This has been under wraps for a while but I can finally reveal…
Three 45 minute sets (due to limited spaces in the Planetarium) of a specially reconstructed version of the album including exclusive material. I’m currently working with the astronomers at the Observatory, building a bespoke show for their 360 degree hemispherical screen. Tickets are very limited, only 82 for each show, so be quick if you want to see this http://ninjatune.net/shop/tickets
Last night I saw Kid Koala‘s new show ‘Space Cadet’ and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen with a DJ at the helm before. Part gig, part story, part stand up comedy and a lot of audience participation, it was not your usual gig. I took my family and there was a moment when we thought the kids wouldn’t get in even though we went to the 7pm show but it was fine. Everyone sat down and there was no PA – only headphones for everyone.
Eric sat down for most of the show and chatted as much as he played, featuring musical excerpts from his new book and CD – ‘Space Cadet’, the forthcoming blues album on Ninja Tune, his Yo Gabba Gabba routine (where he donned his Koala suit) and the always awesome ‘Moon River’ routine. Members of the audience were invited to play bells, music boxes and Asteroids (destroying pre-photographed faces of themselves),whirl tubes to the music and thumb wrestle!
As well as this there was a collection of original art and a table full of 3D plants featured in the book, games, space echo and turntable recorder to play with and cookies to decorate. Go and ‘experience’ it if you can, you’ll not see anything like it for a long time again.
Well this is a turn up, 10 vintage Plug tracks from 1997, rescued from the vaults of Luke Vibert aka Wagon Christ. For all those who loved the Plug EPs, the ‘Drum n Bass For Papa’ LP and the ‘Extreme Possibilities’ remix of 2 Player from back in the day – you won’t be disappointed. These are not just some so-so offcuts, best left in the cupboard, some of this is better than some of the material from the 90’s IMO. CD and vinyl in January on Ninja Tune.
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I’d missed these previously but there have been 6 different B-Music podcasts in the last 18 months floating on the Finders Keepers Soundcloud page. I can recommend the Andy Votel, Benjamin Hatton and Alfonso’s mixes plus you get preview tracks from recent Vannier and Bollywood releases.
Full preview of ‘Prey’, the track I did with JG Thirlwell aka Foetus / Steroid Maximus / Manorexia / Clint Ruin / Wiseblood etc. etc. on my new EP. To say I’m happy with this is an understatement, it was a huge honour to get JG’s contribution after being a fan of his for over two decades.
DJ Food – ‘Prey’ feat. J.G. Thirlwell by Ninja Tune
In 2002 I remixed his track ‘Suspect’ from the album ‘Flow’ (still one of his best) for the compilation ‘Blow’. Instead of payment I asked for either a remix or a guest vocal on a future project and it took nine years to call in the favour. JG came to the UK in March this year and we agreed to meet up at Matt Johnson‘s place as I had tracks for both of them. I spent a hugely enjoyable morning chatting with them over tea, talking about everything from the state of the music business to The Monkees.
This was one of those tracks that came together incredibly fast and, upon delivery of the vocal, I had to make very few changes to anything, just a slight rearrangement of a vocal here and there. An instrumental, retitled ‘Beast of Prey’, will be available as a bonus on the Japanese CD of ‘The Search Engine’ in December.
Last week we hid 5 different parts of ‘Magpie Music’, the track I did with 2econd Class Citizen, around the web on different sites and encouraged people to find them with their search engines.
Thanks to all the sites who took part – Clash music, Seeks music, ireallylovemusic and Future sequence and please have a look round them as they are all worthwhile places for new music. Here are those segments now, a few had trouble with Friday’s download but they got there in the end.
Part 1 “Finders Keepers”
Part 2 “They Turned Their Faces Down”
Part 3 “A Positive No”
Part 4 “Eye of the Needle”
Part 5 “No More Stars”
The gorgeous Ghost Box 7″ Study Series continues with a double header from Pye Corner Audio with The Advisory Circle – out in two weeks, pre-order it here.
Finally, the DJ Food album – ‘The Search Engine’ – is available to pre-order in the Ninja Tune shop. It comes in many forms so pay attention:
• Regular 12 track album CD – gatefold card cover and 20 pg booklet
• Ltd 48 pg comic-sized booklet full of artwork, photos, lyrics and more + 12 track album CD in card wallet + 7″ 
flexi disc of a bonus track not on the album
The limited package with the flexi disc is at an early bird price of just £12 at the Ninjashop at the moment but you’ll have to be quick.
• Regular 12 track album – mp3 download + pdf booklet
• Regular 12 track album – WAV download + pdf booklet
• Expanded & Extended 17 track album – 24 bit WAV download + pdf booklet
This version adds 5 tracks that were on the previous 3 vinyl EPs but didn’t make the cut for the CD album ‘proper’ + has full versions of tracks that were edited down for the regular version, up to 4 minutes more on one track. Some versions are only available on this edition as I remixed several older tracks for the album but edited them down for the final selection – this is your chance to be a completist.
For all those wondering where the vinyl is? Well, the three EPs released so far make up a version of the album (albeit an alternate universe one) and all come with nice poster covers and inner sleeves so, if you bought these then, you already have the album of sorts. That being said, there are different mixes, edits and the vocal version of GIANT on the CD and digital versions which aren’t yet on wax. We have ideas about that but I don’t want to jump the gun without things being set in stone. Ninja should be repressing some quantities of the earlier EPs so we’ll see what happens, don’t write a new vinyl version off just yet.
The hunt continues, part 1 was on the Ninja Tune Soundcloud and part 2 was on the Clashmusic.com site. Part 3 is out there somewhere, you just need to find it…
Love this cover of JRocc‘s new single, artwork by Gustavo Eandi.
With one week away until the release of my ‘Magpies, Maps & Moons‘ EP Ninja are giving you the chance to download 5 different segments of the track ‘Magpie Music’ that I did with 2econd Class Citizen. This is a suite of tracks we made and then stitched together to form an 11 minute piece on the new EP and album, various tracks have been extracted from it and cleaned up to form little standalone DJ tracks for you to enjoy.
The only catch is, you have to find them, Magpie-like, and steal them from wherever they are hiding on the web using your computer’s search engine (incidentally, the new album’s title). The first one is up now, four more go online each day this week and the EP is released on Monday 7th November. Lots of exciting things happening on the lead up to this release at the moment, I’ll give all the info as each thing is confirmed but January is going to be packed at this rate.
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Equinox Records out of Berlin have been around for a while and they currently have a sale on in their shop so I recently hoovered up some bits I fancied. The packaging and design aesthetic of the label is very strong, being overseen by the label head Gunter Stoppel aka DJ Scientist. There is a look of unbleached card, circular designs, B&W inner sleeve photography and a multitude of formats including colour and clear vinyl, 5″ and postcard records, cassettes and other oddities. It’s a varied roster, mainly concentrating on instrumental beats and electronica with a heavy leaning toward Hip Hop and sampling. Of course I would be first to recommend 2econd Class Citizen but the new David Vangel album is excellent as are releases by Davinci and Deckard amongst others.
Two new Ninja releases with tracks by myself and 2econd Class Citizen. Loka‘s ‘Temporary External’ EP has remixes from us both of tracks from the forthcoming album ‘Passing Place’.
My EP – ‘Magpies, Maps & Moons’ – is the last in the trilogy before they get compiled into a new form on the album due in January 2012. Both are available to pre-order from the Ninjashop as digital downloads with mine also coming in 12″ form too. Click the covers for previews and direct order links.
[quicktime width=”640″ height=”495″]http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/Josh-Homme-Int-2008.mp4[/quicktime]
This is my KLF mix ‘The Sound of Mu(sic)’ as visualised with the new Soundcloud plug in Spectrogr.am. It doesn’t seem to like Firefox at the moment (maybe I should update) but it works in Safari fine.
My Boards of Canada mix came out a little weird round the edges, I added the colour as I couldn’t get the colour on Spectrogr.am to work for love nor money.
[youtube width=”640″ height=”375″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCwfX9mkXSA&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
incredible, beautiful, bravo!
Remember this a few weeks back? Well, they are available to order now if you send a ten pound note in an envelope to:
Matty Skylab c/o The Bootstrap Company, The Print House, 18 Ashwin Street, London, E8 3DL.
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They are also asking people to include with their order anything related to The Night Sky – Space, Planets, UFO’s, Space travel etc for a mail art project.
Loving the new Martyn album on Brainfeeder, you can listen to a stream of it on their site.
The cover art by Erosie from his ‘Horror vacui’ series’ is exceptional as well.
Today sees the release of DJ Shadow‘s new album, ‘The Less You Know, The Better’, in case you hadn’t seen all the press and publicity recently. He’s taken a fair bit of knocking these last few years, since ‘The Outsider’ rode into town and divided opinion, with the majority, unfortunately, not in its favour. It had its moments, others were tucked away on B-sides and extras on special editions too, but the mix of Hyphy Hip Hop and indie rock with too few of his usual beat workouts led to a very uneven record that would have worked better as a series of themed EPs in my opinion.
It’s a favourite pastime to build ’em up and knock ’em down in this country, and being a Shadow fan was almost a dirty word for a bit. His involvement in the DJ Hero game probably didn’t help that situation but the appearance of limited handmade records, a series of archive tape compilations via his site and then the Shadowsphere has helped rebuild his profile ready for the new release.
The new record has some great material on it and is a return to form whilst still taking steps outside his comfort zone. ‘Border Crossing’ and ‘I Gotta Rokk’ are as strong as any of his more guitar-led material like ‘The Number Song’ and ‘High Noon’ and ‘I’ve Been Trying’ is an update on tracks like ‘6 Day War’ and ‘This Time’, using a sampled vocal entirely as the voice of the song, a trick he seems to repeat a few times here. One of the highlights of the album is ‘Redeemed’, a female vocal-led number that, on first listen, didn’t do much for me but just gets inside your head. For those that love the Shadow of heavy breaks, spoken word and scratches, there’s plenty of that and we get possibly the first RnB pop ballad(!) in ‘Scale It Back’. The howling Beat poetry in ‘Give Me Back The Nights’ doesn’t quite work for me and, again mystifyingly, several bonus tracks are more worthy of album inclusion in ‘Come On Riding’ and ‘Let’s Get It’. I’d like to know how many get involved in compiling the running order for his records these days as album sequencing is an art in itself.
It’s a shame the UK media has wanted to focus on ‘Endtroducing’ so much in the press surrounding the new album rather than let it stand on its own merits but it has produced a couple of very worthwhile radio shows which you can hear below courtesy of the ever faithful Joost over at Solesides.com. Coupled with his live show, which I saw a few weeks ago, and the self-depreciating artwork by Tony Papesh, it’s a great return to form.
DJ Shadow – THE MUSIC THAT INSPIRED… by Solesides on Mixcloud
