Music

DJ Shadow – The Less You Know, The Better

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

Posted in Art, Music, Records. | 2 Comments |

Pepe Deluxé and the Great Stalacpipe Organ

As mentioned before on this blog, Pepe Deluxé‘s next album – ‘Queen of the Wave’ – is an incredible journey in both audio and fantasy. Details of exactly how much of a journey it has been (and why the record hasn’t appeared yet) are just beginning to emerge with the release date scheduled for early 2012. There’s digging and then there is journeying underground to find sample sources for your record, Pepe went the latter route for one track, ‘In The Cave’.

The main reason for the delay of the record was the duo’s desire to record on the largest instrument in the world, the Great Stalacpipe Organ in the underground caverns of Luray, Virginia, USA. The organ is situated underground in a 14,000 square meter cave where the stalactites have been tuned to concert pitch by oscillators and are then struck by rubber mallets in a complicated set up connected to the organ by over 5 miles of wiring. I’m not making this up, it was conceived in the mid 50’s by mathematician Leland W. Sprinkle after his son banged his head on a stalactite and it rung with a pleasant sound. When Pepe first discovered its existence in 2005 (via the 365 Days project) they found that it had fallen into disrepair and had to be renovated completely, this ended up taking several years but they got the green light in late 2010.


Paul Malmström from PD wrote an original composition for the the organ – the first ever written and recorded for it – and traveled from his home in New York to record it earlier this year. In front of a crowd on onlookers (it was a public holiday so the cavern was open) he managed to record several takes and complete the final piece in the jigsaw for the record, forthcoming on Catskills in January 2012. A single – ‘The Storm’ – is released on October 10th and many things are afoot on the Pepe website and new Facebook page. 2012 is going to be a mighty fine year for music…

(Paul and his giant organ – insert suitable double entendre in the comments please)

Posted in Event, Music. | 3 Comments |

Andy Votel – Vintage Volts mix

Only just managed to get a copy of this on CD – a great mix of analogue and 8-Bit wonders from Andy’s seemingly endless collection. Excellent artwork to go with it too, a nice story behind it and sound clips are here. Unfortunately it’s out of stock at FK but a couple of places have it if you look around the web.

Posted in Music. | No Comments |

Holy Sh*t Batman! DJ Format & Mr Thing!

Christ this is good, Mary, mother of Joseph, this is shit hot, God I love a mix with a theme and they don’t get much better than this. DJ Format and Mr Thing – I’m not going to bother with any potted biogs, if you don’t know them, go and find out what you’ve been missing all these years.

Anyway, they put this together as a limited edition CD in 2009. Packed full of religious records of every persuasion and slant, it’s been uploaded to Soundcloud for your delectation. All kneel and praise the masters.

Holy Shit – DJ Format & Mr Thing by dj format

Posted in Music. | 2 Comments |

The Death Set new album & single artwork

.
•
Remember the iconic artwork for the first Death Set record back in 2009? One of my favourite covers of the year and their new releases are high on the list for 2011 as well. Another blend of B&W collage with yellow and red, this time coming on like Richard Hamilton meeting Eduardo Paolozzi. Below are the album and singles, front and back, plus a tour poster I found featuring additional artwork. Buy ’em all here.



Posted in Design, Music, Ninja Tune. | No Comments |

Mat Ducasse / Skylab / Disqo Conqrette mix CD

After posting this the other month I was contacted and sent this lovely item by Mat Ducasse himself from Skylab. It’s an excellent mix of French pop, psych rock, electronics and soundtracks, packaged beautifully with inserts and a unique CD sleeve. No idea if you can buy it anywhere but there’s a Disqo Conqrette page with a free mix here (different to this CD) and a sparse Facebook page here

Posted in Music. | 3 Comments |

DJ Food – Magpies, Maps & Moons CD promo


Not for general sale but I bet there will be a few out there as journalists hear it, go ‘WTF?’ and sell them to their local record store. The 12″ should be at the label later this week, full photos when I get it. This is the final of 3 EPs and is released on 12″ and download on Nov 7th. ‘The Search Engine’ album will be out Jan 16th, 2012 and features versions of 12 tracks taken from the EPs, plus some exclusive bits.

Posted in DJ Food, Music, Ninja Tune. | 7 Comments |

JG Thirlwell artwork

A couple of projects JG has been involved with recently have really caught my eye on the artwork front, both have a medical angle and lean on the black, white and red colour palette.

The first is Manorexia – ‘Dinoflagellate Blooms’, a double disc pack with X-rays and syringes. Click for larger versions. Buy it from JGT’s site here. It’s a double CD with regular and 5.1 surround sound version.


The second is a lovely 4 track 10″ under the name Hydrose Plus, a collaboration with Fred Bigot. The cover shows a face from a medical encyclopedia in profile but when you take the clear vinyl 10″ out of the sleeve you realise that the eyeball is printed on the label and fits perfectly into the eye socket on the front. Not only that but you also get an insert with the inside of the face cut away.

Buy it directly from the label here.

Posted in Design, Music, Records. | 1 Comment |

64 Bar Challenge No.6 mix

The 64 Bar Challenge mix I did has finally gone up, 29 tracks in 52 minutes, the brief was for each track to be 110 beats per minute and last 64 bars. The series was originated on the Ninja Tune forum by Kovas and driven over 6 different challenges  with entries from all over the world.
The quality was really high, largely leaning towards the electronic end of the spectrum, and with roughly 50/50 of the entrants being unsigned or never having released anything. Take a listen and see what you think and contact Kovas at [email protected] if there’s anything here you’d like to know more about, we’d both like to see some of this talent get a lot further. If you go to mixcloud you can see who did what as it scrolls through the mix.

Posted in DJ Food, Music. | No Comments |

Alex Paterson 3 hour Orb special

.
•
I love The Orb, one of my favourite groups, and here Alex Paterson goes on a 3 hour mission with all sorts of rare or unheard versions, mixes and the like from their back catalogue. That unreleased remix of U2‘s ‘Numb’ that there are only 2 acetates of? He plays a lot of it here. Unreleased mixes from ‘…Ultraworld’ or a 2010 remix of ‘The Blue Room’. You can listen to it here on The 180, a monthly mix show from Music For Listeners on KRTU in San Antonio. Alex’s is July’s mix and Junes is System 7 whilst August is Thomas Fehlmann with exclusives all round.

•

.

Posted in Music. | No Comments |

DJ Food flexi disc

Yes I can hardly believe it myself, I’ve wanted to have a flexi disc with my music on it for as long as I can remember and today they arrived. The fact that the last major manufacturer of flexis shut up shop in 2001 didn’t deter me from looking all these years and I finally found someone who had restarted the process late last year. David Read over at Vinyl Record Guru in Nanaimo, Canada is the man to speak to and they do a wide range of coloured inks, several different disc colours and both 33 and 45 rpm.

This little beauty will (somehow) be given away with a limited CD of my album sold via the Ninja Tune online shop later this year. More details when I have them (and better pictures too!) I’ve been planning to showcase my flexi disc collection for a while so I might do one a week starting next year in a ‘Flexi-stentialism’ section.



 

Posted in DJ Food, Flexi Discs, Music. | 7 Comments |