I found the time to visit the Third Man London shop today and was completely taken with the whole concept and design. Not only is it a record shop but also houses a small basement for live gigs, a book dispenser, a Record-o-gram booth for recording records and masses of merchandise from clothes, badges, turntables, audio gear and anything you can slap a Third Man logo on. I’d recommend a visit just to see what a lovely piece of interior design it is, part shop, part venue, part curio store and museum of Third Man artefacts. Just a very bold statement of intent.
It’s on Marshall St near Carnaby St in Soho, you can’t miss it.
A new ambient compilation is released on Ninja Tune side label, Ahead Of Our Time in November, curated and mixed by Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris in association with Calm, the mental health app designed to help you manage stress, sleep better and live a happier, healthier life. Check the track list below for a seriously impressive line up.
You can listen to a mix of 10 tracks if you use the Calm app here. The comp will be available on 2xLP and 2xCD with nearly 30 tracks on the CD edition. Listen to two previews and order here
Recorded to DAT at home (hence the title) and missing the first 10 minutes or so due to an Autechre live track and Boards of Canada’s ‘Aquarius’ Peel session being taped over them. This mix is rough and ready with some brutal half time Bug/Ice beats giving way to jump up D’n’B including UK remixes of The Beastie Boys and Missy Elliot.
Part 2 slows the pace a little and moves into sample territory with the Weather Report-sampling Noise/Paradox ‘Last Night on Earth’ and Jadell’s old school nod, ’Sureshot’ (apologies for the dust on the needle). An unknown track follows that gives way to the techno jazz of Bedouin Ascent’s remix of Move D, such a complex bit of programming. I’m sure I’ve got a tape of unreleased BA music from way back somewhere.
I’ve no idea why Knights of the Turntable is in here, an early 80’s electro B side with all this modern stuff? I must have just got a copy second hand and the tempo was right. CSM’s ‘The Way’ was on Clear offshoot, Reel and Norken’s remix does that rare thing of evoking what I call ‘night time techno’, early hours of the morning headphones music like Elektroids or B12. Jega comes along and ruins that particular mood with his distorted beats and we finish with excerpts from Marshall McLuhan’s ‘The Medium Is The Massage’ which has been laced throughout the mix. You can detect traces of samples that appeared in the following year’s ‘Kaleidoscope’ album in here too in some of the vocal snippets.
For the Solid Steel scholars, the missing tracks from the start of part 1 were apparently:
DJ VADIM – AURAL PROSTITUTION (SWOPE MIX)
STEVE GREY – STEVE GREY
Track list:
Part 1
DJ VADIM – LORD FORGIVE ME (BUG DOOMSDAY LINE MIX)
ICE – X-1(UNDERDOG MIX)
BEASTIE BOYS – INTERGALACTIC (P.O.TECH/TMS REMIX)
MISSY ELLIOT – HIT ‘EM WITH THE HEE (GANJA KRU REMIX)
Part 2
NOISE/PARADOX – LAST NIGHT ON EARTH
JADELL – THE SURE SHOT
Unknown – unknown
MOVE D – HURT ME (BEDOUIN ASCENT MIX)
KNIGHTS OF THE TURNTABLE – FRESH DUB
CSM – THE WAY (NORKEN MIX)
JEGA – CARBON 60
Apparently these flyer don’t come up for sale very often and I’ve certainly never seen one. There are only three in this diamond style and they are extremely rare. Hard to tell who the artist is although it looks like there may be a signature near the bottom of the keyhole shape. Anyway, saw this and thought I’d share.
An email from the mysterious ‘Rolito’ arrived one day in 2003 with an offer of being one of 6 designers to customise a new line of toys he was making. Each toy had a tiny body and a large, dome-shaped head inside of which was another, smaller, stash box. I was intrigued as I’ve been a fan of the vinyl toy ‘thing’ since Michael Lau came out with his Crazy Children around 2000 and the thought of having my own one was something that appealed greatly. The other thing that appealed was that Rolito had a crazy website based around a load of characters he had created that inhabited Rolitoland. There was little or no explanation about these creatures but the attention to detail and graphic ideas were more than enough to hook me in.
The brief was open and I decided to adapt my Ninja logo around the toy using various different existing graphics and logos to make a ‘RolitoTune Ninjaboy’. The process for getting the graphics onto the toy were slightly limited so I wasn’t able to do some of the things I wanted to. I suggested we include a 3″ CD in the package with a selection of Ninja music to add to the promotional aspect of the toy so that people who didn’t know where it came from would be introduced to the label via the disc. One of the beauties of the Rolito packaging is that it dismantles without having to tear, cut or unstick anything, this meant that the empty vacuum packing would ultimately become the ‘sleeve’ that would house the CD.
There were only 450 made, Ninja got around 150 I think and sold the lot within a weekend over the net, some of which have since appeared on eBay for up to £99. I also contributed a short soundtrack to an animation on his website that showed the shipment getting stuck at the French customs – a scenario that actually happened.
Saturday’s Groovy Record Fayre, organised by Jonny Trunk (Trunk Records) and Ian Shirley (Record Collector) was an absolute blast. Further cohort Pete Williams and I had a table selling vinyl, CDs, ephemera, comics, books and more and it was more than worth our while. Loads of people stopped by to say hello and browse and later on, after the stalls had been cleared, there was a pub quiz on music. After this, Martin Green and Jarvis Cocker stepped up to DJ and some of the tables were cleared for a full on party. It was the first time we’d danced in public for 18 months and it felt fantastic, tune of the night was The Inhuman League with ‘You Were Working As A Waitress In A Cocktail Bar’ – look it up if you don’t know it. Thanks to everyone who came along, said hello and bought something, I hope they do it again next year.
Ian Shirley (Record Collector / Om Swagger)
Doug Shipton (Finders Keepers)
Mark Pawson (Pawson Novelties)
Jonny Cuba (Soundsci / Other Mirror) and Ollie Teeba (The Herbaliser / Soundsci)
Martin and James (The Karminsky Experience Inc.)
Julian House (Intro / Ghost Box / The Focus Group)
L-R James (Karminski Experience Inc.), Edwin Pouncey (Savage Pencil), Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth / Ecstatic Peace)
Gavin (Spun Out Of Control), Martin Green (Smashing / Duovision), Jonny Cuba (Soundci / Other Mirror)
Shane Quentin (Garden of Earthly Delights), Edwin & Jill, Alan Gubby (Buried Treasure Records / Revbjelde)
Martin Green and Mark Moore (S’Express)
Lawrence (Felt / Denim) and Trevor Jackson (Playgroup / The Underdog / Bite It!)
Adam Seth-Ward (Kesselrunners) and Robin The Fog (Howlround / The New Obsolescents)
Delayed Pt. 2 to Mixcloud 72 because of the Now, Listen anniversary the past 2 weeks
Recorded over the Xmas break of ’98/99 (where PC and I went to LA to play at a disastrous New Year party which ended in multiple hospitalisations from a bad drugs batch and police shut down). This sounds like a live set recorded at home, possibly on three decks and is full of contemporary electronica, jazz, library and that end of the millennium weirdness where there wasn’t any dominant scene happening.
The King Biscuit Time track that kicks this off is a real anomaly for me, I never founds anything else by them that did it for me but this absolutely rocks. Absolutely joyous with that filthy break and weird bass line. Paddington Breaks were from the same stable as Animals On Wheels, lazily bundled in under the name ‘drill n bass’ on account of them sometimes aping Squarepusher‘s completely style of programming. As you can hear, that was far from the truth with this track, sounding more like vintage Black Dog that anything else.
Stereolab were generally turning anything they touched to gold around this time and their Pastels remix is no exception despite dodgy ‘scratched’ flute sound. John Callaghan has been making music for 30 years and released a couple of 7″s on Warp at the end of the decade. The spooky ‘I’m not comfortable in my own mind’ wasn’t something you’d associate with the label at the time but not a million miles away from Broadcast in tone. More Warp with another BoC Peel Session track before something from Bundy K Brown‘s short-lived Pullman project, an acoustic instrumental outfit with only two albums to their discography.
Bundy was always moving on to different projects from Tortoise, Grey Market Goods or Pullman, his Directions debut EP, Echoes, has just been reissued after 25 years with extra material on Temporary Residence. Air (the German alias of Pete Namlook version – their are over 30 bands called Air on Discogs) appear again with another track from their Fax debut. Major Force West had an album collected on Mo Wax of various tracks from ’97-99, some rumoured to originally be slated for the UNKLE LP before James Lavelle changed direction and producers. To me it’s a brilliant record, full of mind-expanding trip hop in the very best psychedelic sense. Snatches of the moon landing, shortwave recordings, parts of How To Speak Hip and all manner of analogue electronics over a steady breakbeat goes down very nicely.
We finish where we started in part one of this show with the Karminsky‘s and a track from their second single, ‘The Hip Sheik EP’, insultingly files under Electronic: Acid Jazz on Discogs, far from it. Peppered throughout this show and the previous one were snatches of The Tape Beatles from their ‘A Subtle Buoyancy Of Pulse’ debut (or possibly ‘Music With Sound’, I forget). Either releases are incredible cut up/collage albums in the style of Negativland, People Like Us or The Books and The Orb have pillaged the latter for years.
King Biscuit Time – Niggling Discrepancy
Paddington Breaks – Blimsearch
The Pastels – One Wild Moment (Stereolab mix)
John Callaghan – Smearhead
Boards of Canada – Olsen
Pullman – Tall Grass
Air – 1st Impression
Major Force West – Circling Round
The Karminsky Experience – Suspense
The Tape Beatles – Outro
I’ve compiled some of my favourite Command sleeves for a 4th volume of Forgotten Graphics – 24 pgs, buy here
Or I will have copies with me at Jonny Trunk‘s Groovy Record Fair this Saturday
I’ll be having a stall with my Further co-pilot, Pete Williams, this weekend at Jonny Trunk‘s first Groovy Record Fayre which, I’m reliably informed, will double as a celebration of 25 years of Trunk Records with DJs, a quiz, three bars and snooker tables in a glorious listed building. I’ll have various bits of Ninja Tune ephemera like promo CDs, flyers, posters, plus of course, some vinyl, comics and other oddities I can dig up. It’s all free, details above.
The incredible Cut Chemist 2.5 minute workout of Blackalicious’ ‘Alphabet Aerobics’ starts us off into the second section of the Director’s Cut, upping the tempo considerably into Four Tet’s epic ‘Glasshead’. Camping Gaz and Digi Random’s crazed theremin and ska ‘Circus World’ didn’t make the cut and neither did the UK garage beats of Sunship’s ‘Cheque One, Two’ (it’s a nice idea but a bit out of tune). The next section is so sublime and stayed in for exactly that reason, Herbie Hancock’s ‘Nobu’ out of ‘Glasshead’ and then into Link’s ‘Arcadian’ is, as Ninja’s licensing manager at the time, Dean Smith, used to say, ‘a moment’. Talking of which, this half of the mix was taken from the radio broadcast so DK, Dean and I are present occasionally to chat and track back over things. PC performed some judicious edits of ’Nobu’ for the final mix as it’s a very long track but the full thing appears here.
It was such a shame we couldn’t license Lorez Alexandra’s ‘Baltimore Oriole’ as the mix out of Link with the pitched down ending melody over it and then into Art of Noise’s ‘Moments In Love’ is just delicious. Another, err, moment occurs out of the AON and into Vangelis’ ‘Let It Happen’, originally slated to be the closer but replaced by Faze-O’s ‘Riding High’ on the final CD. The final section here was a proposed end selection I made which was vetoed for the mix coupling Coldcut’s ‘Autumn Leaves’ acappella with Air’s ‘Modular Mix’ and a lot of delay action. Following this is 10cc’s classic, ‘I’m Not In Love’ beautifully sliding into ‘Moments In Love’, the former I’m convinced of which was some sort of inspiration for the latter. The chord change as they mix together is another moment for me but the others weren’t having it, 10cc were just too uncool. The telephone message that ends the mix was left for me by Dom Smith, another Ninja Tune office employee (and now manager of Flying Lotus, Thundercat and the Cinematic Orchestra), in response to my answerphone containing a snatch of Missy Elliot’s ‘Beep Me 911’ at the time.
Part 2
Blackalicious – Alphabet Aerobics
Four Tet – Glasshead
Camping Gaz & Digi Random – Circus World
Sunship – Cheque One, Two
Herbie Hancock – Nobu
Link – Arcadian
Lorez Alexandra – Baltimore Oriole
Art of Noise – Moments in Love
Boards of Canada – The Colour of the Fire
Vangelis – Let it Happen
Air – Modular Mix
Coldcut – Autumn Leaves (acappella)
10cc – I’m Not in Love
Art of Noise – Moments in Love
The Quadraphon Mk II – a lot of last week was spent working on this, making container pods that hold three extra tone arms, attached to a modular sliding rail that can be fitted over any DJ turntable.
Each tone arm can be moved and locked into position to recalibrate where the arm sits in the groove and the whole thing comes apart for portability.
It’s not perfect but better than the Mark I which had free-standing tone arms. Still got to perfect the sliding action to make it smoother and retool one of the pods but it all works. If you want to hear what comes out of such a contraption then check out the releases on my Infinite Illectrik label on Bandcamp.
Its debut should be at the Castles In Space Levitation show in Whitby, Nov 6th as part of The New Obsolescents’ first proper live show, the time and details of which are below. There are two nights and tickets can be bought here
20 years ago PC, DK and I presented a unique extended cut of our new Solid Steel mix as the CD was released and we were about to embark on a US tour with Four Tet and Bonobo to support it. This gave us an opportunity to retool the mix and add many parts originally up for consideration but not included for various reasons of time, flow or licensing restrictions. The devastating events of 9/11 the week before meant that the idea of including DJ Vadim’s ‘The Terrorist’ acappella was now firmly out of the window and this was replaced by Missy’s ‘Get Ur Freak On’ for the tour. In this mix it’s replaced with a selection of interview snippets PC had recorded from a round of pre-tour interviews.
In the original mix incarnation we had a section by Ollie Teeba from The Herbaliser as a guest (there was an idea that this would come out as an all-star affair with the Ninja Tune 10th anniversary Xen Cuts compilation originally but it wasn’t finished in time). Ollie’s section was added back in as well as many other ideas and additions that got cut in the final edit. Licensing problems meant that we couldn’t get loads of these like Vangelis (had fallen out with his label), Pharaoh Monch (big Godzilla sample they were being sued over) and Sesame Street were unhappy with their track being used next to rap tracks. This ended up being a godsend as their ‘Pinball Number Count’ would have settled near to DJ Vadim’s track and possibly scuppered the whole release. As it was we released it later as a standalone track and it was all the better for it.
The Jeru / Cinematic / DJ Shadow / Ken Nordine mix I used to do on my opening sets for Kid Koala and Amon Tobin during 2000 and Pharaoh Monch’s ‘Simon Says’ scratched into The Addams Family Theme was a little thing I used to do in my DJ sets and we overlaid the original to labour the point for this mix. Sabu Martinez made it into the mix and got extended with a couple of other tracks for a really uptempo part.
The Boards of Canada meet Grandmaster Flash long form mash up was a staple of my club sets around this time with the payoff coming when Melle Mel’s verse comes in as the track takes off. Blending perfectly into Ollie Teeba’s set of old school hip hop, breaks and Herbaliser tracks, this section didn’t make it as I think we changed directions as it wasn’t ready for the 10th anniversary and the Solid Steel mix CD series was formed out of that idea with The Herbaliser doing the third entry. Another Boards track after Pinball Number Count was probably way too much but the counting and children subject matter made it fit as well as the perfect tempo to introduce Blackalicious’ ‘Alphabet Aerobics’ which will kick off part 2 next week…
Part 1
Jeru Tha Damaja – Come Clean
The Cinematic Orchestra – Channel 1 Suite
Neotropic – Beached
DJ Shadow – Changeling
Ken Nordine – Looks Like It’s Gonna Rain
Mr Scruff – Ug
The Grooverobbers feat. DJ Shadow – Hardcore Instrumental Hip Hop
Pharoah Monch – Simon Says (instr)
Sabu Martinez – Hotel Alyssa-Soussie, Tunisia
Boards of Canada – Happy Cycling
Grandmaster Flash – The Message
Jazzy Jay – Cold Chillin’ In the Spot
Wildstyle Brakebeats – Gangbusters
Creators – Hard Margin (instr)
The Herbaliser feat Bahamadia – When I Shine (acappella)
The Nextmen – Mental Alchemy (instr)
The Herbaliser feat Latyrx – 8 pt Agenda (accapella)
Slick Rick – It’s a Boy (remix Instr)
Common – Resurrection
The Herbaliser – Shocker Zulu
Walt Kraemer feat. The Pointer Sisters – Pinball Number Count
Boards of Canada – Aquarius
On my travels round the web I ran across these late 60s parody drug posters – the following info was cribbed from the Worthpoint website:
Vintage Psychedelic Poster ‘Cocaine Candy’ Limited Print
Published by The Esoteric Poster Company in 1967
Hand-Pulled Serigraph on Thick Stock Paper, Semi-Gloss Finish
Original Art by Robert Wendell, after Roland Crump
Printing by Gawdawful Graphics / Wendell & Klopp
20″ x 13″ Black Light Sensitive
The Esoteric Poster Company, founded by Howard Morseburg in California during the early 1960’s, had a brief run before folding for good in 1968. The beatnik satirical ‘drug’ parody posters achieved popularity from the community they sought to mock. Owner and founder Howard Morseburg hired artists Roland Crump (acclaimed Disney animator) and Robert Wendell to produce the designs. Very limited printing, less than 300 (as low as 100) printed.. among the most collectible and prized of all 1960’s psychedelic era posters.
Guaranteed original from very limited back stock, from Howard Morseburg’s gallery in Alhambra, California.
A bit more history:
Howard Morseburg (1924-2012) began his career in the art business in the 1950s. He was a World War II veteran who had served in the Merchant Marine and later worked in the book and magazine business. As a young officer during the war, Morseburg was on the “Murmansk Run” to the Soviet Union and other perilous wartime voyages through the submarine-infested North Atlantic. It was one of Morseburg’s friends from this time, a young skipper named Jim Greenberg, who was to introduce him to the art business.
After the war, this friend became a ship’s captain on the Atlantic route, and began importing paintings by European artists to the United States. In Europe, which was still suffering from the economic after effects of the war, there was no appreciable market for these artists’ work. During the 1950s Greenberg began selling the paintings he imported to galleries, furniture stores and interior designers who were then developing a wider consumer market for art than had existed before the war. From his base in Seattle, where he and his young family were then living, Howard Morseburg followed suit, and he began selling paintings imported from Europe throughout the western United States.
In addition to the European paintings he received, Morseburg began representing young American artists. He also became involved in the West Coast printmaking movement. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he started to represent young artists like Wayne Thiebaud, Elton Bennett and Mel Ramos, who created their own hand-pulled prints. It was this interest in printmaking that helped lead to his next venture.
The Beatnik Posters: About 1960, Morseburg became interested in creating humorous and satirical posters. At this time, the “beatnik” movement was in full swing and coffee houses and jazz clubs were full of beatniks spouting free-form poetry to the beat of bongo drums. To Morseburg, the beatnik movement found in Greenwich Village, Seattle, San Francisco and the East Bay was ripe for satire. He met a talented young Disney artist and Imagineer named Roland Crump at a gift shop in the San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. Crump was a brilliant and eccentric young artist and designer who became one of the most important Disney “Imagineers.” Crump was already producing some hand-pulled beatnik posters before he met Morseburg, but once the association began, Morseburg had larger quantities of some of the posters published using the photo-offset process.
Crump designed a series of images that satirized the drug culture that was developing among the Beats, which Morseburg took on the road, travelling down the coast from Seattle to San Diego. In that era, drug use was not widespread and they were chiefly popular with musicians and beatnik hipsters. So, Esoteric Poster’s first releases were “Smoke Marijuana,” “Fly High, Fly Heroin Airlines” “Cocaine” and “Opium.”The next posters were which poked fun at a Beatnik club, and “Big Liz,” which was a colorful poster of a Beatnik princess. Those 30″ x 24″ posters were silk screened in three colours and for posterity’s sake they cost $0.50 to produce, were sold to book stores for only $1.00 and retailed for $1.95.
In the course of his frequent sales trips to visit art galleries, Morseburg personally distributed Esoteric’s posters. His primary outlets for the posters were the book stores along the west coast that catered to college students in Berkeley, Stanford, Portland, Seattle, San Francisco and San Diego. These posters were produced as very early critical parody of the drug culture by the Esoteric Poster Company, but the message was so subtle that they were popular among the very community they sought to mock.
Below are a few more I’ve run across although details about dates and print houses are scarce but I’m reasonably sure they’re from the same era.
Original vintage black light ultra violet poster designed by Dominick Jago, 1969.
Depiction of the pharmacopeia of the era.
Publisher: Poster Prints, Plymouth Square Center-Conshohocken, PA.
Dimensions: full sheet: 21″ x 31.5″
Printed by The US Department of Health, Education and Welfare; Public Health Services and Mental Health Administration, possibly 1969 although other sources say 70’s.
Recorded over the Xmas break of ’98/99 (where PC and I went to LA to play at a disastrous New Year party which ended in multiple hospitalisations from a bad drugs batch and police shut down). This sounds like a live set recorded at home, possibly on three decks and is full of contemporary electronica, jazz, library and that end of the millennium weirdness where there wasn’t any dominant scene happening.
A blast of Tape Beatles opens before The Karminsky Experience Inc. and Dynamic Syncopation bring the fast breaks and soundtrack vibes in. People were increasingly becoming interested in OSTs and library tracks at the end of the 90s with lots of bootlegs and a few licensed comps floating around. Air‘s ambient classic on Fax continued this but in a more downtempo vein, not to be confused with the French band of the same name despite using a French title, this was a Pete Namlook alias.
Bruce Haack’s ‘Word Game’ beams in, completely from another galaxy with its chugging Moog groove, only to be superseded by Grooverider‘s excellent ‘Where’s Jack The Ripper’. I felt D’n’B was going through a dull patch at the time with all the dark No U-Turn type stuff not really floating my boat but this had that funk to it that had been lost over the last few years. The Boards of Canada Peel Sessions were out and they always got a lot of love from me on the show so I couldn’t resist halving the tempo and then mixing Grooverider in again over ‘Aquarius’. Followed is Slag Boom Van Loon‘s ‘Poppy Seed’, a track Boards would soon remix for the Planet Mu label.
Part 2 next week!
The Tape Beatles – Intro
The Karminsky Experience Inc. – The Hip Sheik
Dynamic Syncopation – Closer To The Line
Air – Je Suis Triste Et Seul Ici
Bruce Haack – Word Game
Grooverider – Where’s Jack the Ripper
Boards of Canada – Aquarius
Slag Boom Van Loon – Poppy Seed
The Tape Beatles – Outro
There’s a free Savage Pencil exhibition at Orbital Space for the month of September, that being the new name for Orbital Comics on 8 Great Newport Street, Covent Garden. There are T-shirts and prints for sale as well as prices on most of the artwork although they’re not cheap. It’s great to see the originals to the Nothing Short of Total War compilation on Blast First as well as several others and Edwin’s visual bite hasn’t dimmed in the last 40 years.
In the front of the shop there’s also a great display of Graham Humphreys‘ work for film and books, mainly dealing with horror or B movie content. It’s great to see the originals and most are for sale although some have already been taken.
Amon Tobin‘s 2002 album, ‘Out From Out Where’ is reissued today on Ninja Tune. It’s pressed on gold vinyl, l’ve remade the sleeve from the original files and it now includes a double sized poster. Order here https://ninjatune.net/release/amon-tobin/out-from-out-where