Perks of the job

One of the nicest things about the job I do is meeting other artists and like-minded people, and sometimes you get unexpected surprises because of this. Two recent packages turned up within days of each other and bought a smile to my face. The first was from Nigel Peake and he’d sent a unique screen print of the Ninja Family Tree he’d designed for the XX box set. This had reversed colours – blue on white – and he had hand-coloured my name on the print. Beautiful. He has now made a limited, signed edition available via his site so, if you didn’t get the box set, prefer the reversed colours and want a fold-free version, head on over there.

Doc Vec x 2This week saw not one but two posters from Doc Vek at the door, his design for the DJ Kentaro show earlier in the year (right) and the forthcoming Ninja Tune party in Bristol at Motion (left). This was one of only three made and I’ve already framed it for the studio. I loved it so much that I suggested to Ninja that they have some made for the Ewer St. party in London on Oct 2nd. They will be personalised with the date, location and line up and probably available from the Ninja shop afterwards.

6 Mix Ninja special this Sunday

6 musicColdcut host a 2 hour show celebrating the 20th anniversary of the label this Sunday on 6 Music’s 6 Mix show . Special mixes have been compiled by myself, Mr Scruff, Daedelus and Toddla T (doing a Roots Manuva special) showcasing tracks from the new XX compilations and Ninja classics. It starts at 8pm and will be available on the BBC’s Listen Again feature for a week afterwards.

The Light Surgeons shortlisted in the Vimeo awards!

The Light Surgeons’ short film about luck, ‘Shimazeltov’, has been shortlisted in the documentary category for the Vimeo awards! The film focuses on the Jewish community and their ideas about luck, it’s insightful, humorous and beautifully shot and framed.

I’m pretty excited about this because not only is it an excellent short but my wife assistant produced it and my kids make a fleeting cameo in it. The Vimeo festival takes place in NYC in October, fingers crossed crossed… You can VOTE for it here and more info about the awards is here and, if you have 10 minutes, please take a look at this beautiful film.

Schlimazeltov! from THE LIGHT SURGEONS on Vimeo.

Posted in Event, Film. | No Comments |

Ninja Tune is 20!

At last the day is here, two decades old and a teenager no more. Ninja is 20 and we celebrate the date – and also the 200th post here – in style with two double CD sets, four 12″s and a lavish box set which is now sold out on the Ninjashop although stores will have it from today.

XXvol1XXvol2Slipcase with contents
The book, ‘Ninja Tune: 20 Years of Beats & Pieces’ has been in the shops a month now, 192 pages and over 1,200 images charting the history of the label from Coldcut’s late 80’s chart hits to today.

This week’s Solid Steel has been given over to celebrating the occasion with an anniversary mix of classics from all the labels by DK and a one hour interview with Coldcut and label manager Peter Quicke about where it all began and where it’s going.
Solid Steel Radio Show 17/9/2010 Part 1 + 2 – DK by Ninja Tune & Big Dada
Solid Steel Radio Show 17/9/2010 Part 3 + 4 – Interview with Coldcut & Peter Quicke by Ninja Tune & Big Dada

After that it’s shows around the world, Berlin, Paris, Brussels, NYC, San Francisco, LA, Tokyo and Osaka, King Cannibal’s ‘The Way Of The Ninja’ mix CD and Zen TV pt.2 on DVD.

XX 12″s 3-6

Some more (not very good) pictures of the XX 12″s – out Monday. 1 & 2 only available with a purchase code from the XX box set, 3-6 available for general sale. A mystery seventh 12″ with two remixes of a Ninja classic unavailable anywhere else, will creep into circulation shortly.
XX 1 coverXX 1 backXX 2 backXX 3 coverXX 4 coverXX 5 coverXX 5 backXX 6 cover

and a sneaky reason to own all six 12″s, when put together, the spines spell Ninja Tune XX
XX spines

Ninja Tune XX box set features on Hard Format

I’m very proud to announce my first design entry on the Hardformat blog. Run for three and a half years now, it’s a site dedicated to “reaching for the sublime in music design”, both past and present. One of the first things I think any designer finding the site would think is, “I wonder if I’m on here?”, the second would be, “I want to be featured here”, if they don’t find their work. The site already published the original mock up image of the set a few months back and we entered into a dialogue about it. That turned into me writing up a lengthy piece detailing some of the process involved in realising the gargantuan project.

www.hardformat.org/5200/ninja-tune-xx/

ninja-xx-9

DJ Shadow Handmade

Most of you will have heard, or at least heard about, the two new DJ Shadow tracks that officially came to light last week via his site, after being out and about, ripped from radio broadcasts for a bit. ‘Def Surrounds Us / I’ve Been Trying’ caused a stir last week which is no mean feat in this day and age from an artist who is approaching 20 years of official releases. In the digital age these things are easy to come by, not so easy is an actual hard copy, pressed onto vinyl, dark blue vinyl to be exact, with a unique handrawn front cover no less.

But they do exist and Shadow has been giving them away to DJs and fans via his site and posts on Twitter. There are rumoured to be only 100 copies at the moment, each with its own unique sleeve design and stamp bearing the legend ‘Handmade, because you’re worth it’ on the back. I was lucky enough to receive a copy earlier this week after a heads up from Joost over at the Sole Sides board and people have begun adding images of their copies to Discogs on the release’s entry page. Here’s mine but I have several other ‘handmade’ Shadow records I’ve collected over the years that I thought I’d share with you.

Def Surrounds UsHandmade stamp

This is my copy of the ‘Enuff (DJ Fresh remix)/This Time’ single, this was a regular white label copy that I’m pretty sure I customised with a sticker from elsewhere. There are 100 copies of a fully sprayed and stencilled Paul Insect version that were sold through DJ Shadow.com but alas I don’t have one of those.

This TimeEnuff label

In Tokyo a few years ago I stumbled across a pile of these in the Shibuya HMV, supposedly a limited edition for Japan with hand silk screened covers and an extended version of ‘Roy’s Theme’ from the KeepinTime compilation.

Roys ThemeRoys detailRoys theme detail 2Roys theme detail 3

Going even further back we have the ‘Monosyllabik’ promo 12″ that was sneaked out before the Private Press hit, confounding everyone. So much so that I found one in the local exchange for £1, some DJs obviously weren’t too hip to what it was or didn’t care and passed it on. I have three different copies of this: one I was sent as a promo, the other I found in the exchange and the third was from eBay. This is the best of the three, including as it does, all 10 stickers on the front (there were said to be 10 different sleeves designs out there at the time).

Mono 1Mono 2Mono 3

… and last but not least, my very own creation, one of five handmade (and mixed) CDRs of the ‘Press Cuttings’ sampler mix I made of selections from the Private Press in 2002. This aired on Solid Steel and I gave Shadow a copy after a gig which he was then kind enough to add to his official discography later. Each disc has a different image on it and the covers are all made up of graphics from old private press record booth sleeves. Hear it at the bottom of the page.
Press cuttingsPress cuttings backPress cuttings disc

Press Cuttings (The Private Press Compacted) by DJ Food

PS: a section of a Quietus interview with Shadow about the making of the Def Surrounds Us sleeve artwork:

“On the 12”s, all of the sleeves are one-offs. When it was conceived, it was the purest way I could think of to let the music out of my hands and into the chance environment of society… in the most pure and unfucked with way. It wasn’t coming from the label, it wasn’t coming laoded with information. And if I’d had my way originally, it wouldn’t even have had my name on it. It would have been totally anonymous… It would have just let time and people’s own research and ideas determine what it was. I guess in a certain sense cooler heads prevailed and it has come out as a compromise where when you first look at it you’re not going to know what it is or who it is by. But for people like you and me who look at records every day you’re just going to stop and go: “What the fuck is this?” Because it’s removing the art from its proper context. In most cases I would have my kids doodle something and then when they got bored with it I would add my own hyper detail to it. I’m not a great illustrator but I like to draw and my dad was a graphic designer. I like spending a lot of time on pointillism and detail. It doesn’t really matter what the image really is and in fact I try and keep myself from representing anything. In some of them I’ve even added a little note that says, “Please add to the artwork before you pass it along.” We’ve added stickers on some. I like the idea that the art is never quite finished. It was inspired by a lot of other covers that I’ve seen. Obviously this kind of thing has been done before in the DIY scene and the minimal synth scene of the early 80s, so I’m not claiming to have invented the process but I intended it as the most honest and pure delivery mechanism that I could think of. “

Posted in Art, Music, Records. | 11 Comments |

Process: The working practices of Barney Bubbles

So, Nigel Peake is in town, fresh from painting a mural and we’re wandering around Pimlico like a couple of tourists. Clutching an A-Z and an iPhone, we’re trying to find the Chelsea Space which is currently hosting the Barney Bubbles exhibition, Process.

Bubbles, born Colin Fulcher, sadly committed suicide in 1983 and has long been an unsung hero of British sleeve design but this has started to change in recent years after Paul Gorman’s book on his work, ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful’, was published in 2008. Quickly selling out and starting to command high prices on the web it’s now been updated and expanded in a new edition.

Possibly one of the reasons Bubbles isn’t as widely know as, say, Neville Brody, Malcolm,Garrett, Hipgnosis, Peter Saville or Jamie Reid is because his work spanned both both ends of the seventies and beyond – the hippy / prog / rock and the punk eras –  and never conceded to one house style for anyone. The two things he’s probably most known for – Hawkwind and Stiff Records – couldn’t be much further apart. Looking at one of his Hawkwind sleeves and then an Elvis Costello or Ian Dury from later you’d be hard-pressed to see any sort of stylistic link, yet he did them both.

After walking up and down the street way too many times, asking in the Tate to a bemused attendant and eventually finding the space via a round-the-houses route through the College of Art we realise we’d walked right past it. Failing to notice the sign outside the inconspicuous door set back from the main road, we should have stopped yakking and paid a bit more attention.

Anyway, once inside we were greeted by walls pasted with vintage music paper ads and posters of late 70’s vintage, a couple of old record players sporting various vinyl rarities, badges, stickers and a gorgeous rack of Ian Dury ‘Do It Yourself’ wallpaper-sleeved LPs. Right in, no messing about. Along the bottom of one wall were various publications all sporting BB covers including a John Cooper-Clark ‘Directory 1979’ an issue of the NME, Nova magazine and a Hawkwind programme.

A long, thin, tall corridor then stretches up before turning into the main exhibition room and one wall is covered with posters and record sleeves, the Hawkwind ones unfolded flat to show off their wares. Frustratingly the sharp viewing angle meant that the higher pieces were hard to see properly, further compounded by spot lighting which caused glare on anything in a PVC protective sleeve.

Into the main room, past a giant hanging Chuck Berry sculpture and here’s the good stuff. Cases of artifacts, portraits, sketchbooks, paintings, paste ups, reference books, even materials like Rotring pens he left behind. One wall is covered in original art paste up sheets, tracing paper with notes covering some of them, all hung with big bulldog clips which is a nice touch throughout. Another wall is full of beautifully presented black and white art, logos, layouts – a mixture of paint, pen, Letraset and whiteout – all of which would have blended into one under the camera later.

It must have been a difficult task for the curators to hang the work because it was so random, finding obvious themes and connections is almost impossible with Bubbles because each piece is so different from the next. Sure he has various tricks and techniques that he employs, his mixture of abstract and 3D shapes to make words for instance, but it’s as if he was always starting from scratch with each new piece. His foldout sleeves for Hawkwind and Elvis Costello are placed behind perspex but even they jut out at points, unable to be contained in such a space.

I’m no expert on Bubbles but this looks like a goldmine of his work for anyone remotely interested in him or the groups he designed for. Also this is a great reminder of how things were done decades ago, pre-digital, everything is hand drawn, painted, cut and pasted and it’s beautiful to see, especially all the whited out parts. Although by no means a complete overview – several pieces are conspicuous by their absence – the curators intend this to be more of a stepping stone to bigger things later and the new edition of the book should help this.

The exhibition is on now until October 23rd at Chelsea Space,

16 John Islip Street,

London, Sw1P 4JU
More details here

and visit Paul Gorman’s excellent blog on all things Barney Bubbles

and a good, quick overview of his work at feuilleton

Posted in Art, Books, Design, Event, Music, Records. | 2 Comments |

Familiar?

Interesting image, looks familiar, seen it before somewhere, can’t place it…

hff_main_strip_site_v2TCO A2 poster (promo)

I’m just kidding, go check this out if you’re in London this weekend, a couple of Light Surgeons’ things are playing:

SCHLIMAZELTOV! dir. Christopher Thomas Allen 11m
Documentary short exploring the concept of luck or “mazel” through London’s Jewish Community.
(this is excellent and beautifully shot)

and a live performance of

TRUE FICTIONS 80m
True Fictions is a live audio-visual spectacle that fuses documentary film making, music, animation and motion graphics with cutting edge digital performance tools. A stunning collage of music and live cinema which explores the themes of truth and myth through a multitude of American and Native American voices; with a original musical score created through the collaborations of 25 New York based musicians and vocal artists.
(you need to see this live, multi-layered screen collage at its best)

More info here

Paris XX

The Paris show on Friday was great fun, packed out, great to see Vadim and Yarah on a Ninja bill again too. During mine and DK’s set someone pulled the fire alarm and all the power went off on stage for more than 5 minutes. Unfortunately we were in the middle of a drum n bass section so that went down like a damp squib. Before the gig I went up to the Galerie Chappe to see the exhibition of Ninja art and sleeve design that had been put on, apparently 1,500 people turned out for the opening! Ping Pong, who have done promotion for Ninja for over a decade now under the leadership of Fred ‘DJ Oof’ Elalouf, did a great job of putting together a show which included original art, paste up sheets, sleeves, huge posters and specially made prints of selected covers. They also made exclusive T-shirts, seats and a huge banner for the gigs which greeted me when I walked into the venue.  See photos from the exhibition here (warning, this is a Facebook photo album), and it’s on until October 2nd. There are 4 more gigs coming up in Paris over the next few weeks including a huge, long sold out line up at La Machine and two gigs at the Pompidou Centre.

XX banner, ParisGalerie Chappe Ninja L'expo

Trax magazine and Paris gig

Trax coverTrax contentsFree CdTomorrow, DK and I do the first of the official Ninja Tune XX gigs in Paris, there’s an exhibition opening tonight with cover art and all sorts of material picked from the archives. I’m looking forward to seeing photos but couldn’t be there myself as we’re gearing up with our live set for the anniversary shows. The 4 deck set with be audio/visual with a heavy bias towards Ninja’s greatest moments from the last two decades.

Also just out in France is music magazine Trax which generously devotes a WHOLE ISSUE to the birthday celebrations and includes a free sampler CD too. Yours truly was interviewed about the artwork side of things and chose my favourite Ninja-related release (the suitably-titled ‘La Prochaine Fois’ seeing as this subject of this post is France). Also there are several of Nigel Peake’s drawings published including his study of the Ninja HQ and a mini version of the family tree poster available with the new box set.

Family TreeVisual Food

Posted in Books, Event, Music, Ninja Tune. | 6 Comments |