You can now buy an actual vinyl copy of the Cut Chemist ‘Mix By Jimmy’ selection of acetates from Afrika Bamabaataa‘s collection. I posted about this the other week and it’s littered with amazing tracks or versions of old school wonders including Soul Sonic Force demos.
There’s also an 80 pg book / tour program featuring shots of some of the collection, slipmats, poster, facsimile photo and flyer, a tote bag and more. Go to Boo-Hooray to grab them but be prepared, they aren’t cheap!
A very odd combo arrived in the form of a Teeny Tiny Trunk 7″ the other day. An as yet unreleased duo of tracks by Anthony Newley with musical accompaniment from none other than Delia Derbyshire. The pair are an oddity and so are the recordings with Newley coming across as a bit of a perv as he comments on the passing of young girls in short skirts. The combination of clear vinyl and a Julian House sleeve design completes the package although these appear to be sold out now in the clear variant. Go to Trunk Records for black vinyl copies
Cut Chemist has put together a new 30 minute mix with records pulled from Afrika Bamabaataa‘s collection that he and DJ Shadow are currently touring under the Renegades of Rhythm banner.
“I compiled ‘Mix By Jimmy’ to take you on a journey into the deepest part of the deepest music collection of our time. Featuring recordings Afrika Bambaataa had pressed to acetate for spinning live at shows in the late 70’s and early 80’s. This mix includes entirely unreleased demo versions of hits like “Looking For The Perfect Beat,” “Renegades of Funk” and “Planet Rock.”
On Thursday night I was lucky enough to squeeze into Sarm Studios alongside 60 other Frankie Goes To Hollywood fans and assorted industry people for a playback of ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome’. Ably hosted by Classic Album Sundays‘ Colleen Murphy it was a final farewell to the studio were the album and thousands of other songs were originally recorded before it closes to be refurbished into flats at the end of the year.
The evening started with a swift drink around the corner with designer Philip Marshall alongside Steve and Paul from Union Square Music who I’d worked with on the Frankie box set, now at the printers and awaiting release in a month’s time. We were treating this as our ‘wrap’ party even though Paul and Steve still have the logistics of consolidating the set elements and shipping all the boxes out (over 1,100 have been sold so far). Walking past Sarm earlier, a gaggle of fans had mistaken me for alternately, Steve Lipson and Holly Johnson as everyone who ventured near was scrutinised by the gathering crowd.
Once we returned to the studio there were many more outside, although nearly all midde-aged men, a far cry from the teenage girls who used to gather to try and catch a glimpse of Frankie as they came and went 30 years ago. Once inside I was finally introduced to Paul Sinclair from Super Deluxe Edition (also see his review here) whose blog is a must for all things that fall into this category, and we settled in the back row next to a Sarm patch bay to listen to the evening’s events.
First up was Colleen quizzing Trevor Horn about his career and some of the difficulties in recording the album with the fledgling band, some of who were still learning their instruments. The thing I realised about Horn that evening is that whether working with the best or the most incompetent he’s always managed to get something extraordinary out of the people he works with. Take his two projects before starting ZTT and recording ‘…Pleasuredome’:
Yes ‘90210’ – a group able to play and sing virtually any other band under the table but suffering from a lack of relevance in the pop market. He managed to make ‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ into a worldwide smash hit for them, including an experimental extended 12″ mix, and bring them to a whole new audience. Contrast this with Malcolm McLaren‘s ‘Duck Rock’ LP, a mish mash culture clash of World Music before the term was even invented fronted by a band manager who couldn’t even keep time let alone sing. That record produced several top 40 hits and can be credited with bringing Hip Hop culture as a package (rapping, scratching, graffiti, fashion and breaking / double dutch) to the world, certainly to Europe.
Colleen was an excellent hostess who certainly knew her ZTT / Frankie / Horn history and various nuggets of info concerning recording shenanigans were revealed before we broke for sandwiches and drink. On returning we were confronted with an often hilarious piece to camera by Paul Morley who couldn’t be present but had sent a recorded message instead. He regaled us with lists of adjectives to describe the album, painted a picture of both the musical and journalistic landscape at the time and quoted the David Frost line from the TV ad: “hello, good evening and welcome… to the pleasure dome”.
At which point Colleen dropped the needle on her custom built sound system and we settled back to listen to side F of the album in the same room that much of it was made. Even though everyone in the room probably knew every note and nuance of the record it was still a new experience. Few would have access to a system as good as this and the acoustics of the room gave it a different shade. The bass at times was extraordinarily deep and full, the stereo separation very apparent too and the first side – IMO one of the greatest pieces of pop music ever recorded – flew past way too quickly. On to side G and the trinity of pre LP pop classics that are ‘Relax’, ‘War’ and ‘Two Tribes’, songs we’ve all heard a million times in multiple versions that still sounded fresh as the day they were mixed down.
Another break for refreshments, toilet breaks and the like and people were starting to loosen up and really enjoy the evening. It was on to side T – generally thought to be the weakest of the bunch because more than half of it consists of three cover versions including the almost universally reviled ‘(Do You Know The Way To) San Jose’. On reflection if you took this song away the side would stand up way better. The brief version of ‘Ferry ‘Cross The Mersey‘ giving way to the powerful cover of Springsteen‘s ‘Born To Run’ coupled with two new band compositions not being as winsome as it currently stands. Would the inclusion of the full ‘The World Is My Oyster’ or ‘Disneyland’ have helped? Almost certainly but perhaps there wasn’t the time to finish these before the album had to be out hence their inclusion on later releases?
Side H, with three slices of Frankie’s finest non-single material and ‘The Power of Love’ to end before the coda of ‘Bang’ left everyone clapping their appreciation for a work now, rightly, considered a classic. Cue Trevor Horn returning alongside engineer and guitarist Steve Lipson and Fairlight operator and former Art of Noise member JJ Jeczalik. All three were in good spirits and another ex-Art of Noise-er, Gary Langan, was also lurking in the wings. There were brief introductions and reminisces before the room was opened up for questions for the super-dry Lipson, jovial JJ and laid-back Horn.
At the end a virtual scrum descended on the three as record sleeves were whipped out to be signed and further questions asked whilst posing for photos. We crept off to the control room, somewhere that was generally out of bounds to the rest of the party but that we had access to via the USM connection. I sat at the huge mixing desk overlooking the live room and, for a second, imagined I was Trevor or Steve all those years ago. It was a great end to a unique evening and I think most people went away satisfied that they had been part of something special, something that was soon going to be permanently laid to rest when the studio closes.
For Philip and I it felt as though we had finished the project and this was a little send off, of course there will be something else cropping up, there always is, but it was a nice end to nine months’ work. I left content that I’d had the opportunity to visit the place where some of my favourite records were created (not only Frankie but Propaganda, Art of Noise and Grace Jones to name just three on ZTT alone). We were Inside The Pleasuredome for what seemed like most of the year but last week, as we left the Blue Building, we went out in style… with a Bang!
The Ultra Deluxe Frankie Goes To Hollywood ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’ box set by is available to pre-order via Pledge Music and is released at the end of October, 30 years after the original opened its doors.
After waiting years, it’s finally here, Jeremy Schmidt‘s soundtrack to Panos Cosmatos’ ‘Beyond The Black Rainbow’. It’s short but it’s more than sweet and beautiful to behold in the packaging we’ve come to expect from the mighty Death Waltz label.
I appear to have an orange vinyl version with no sleeve notes though, not sure what happened there but I’ve mailed Spencer at DW to find out.
Also, here’s the new More Than Human radio show in handy downloadable form: it features a full-length interview with Jeremy (aka Sinioa Caves) plus some of his soundtrack picks; a final preview of the New Forms Festival (in Vancouver this weekend just gone) and lots of new, old and obscure electronic and experimental treats.
You can subscribe for free to the podcast in iTunes – that way the show auto-downloads every week.
Available now on Death Waltz Originals – ‘The Equestrian Vortex’ 10″. Fans of Berberian Sound Studio will already be familiar with the name of this ‘film’.
Looks like a lovely Julian House sleeve again, BUY it here now, one-off pressing.
Received a vinyl copy of this wonderful album over the weekend from InFiné Records (thanks!) Beautiful packaging with debossing on silver card + insert and inner sleeve, rounding off an excellent record perfectly. Pretty sure this will be in the end of year top 10 album chart for 2014 for me, not a duff track on it. Get it here.
UPDATE: Finders Keepers have just put an exclusive cassette version on sale referencing the original artwork.
On Friday I was lucky enough to be invited by Ben Eshmade of Arctic Circle to play at the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford. This Anish Kapoor-designed structure was erected next to the Olympic Stadium a few years back and is now hosting it’s first forays into music-themed ‘lates’ for the public, looking to expand its use beyond an over-designed viewing platform. I have to confess that I wasn’t a fan of Kapoor’s design when I first saw it but, like so many things, once you go to and experience them you gain a new appreciation for them.
The structure is much bigger than I expected, the red metal wire frame that spirals up around it is beautiful and one of Kapoor’s giant funnels nestles underneath it, largely hidden in photos I’d seen. The viewing floors are what you’d expect and the view is breathtaking although we were unlucky in that it rained during much of the gig so the balconies were less inviting than usual. Due to meshed overhead shelter which let rain in you had to wonder if the architects had truly thought through such a structure built in the UK with its less than tropical weather habits. The rain however did create a great Blade Runner-esque effect on the windows with the blue interior spot lights, the illuminated red girders of the Orbit outside and the city lights in the background and we could see the Secret Cinema set for their Back To The Future feature close by.
Ben had curated a broad selection of players for the night, Manchester’s Paddy Steer, ex-of Homelife, bought his DIY one man band set up to the outside area below the funnel and proceeded to amaze with his ability to play more sounds than he had limbs. Using foot pedals, percussion, keys, strings as well as vocal FX he played all manner of sounds from his homemade set up with shakers strapped onto wrists, percussion sticks and legs, all the while dressed like a cross between Roy Wood, Sun Ra and Moondog. He seemed beamed in from another planet, the kind of performer that the crowd didn’t want to sit too close to lest he might suddenly jump up and try to implicate them into his act like a magician. Sadly I missed most of his set due to sound checking duties upstairs but he was holding court by the time I got back down to earth before the rush for the lifts took his audience up to their destinations for the evening.
The lifts housed two players to accompany people on their short ride: a pedal steel player and a voicebox & keyboardist who had 20 seconds or so to entertain you as you rode. This was a nice touch and put you into close proximity with the artists as you can imagine, I heard one girl exclaim that one of the players must have been blind as he was wearing dark sunglasses indoors. On to the first floor, Ninja label-mates Grasscut did their quintessentially British electronic folk thing to a queue for the bar that snaked around half the room, something that evidently hadn’t been quite foreseen as staff hastily assembled another bar elsewhere. I’m not quite sure what some of the audience expected musically but it wasn’t a rave by any description and there was quite a mix of people wandering around. Upstairs on the second floor Transept and Astronauts played electronic and acoustic sets respectively before it was my turn to spin at 10pm.
I’d spent several days pulling all manner of sci-fi, space and lunar tunes from my collection for this and was almost overwhelmed for choice when coupling the vinyl with existing material I had digitized into Serato. I could have played for 3 hours rather than 90 minutes I think and wasn’t expecting such an attentive audience who sat and expected a show. I’d bought an extra portable turntable to add in textures and spoken word and used the main decks to switch between Serato and vinyl to weave a space scape together against a dark, rainy city backdrop. 
Further visuals were provided by two huge highly polished stainless steel ‘mirrors’ that reflected you back on yourself, distorted like a fairground sideshow and provided all sorts of weird juxtapositions as can be seen in some of Steve Cook‘s excellent photos of the evening on his Secret Oranges blog. My set began with the intro to the Clangers TV show and ended with ‘The Music of the Spheres’ from the same before pre-recorded selections of the organ playing at the Union Chapel ushered everyone down to the ground and out into the rainy night. All in all an excellent, unique experience which I’m forever grateful to Ben for organising and which may hopefully lead to more lates of a similar nature, the next one at the Orbit being a silent disco.
No.2 – so soon? Ghost Box‘s follow up to the Study Series of 7″s continues with Other Voices and it’s the turn of Listening Centre from New York. Two tracks on a beautifully designed 45 single, available to pre-order for Sept 17th release. More info here…
You may remember me featuring the Madlib ‘Pill Jar’ album cover a while back when he put it up as a free download. Well, it’s still there but he’s added more tracks and it’s now available as a physical LP with that great cover image by Rogerio Puhl. Another couple of nice cover designs, courtesy of Jeff Jank, come for the Rock Konducta 1 & 2 LPs – taking classic Beatles and Black Sabbath sleeves and bastardizing them.
Still totally loving this album and the vinyl arrived this week along with their previous outing, ‘La Carotte Bleu’, which, while not as focused as the new album, has plenty going for it if you want to explore the band further. ‘Midnight Sun’ however pretty much falls into the ‘all killer, no filler’ bracket for me, a well-rounded record that has layers of detail which rewards multiple listens.
The LP comes in a heavy card gatefold with a tip-on jacket and inner sleeve housing one of five colour variants (I got purple as you can see). They’ve just released a new video for the opening track, ‘Too Deep’, which is a one take affair that rewards with the final scene. It’s also apparently an homage / rip off (depending on your point of view) of the French short ‘C’était un rendez-vous’ by Claude LeLouch but they cleverly riffed on the end scene.
On Monday evening I joined Matt Johnson of The The on stage at Rough Trade East in London for a two hr Q&A about his ‘debut’ album, ‘Soul Mining’. It was a great evening with plenty to talk about and 200 eager fans there to listen and ask questions before queuing half way down the shop floor for autographs.
One fan even had the original art for the ‘Soul Mining’ cassette with him, complete with pasted up overlay. Matt recorded it all via clip on mics and I believe someone was video taping as well. I should be editing the audio sometime next week for a podcast. (Top photos by Nancy Brown and Adam James Seth-Ward, photo below posted on Twitter, thank you , please let me know who you are so I can credit you).
The recently released box set is something to cherish with lots of quirks courtesy of Matt’s designer Cally at Antar. Upon lifting the lid you’re greeted with a huge scan of one of the original master tapes on the underside and a 24″ x 36″ foldout containing images and liner notes. The download card is a large replica of a 1/4 inch reel to reel tape and I was thrilled to have a thank you on the reverse for providing images from my archive to the project.
The bonus disc of remixes and B-sides is probably the jewel in the crown as it arrives in a full colour gatefold plastered with Andy DOG Johnson‘s classic imagery. Finally we come to the original LP which is a faithful recreation with an inner sleeve showing the original labels barely visible printed straight on to the paper. Cally tells me he had to fight hard to present details like this and more as part of the package as Sony wanted it all cleaned up but to me these are the details that make it unique, showing off the artifact. More master tape scans finish the experience on the box bottom and the quality is top notch, it all feels as if a lot of care and attention has been taken to put this together.
The audio really doesn’t need rhapsodising over but the bonus Recollected disc contains alternate 12″ and early versions of Uncertain Smile, Perfect, This Is The Day and I’ve Been Waiting For Tomorrow (all of my life) from the album and period B side Fruit of the Heart. The remaster has been very sympathetic to the original and with a lack of outtakes or demos the quality of the songs never dips or falters. You can order a copy direct here and there are several articles doing the rounds on the web at the moment, one of the best being John Doran‘s piece on the Quietus and check the latest issue of Mojo for 6 pages of Soul Mining.
Also I should point out that the box set is (intentionally) large enough to easily fit the dual 12″ of Matt and mine’s versions of ‘GIANT’ that was released for Record Store Day. This was always intended and nicely completes the set of Andy Dog cover art from that era whilst adding a touch of my own take on his work.
The new series of singles by regular Ghost Box artists and some very exciting guests commences later this month. The series is called Other Voices and kicks off with a collaboration between Sean O’Hagan of the High Llamas and Jon Brooks of The Advisory Circle. Future contributors so far include, Steve Moore, Ed MacFarlane (Friendly Fires), Listening Center, Pye Corner Audio and The Soundcarriers. Pre-order here…
Very pleased to log on and see that the Frankie Goes To Hollywood ‘Inside The Pleasuredome’ box set I designed has tipped over the 100% mark to become fully funded :). Rob Puricelli has put together a great overview of the project on his Failed Muso blog.
I’ve been waiting for this to drop for over a year now, Spencer from Death Waltz hinted at it a long time ago and has since confirmed it here and there online. I saw him a few weeks back and he was saying September and he’s been true to his word as it popped up for pre-order out of the blue yesterday. A synth and organ-heavy score to the ‘lost 80’s movie’ by Black Mountain member Jeremy Schmidt, it has all the slow moving menace of the film and the sleeve is just as beautiful.
There are two versions : one for Europe on clear vinyl with red smoke effect via Death Waltz and one on clear vinyl via Jagjaguwar for N. America who are also doing a bundle with a DVD of the film.
This fall DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist will embark on the ‘Renegades of Rhythm Tour’ celebrating the legacy of Hip-Hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa.
Shadow & Cut pulled from Bambaataa’s beautifully tattered 40,000 strong vinyl collection to bring you not just Soul and Rap, but also Soca, Calypso, Dub, Salsa and more.
As Bambaataa puts it himself, “DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist are going to blow your funky mind.”
US dates only at the moment but as soon as this comes to the UK, I’m there…
More info on the ROR tour at http://bit.ly/RORTour
Ticket info at http://on.fb.me/1qVjBO6
7″ BBC Sound Effect records from the collection of my father-in-law. Notice they are billed as Long Playing and are cut at 33 rpm.
This is an interesting use of vinyl to promote a new artist. This arrived a while back now but I’ve only just got round to putting it up here. This LP arrived in the post unannounced, no clue as to where it came from (although I have a possible lead). It’s a used album (Peters & Lee in this case) with ‘CC’ 07.04.14 screen printed over the front with another black square covering most of the back.
The record inside is unplayable due to two large paper square’s being stuck over the grooves, one blank but for a ‘cc.’ in the centre and the other with message and illustration. “Want a tune for today? Well here’s two. Take a listen, you might just smile, Count Counsellor www.viewsource.cc“
I think this is first time I’ve seen vinyl used a the carrier for a web link and it’s a clever way to get the attention in an age of digital promos. The image of the head viewed from the back suggests that the Count isn’t ready to fully reveal himself yet although I see a few music blogs have picked up one track last month. If you visit the site at the link above you will be able to hear two tracks with very little other information aside from a few ‘coming soon…’ messages. A curio for sure but an innovative attempt to engage the attention by customising a music format to carry a message rather than a sound.
Death Waltz Recording Company releases for Record Store Day 2014 (only 2 of the 4). Each album has a splattered colour vinyl disc, a huge 36″x36″ poster, a 12″x12″ card print of the poster plus sleeve notes, a housebag that’s both embossed and debossed and a paper wraparound with release details.
These retail at an average of £20 each – incredible when you see the prices of other releases only offering half that. Plus Spencer Hickman, the label owner, is a straight up dude, one of the soundest people I’ve come across in the music industry. 
