall to see Holly Johnson (ex-Frankie Goes To Hollywood) in concert, expect a huge announcement connected with that soon…

Holly
Also last week was the soft launch of a new book from long time friend Remi Rough and Velocity Press – Future Language of the Ikonoklast – an amazing collection of work from the graffiti crew of the same name that operated from the late 80s in the UK and rewrote the rulebook on what could be classed as writing. Seen here with Remi’s latest album, you can pre-order the book and there should be a proper London launch around September with one in Birmingham at the end of the month with special guest Henry Chalfont!.

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Speaking of Birmingham and Henry, one of the reasons he’s there is because there’s an exhibition of his photographs from Subway Art and beyond on RIGHT NOW and it ends at the end of June! Get up there, and while you’re there the High-Vis graffiti/comic festival is on this weekend 21st June in Kingsheath too – all roads lead to Brum.

Epic story of graff

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Buy Music Club June 2025

BMC June 2025
Slightly late this month (been very busy) and still no new episode of the Electrik Collage show (it’s coming) – I’m enjoying having two releases and three cover designs in this month’s list. The Locked Loop Group lathe cut zoetrope is on its second pressing now and will be cut dependent on orders received by a cut off date. Big news for this month is the final announcement of a project I’ve been working on with Doug Shipton at Fundamental Frequencies for a year now – Telepathic Fish: Trawling the Early 90s Ambient Underground.

This double album compiles tracks I and my friends were playing at the ambient parties we held under this name between 1992-1995 in London and beyond alongside Mixmaster Morris and Matt Black and a 20 pg booklet included with the package details the whole adventure. I also collaborated with artist Al White on the Terrace album cover for De:tuned (he did the cover, I did the reverse and labels – it came out nice).

Elsewhere, the Move 78 album is one for the end of year lists, Hieroglyphic Being – who has released about five or six albums in the last month alone – mutes the drums for a new series of ‘Re-selected Psybient Jazz Soundscapes’ which are quite revelatory in revealing the complexity of his compositions. I’d missed his ‘Dance Music 4 Bad People’ album on Smalltown Supersound but it’s one of his strongest of late, my suspicion being that his self-releases can suffer from a lack of quality control sometimes whereas music for other labels steps up a gear.

JG Thirlwell‘s third Xordox album is a synthesiser sci-fi epic and Kate Brooks unearths an album’s worth of outtakes from her Advisory Circle project. I’ve not included the new Stereolab album as that was in a previous list but it’s out now and every bit as good as you hoped it would be.

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Openmind exhibition on now in Folkestone

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It’s been a bit hectic recently, hence not many posts as I’ve been busy framing and preparing artwork for my latest exhibition. After 2 days of transporting, hanging, re-hanging and cleaning up artwork, my Openmind show of work is finally up at Cabron Groove Bar in Folkestone.

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The bar will be open 6-10pm for viewings week days and 2-11pm weekends until the 14th June when I will be returning to play a set with support from Brassica and Bobby Dazzler (see posters at the end for full details)

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There are nearly 50 pieces in the show from 1995 to the present day and I’m now working on a digital catalogue of pieces for sale (I totally ran out of time to do that for the show opening).

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DJ Food gig Folkestone

Posted in Design, DJ Food, Exhibition, Gigs, Ninja Tune, Openmind designs. | 1 Comment | Tags: , ,

The Tale of the Telepathic Fish – a new compilation, fanzine, mixtape and more

FDMTL4 Gatefold outside web
This has been a long time coming, I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a few years now and at last its time has come. I was approached by Doug Shipton of Finders Keepers / Fundamental Frequencies last year about doing a compilation based around the Telepathic Fish parties I co-founded in the early 90s with Chantal Passamonte (later Mira Calix), Mario Aguera and David Vallade. The four of us shared a house in East Dulwich between 1992-1995 when David and I were in our last year at Camberwell College of Art before leaving to make our way out into the world. What started as a house party grew into a series of ambient events called Telepathic Fish under the name Openmind, an alias I still use to this day for my design work.

FDMTL4 Gatefold inside Bandcamp web crop
Doug’s enthusiasm for the project got Mario, David and I back together (Chantal sadly passed away in 2022) to compile an album of tunes we’d all played and loved at the parties as well as digging in our respective archives for photos, artwork and memorabilia from the time. This was a pivotal era for all of us, a formative intersection before we split and went off in our various directions, and the people we met and partied with remain friends to this day. The double album – Telepathic Fish: Trawling the Early 90s Ambient Underground – includes music from the timeframe above by Caustic Window, Global Communication, Spacetime Continuum, No-Man, Tranquility Bass, Nightmares On Wax, Insides and remixes by The Irrestistible Force, The Orb and David Morley.

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It comes in a gatefold sleeve with a 20 page booklet that tells the full Telepathic Fish story and features Mixmaster Morris, Coldcut’s Matt Black, Aphex Twin, Orbital, the Leaf Label’s Tony Morley, the Ambient Soho shop, Megatripolis, The Roundhouse and a disused gas tanker in Amsterdam. All lavishly illustrated with loads of unseen photos and art.

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Also available exclusively through Fundamental Frequencies will be a limited bundle that includes a 44 page zine, Mindfood #5 (we also made an ambient fanzine back in the day) that features material from the first 4 issues plus additional unseen ephemera plus a 60 minute mystery mixtape – ‘Float III’ – and an enamel badge of the Telepathic Fish logo too if that kind of thing floats your boat. Pre-order is up now for a release date of September 5th and we’re looking at the prospect of re-enacting the old Fish parties with some of the original participants and decor around that time for a launch party.

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Mindfood 5 inside mock up web
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It seems things are coming full circle at the moment, what with me supporting The Orb the other weekend. Ambient music is where I first cut my teeth in London as a DJ and these parties were greatly influenced by Mixmaster Morris aka The Irrestistible Force. They were the springboard between college and a career in music and design, where I met Coldcut and in turn ended up jumping on board the Ninja Tune ship for the next three decades. Coinciding with the launch announcement today, Mixmaster Morris, Doug Shipton and I are playing tonight at the Tate Modern Corner bar in London, giving you a flavour of what to expect from the compilation.

Tate Corner Bar flyer

Posted in Event, Gigs, Music, Openmind designs, Poster / flyer, Records. | 1 Comment | Tags: ,

0282 podcast – cheap digs

I recently had the pleasure of chatting to Moz from 0282 for his ‘Doings’ podcast, about finding cheap records, or the things I look for that are cheap anyway. One of life’s pleasures is looking for and discovering new music and I look almost every day.

There’s been a lot going on recently which is why there’s been few updates here. I did a couple of gigs supporting the Orb recently, have been designing a lot of stuff I can’t quite talk about yet and am currently framing a lot of my work for an exhibition next month in Folkestone, see details below. It’s followed by a gig in the same bar as the exhibition on June 14th so, if you’re in the area that weekend, come on down.

Openmind exhibition

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Buy Music Club May 2025

BMC May 2025
Another bumper selection this month – too much good music! From Richard Norris‘ triple CD psych compilation to Little Barrie & Malcolm Catto‘s short but sweet ‘Electric War’ LP to the biggest surprise of April – a new Stereolab album! For beats you have the new Move 78 album (in the green cover, top right), Paten Locke‘s posthumous ‘Dance On My Grave’ and the reactivated Bassbin Twins‘ ‘Beats Are King 3’ EP. I’m a new convert to goat(jp) and if the sound of Tortoise playing with military precision in the style of a Steve Reich composition is your bag then you might like them too.

310‘s classic prog cut up masterpiece ‘Prague Rock’ is on Bandcamp in a new edition and whilst trawling through the (In)Active Listener‘s comps I came across Scotland’s Nebyudelic Soundsystem with a sitar-drenched wig-out named ‘Down By The River’. Barely active over the years, there’s little else by him out there but there are treats on his Soundcloud page. King Gizzard have a new orchestra-led album coming up but for all your acid needs you could do worse than the L/F/D/M release on Don’t Recordings which twists things into new shapes. Also you may have noticed my own release nestling in there, a Quadraphon turntable acid jam under my Locked Loop Group alias which has taken well over a year to come to fruition due to general tardiness by myself. But here it is, an 8″ lathe cut zoetrope picture disc of two tracks in a die-cut sleeve from Acid Lathe in the US, it’s very limited, it’s not cheap but it’s what I and the label came up with as a release and it’s one of the best zoetropes I’ve done IMO. Pre-order is up as of today and if anyone in the UK wants to save a bit on shipping then contact me as I will be getting artist copies sent over soon and we can get a package together and sort out a deal with minimal postage.

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DJ Food presents Locked Loop Group – Acid Endless

AC2 on deck
Out today on the Acid Lathe label from Portland, Oregon – my Locked Loop Group alias over two sides of an 8″ zoetrope picture disc in a fold-over die-cut sleeve. ‘Acid Endless’ is a two part improvised turntable jam on my Quadraphon turntable using locked grooves to generate churning acid beats which were then edited down for this release. Chris from Acid Lathe approached me about doing something a couple of years back, when the idea of the label was just in his head and over time we worked out this release and I helped formulate the label look for him along the way. The cut on the disc is mono but the digital files are stereo so I’d advise you to download them for the full experience.

AC2 side A
AC2 side B
I’m really pleased with this release and can’t wait to see a physical copy as I only have these photos to go by at the moment. It’s limited, it’s expensive but it cost a fair bit to make and I’m not sure how many other double-sided zoetrope picture disc lathe cuts are out there? Also, postage is a mother these days so if anyone from the UK wants one and wants to save on postage then contact me and we can work something out when Chris sends my artist copies over, adding extras into the package which I can then send on to you for a more affordable price. Sadly it seems EU postage costs aren’t much different to US these days so this is just an offer for UK residents. Pre-order here, it’ll be released officially on the 12th of May I think but of course it’s Bandcamp Friday today so 100% of the revenue goes to the label/artist for 24 hours.

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AC2 inside front
AC2 inside back
AC2 back

Posted in DJ Food, Music, Openmind designs, Quadraphon, Records. | No Comments | Tags: , , ,

Hair Who comix

Found online last night whilst looking for something else (as usual) were these four underground comix from 1966-1969 by a group called Hairy Who from Chicago. The Hairy Who? I hear you ask? A group of graduates from the Art Institute of Chicago practicing together during the late sixties who formed their own movement for a few short years. Not only are they wonderfully surreal, colourful and original, they also look nothing like the prevelant psychedelic styles of the time save for the odd Heinz Edlemann-esque touches here and there from Gladys Nilsson. They also veer far from the underground comic scene on the West Coast and actually look more like something from Art Speigleman‘s RAW magazine although that wouldn’t appear until 15 years later. You wouldn’t be able to afford them even if you found a copy from what I’ve seen of past sales but some kind soul has scanned each of the four extremely rare issues and put them on Internet Archive for all to enjoy.

Portable Hairy Who (1966)
Portable Hairy Who (1966)

Hairy Who Sideshow (1967)
Hairy Who Sideshow (1967)

Hairy Who (1968)
Hairy Who (1968)

Hairy Who Cat-o-Log (1969)
Hairy Who Cat-o-Log (1969)

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DJ Food – Oonops Drops mix for Brooklyn Radio

I did a little mix for the Oonops Drops show for Brooklyn Radio, and it airs today. All 45s, all vinyl, just some beat-heavy bits and pieces I’m digging at the moment and wanted to piece together. I’m finding myself drawn more and more back to the instrumental hip hop/trip hop sound, not in a retro way, many of these tracks are brand new and there’s a lot of it out there. I’ve never stopped loving this sound and it seems to be bubbling back into fashion of late. My mix starts at 40:35 min – 1:10:36 min after DJ Oonops, to be followed by mixes from Sola Rosa and DJ Friction.

Track list:
Shawn Lee – You Seem To have Forgotten What Music Was… (Idlesound)
Ticklish – Lost (Beat Machine Records)
Keina – True Love (Cheeba Cheeba Records)
Buggseed – Crystal Morning Pt.2 (Cheeba Cheeba Records)
Unknown – Glass (Drum Breaks Edits) (Solo 500)
The Psyclops Trees – Beak Street (Flying Saucer Records)
Herma Puma – Rockem Man (Cheeba Cheeba Records)
Herma Puma – Illery Summer (Cheeba Cheeba Records)
Time Signature – Brklyn (Slow) (dub plate)
Lord 69 – Fertilise The Corn (Howlin’)
Mike Bandoni – Kool Trippin’ (Village Live 45)
DJ Koco aka Shimokita – World’s Famous feat. 45trio
MagicTouch – Kyousoku 3 (Delic Records dub plate)

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Buy Music Club April 2025

BMC Apr 2025
An extended Buy Music Club Recommends this month as there’s so much great music out there.
From top to bottom, left to right – DJ Sofa – the next entry in the Swinging Flavors series from the Italian Beat Machine label on 7″, the new Clipping. album, ‘Dead Channel Sky’ – constantly evolving their unique template of rap music and Mike Paradinas‘ latest under his Kid Spatula alias, quality electronica from this UK legend. Yage remixes the ‘Translations’ album, itself a radical reworking of their classic ‘Papa New Guinea’, this is more in line with the Amorphous Androgynous and ladles on the sitars. Snapped Ankles – ‘Hard Time Furious Dancing’ – already contender for album of the year on the Leaf Label and then on the right, Sully with a two track club banger of a release on a beautifully etched 12″.
Tortoise have a new track out, preceding their next album, KiF pay homage to guess who with ‘Still Out’, up for pre-order on the Stroud’s Sound Records and Dylan Dylan delivers an EP of 90’s flavoured dance tracks on Pont Neuf. An oldie but new to me is Sir Psyche‘s ‘Bodies of Work 2011-2013’, a free download of properly psychedelic trip hop I recently discovered on a Bandcamp trawl and a recent cover design of mine adorns the first new Dan Curtin album in over a decade, ‘The 4 Lights’ on De:tuned. Last but not least, the long overdue re-issue of chill out classic ‘Dreamfish’ (by Dreamfish aka Pete Namlook and Mixmaster Morris) is here from Silent State Recordings.

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Snapped Ankles – Hard Times Furious Dancing


I’m really loving the new Snapped Ankles album, their fourth for The Leaf Label, ‘Hard Times Furious Dancing’, it’s refreshing and genuinely exciting whilst chiming with the times we live in. People ask where all the protest songs have gone, well here’s an album of them without ramming the point home and set to furiously fizzing beats and basslines. The video above is an imaginary conversation between seventies era Conny Plank and Brian Eno talking about AI.

Snapped Ankles LP
Available on LP, CD, download with different coloured vinyl variants for Dinked indie shops and Bandcamp. Grab it from Bandcamp to put more money in the band’s pockets. They are on tour but will make a loss so had to start a GoFundTrees Crowdfunder, this is the reslity for bands today in the UK.

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The Great Zoetrope

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I recently ran across this great piece of packaging on eBay on a lot for The Great Zoetrope made by the Adult Toys Inc company in 1966. They’ve really made the most of the box graphics here and I’m wondering if things like this being around helped influence the graphics of Sgt. Pepper a year later? They don’t make them like this anymore.

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These last two were from a different auction but show more of the contents and some scale.

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More Psychedelic posters from the web

1971 Images for Learning (Science Research Associates Inc.)
More images saved from various trawls around the web, above: Images for Learning (Science Research Associates Inc.) 1971, found on eBay.

Zen Benefit poster 1967-topaz-text-shapes-4x
From Andrew Sclanders’ Beat Books list: A large postcard with designs by Gompers Saijo publicising the benefit held for the Zen Mountain Center at the Fillmore, San Francisco, March 15, 1967. 
22.5×14.7cm.

The Fool Apple Boutique-topaz-text-shapes-4x
Apple Boutique ‘Upon Our Way’ poster by The Fool, 39.5cm x 57cm, 1967/68.

Pink Floyd 1967 repro
Upscaled repro Pink Floyd poster, 1967.

Hoppy IT graphic
International Times graphic, 1968. Thanks to Neil Rice for pointing this out. From Hoppyx.com

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RIP Doug Lear

Photo albumIt’s seemingly been a month of losses so far and sadly news of another reached me this week, less than two weeks after I’d posted about him for the first time. Doug Lear, formerly one of the UK’s leading exponents of the Magic Lantern (both in performance and collection) passed away on March 6th. Bizarrely, on that very day, I met with friends Neil and Sally Rice who had known him for decades and Neil passed me a red photo album given to him by Doug some years before. Inside this treasure trove is a collection of press cuttings, flyers and other ephemera from his days of giving Magic Lantern performances alongside his then wife, Anita, on their two canal boats.

Narrowboat logo
With Neil’s permission I’m posting some of the contents as a record of their activites in the 80s and 90s, hopefully people will find them along the way and they’ll be useful for research. Also included were four copies of The New Magic Lantern Journal by The Magic Lantern Society from the late seventies / early eighties. This was a reactivated version of an original publication that ran around the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s – several issues of which can be perused on the Internet Archive. I hope you enjoy these pieces of history as much as I do, RIP Doug.

Optical Magic Lantern mags
Anita & Doug 1
Anita & Doug 2 + TV
Anita & Doug 3
Magic Lantern flyer front and back
Magic Lantern Stamp
Most Original Show poster
Narrowboat Theatre poster
With a growing family, the couple opened a museum, tea room and theatre in Wales in 1991, leaving the boats behind. For more information, see my previous post on the Lears. Lears Museum leaflet 1991
Out of the Boats

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Electrik Collage show #13 Mar 2025

Show #13, a Baker’s Dozen is how I’m finishing this first run on ROVR Radio. There’s a lot of instrumental downtempo beats in this episode courtesy of the Legacy Echo label run by Chilla Ninja in Manchester, thanks for the records guys. More Monastry, a couple of old Linkwood tracks from the now defunt Firecracker label and a vintage megamix in the form of a 1987 Trax selection from a promo tape I found last summer. For some modern reconstructions of old classics check out Disco Police‘s stunning recreation of Tom Browne‘s ‘Funkin’ For Jamaica’, Magic Source‘s cover of ‘Voodoo Ray’ and my own deconstruction of Roy Ayers‘ ‘We Live In Brooklyn Baby’ – RIP Roy.

Listen back via the archive here

It’s been a year since I started this and this is my last show for ROVR for the moment. I will be carrying on under my own steam each month but the show will take on a slightly different form, I doubt it’ll be two hours each month for one thing. I loved being asked by ROVR to do a monthly show but when I signed up it was on the provision that it would be a test for a year. My main worry was the way the shows were constructed for the station which involves uploading the individual tracks directly to a back end area where you order your show selection, adding metadata etc. so that tracks can be indentified online once playing. Once the two hour limit has been filled you then choose an option that auto-blends the start and end points of the songs for a seamless transition, not beat matching, just fading. This was hit and miss for me and not the way I make mixes, being more of a mix DJ who layers tracks and samples up. I was assured that they were working on a DAW for this that would give DJs more control over how they blended tracks together, unfortunatley this hasn’t materialised after a year and I don’t feel I’m doing good work here as a result. I also had no way of knowing listening figures for either my shows or the station in general so I have no idea what sort of audience I was getting. But no bridges have been burnt, if the DAW materialises and works well then I may be back.

But, the year is up and I’m keen to construct things in my studio as I always have and hopefully provide listeners with a better show as a result, getting back to mixing, away from the digital playlist format whilst hopefully being more creative. I’ll upload to Mixcloud and that will allow listening figures and comments as well as a trackmarked playlist. It won’t be behind a paywall like the archive uploads I’ve been doing so everyone can listen and it will be easier to share and embed into websites after it’s published. The Electrik Collage shows have all been about getting back to doing radio with an empahsis on current music like Solid Steel used to be (I estimate at least 75% of each EC show is contemporary releases from the last year or so) but I also want to experiment with the format too. What that will entail I’m not sure but we’ll see next month, until then, enjoy the new show.

DJ Food – Electrik Collage #1
Linkwood Family – Piece of Mind
Monastry – Respite
Linkwood – Hear The Sun
Disco Police – Jamaica (Sir Dancealot Deconstructed Regroove)
Chop – Monolith
Magic Source – Voodoo Ray (Radio Edit)
Various Artists – Trax Megamix 1987
DJ Food – Electrik Collage #15
Deadchannel9000 – Concrete Science
2S.Beatz Productions – L.Y.W.B.
Kristian Gjerstad – Drops, Slops & Chops
Chop – Psycho Bubble
Chilla Ninja – Good Time All The Time
Atoribeats – Whoz Da Mann!?
Funkychild – Iguazu
Jon Fu – Revival
Champagne Dub – Thuggin
DJ Food – Electrik Collage #10
The In-Sect – Brooklyn (DJ Food Restructure)
Hot Chocolate – Sugar Daddy
Mandrake Handshake – Emonzaemon
The Psyclops Trees – Oscars Groove Part 2 (Alt. take)
Space Drum Meditation – Water Sirens
Djrum – Frekm pt. 2
Monastry – Destination
Kosmologic Research Society – Rift
D.K. – Untitled Pt.6

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RIP Roy Ayers

Roy Ayers
Another musical giant gone – the incredible Roy Ayers has left the building. I probably first heard snatches of his music via samples in 80s hip hop by the likes of the Jungle Brothers but caught up with the real thing in the 90s. He was on the same bill at a French festival once when I toured with The Herbaliser so we had a view of his set from the side of stage, the photos of which I’ll add here if I can find them.

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By weird chance I used parts of the Roy Ayers Ubiquity track ‘We Live In Brooklyn Baby’ only last month whilst experimenting with some software. This is what resulted, not a normal remix. I played it to PC and he commented, “Cellular restructure. Certifiable.” which I took as a compliment. RIP Roy

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RIP Mark Pawson

Mark Pawson Groovy Record Fayre 2021
Very sad to hear of the passing of Mark Pawson today. A unique figure on the counter cultural art and publishing scene who I would regularly see at zine fairs and the like. His was always the most interesting stall with the most bizarre underground books and comics from all over the world. I’d end up buying some beautifully screen printed French comics from him, the likes of which you’d never see anywhere else and would never see again if you didn’t buy them there and then.

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I first got to know Mark in the early 90s when he was around on the scene when I worked at Ambient Soho, he was the badge man who would make all sorts of badges for the shop, and our Telepathic Fish parties. I still have a load of badges he made using my Openmind logo and was going to get him to make more this summer for the release of a record. He’d sell artbooks and badges he made of his own work using photocopiers and also made badges featuring Negativland and Bob Dobbs.

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His classic ‘Mark’s Little Book of Kinder Eggs’ and book of plug wirings were always in print and I think the ‘Assume This Phone Is Tapped’ sticker was also one of his. There are phrases I’ll always associate with his work like ‘Aggressive School of Cultural Workers’, ‘Demolish Serious Culture’, ‘Book Shops Not Bombs’ and ‘N©’. He belonged to the anti-establishment DIY scene who used whatever they could to make art, was involved in The Exploding Cinema early on as well as the international mail art scene. It’s shocking to know he’s gone, a truly one of a kind figure. I’m sad I won’t bump into him at the fairs any more. RIP Mark

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Posted in Art, Books, Design, Oddities. | 7 Comments | Tags: