Coldcut – 2 Hours of Sanity Pt.1: Love

It’s easy, in this daily avalanche of media, to hype something to the stars and proclaim it the greatest thing in the universe. People are paid to do it for a living regardless of the content they’re pushing but I will only feature items here that I truly think measure up.

As it’s the aforementioned 25th anniversary of Solid Steel, we’re pulling out a lot of the stops this year to bring the very best mixes to the show in the sea of free that is the web these days. We’ve had Coldcut meets The Orb, Kirk DeGiorgio embracing ambiance, classic albums by De La Soul and Public Enemy reconstructed by United States of Audio and DJ Moneyshot respectfully and that’s just the first half of the year.

So it’s a great moment when the creators of the show, Coldcut, step up with the first part of a new mix series – ‘2 Hours of Sanity’ – the first part being a mix ruminating on ‘Love’, and it’s up there with the best. This has been germinating for 3 years, I’ve heard it in various forms for at least the last year and it’s fantastic to finally have them share it with everyone. The word ‘masterclass’ has been bandied about a lot in the few days since this debuted and it’s used with good reason.

The art of the mix is about layering, combining songs, sounds and speech in new ways, in a coherent flow and creating something new from old and new. Many mixes are one song after another, beat-mixed into each other to form a perfect linear trip from A to B. It’s my opinion that the best mixes throw tempo, genre and linearity to the wind and travel from A to Z. You’ll know many of the tracks here if you’ve listened to the show over the years but you won’t have heard them like this before.

Not to forget show producer DK holding up the rear of the show with a solid (pun intended) selection and a rather tasty Bollywood Steel’ mix from collaborator 2econd Class Citizen.

Solid Steel radio show image by Andreas Mass

The Solid Steel team got this lovely message and set of images from Andreas Mass thanking us for our work over the last 25 years on the show.

“I’ve been listening to the Solid Steel Radio Show for many years now. You never failed to make my day, or at least make it a better day by bringing out a new mix.
To all who are responsible for managing the Radio Show and of course to every regular and featured DJ, big props for creating, evolving and keeping it running!”

Andreas is a graphic designer and 3D artist working in Cologne, Germany and you can see more images and his artist profile on Behance.

On a personal note it’s kind of crazy to think that I debuted on the show in the summer of 1993 – 20 years ago! I had just left graphic design college and was asked by Matt Black to guest under the Openmind name with one of my flatmates at the time, Mario Aguera.

Since then, having been asked back again and again, I became one of the team and have lost count of the amount of mixes I’ve clocked up on the show. It’s sometimes easy to forget that I have a platform at my disposal as and when I make mixes and that that platform has a growing numbers of fans every week. I don’t make as many mixes as I’d like these days but I spend much more time than I ever did on the ones I do to ensure they at least come up to standard with the rest of the content.

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(Mr) Chop ‘Illuminate’ LP


I’ve not even heard the whole album yet but I know I’m going to love it. As the description says: “Studio wizard Chop pulls out all of the analogue stops on the Motorik highway to Cybotron by way of a Tangerine Dream on his debut album for Now-Again. Album out NOW; download a free track at the link!”

Buy: Chop ‘Illuminate’ on iTunes
Download: Chop ‘Building Blocks’
Video By: MR.IMD
Chop website: here

 

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Elysium

I saw ‘Elysium’ earlier today and loved it. The design, acting and pace were all spot on, the cgi was incredible and, despite some seriously implausible technological aspects, it was excellent, easily my favourite film so far this year.

Comparisons with director Neill Blomkamp‘s earlier District 9 were obvious but it definitely isn’t a retread as some reviewers have called it. The overall design is fantastic, especially the weathered, beaten up older tech on the ground and we were spoiled with both that and Syd Mead‘s shiny new designs for the rich living above the earth.

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Last 360 showing of The Search Engine at Think Tank

The last showing of ‘The Search Engine’ 360 dome show is on this Thursday at Birmingham’s Think Tank planetarium. The remaining two shows have been cancelled as there has been a reshuffled in personal so August 22nd is the last date on the cards to see it at this moment in time. Dome Club will continue but outside of Think Tank in various other ways but with Mario Di Maggio at the helm.

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Nostalgia #2 : 90’s version

(disclaimer: I started writing this over a year ago and it’s sat on another machine for a while, I’ve slightly updated it but imagine it would have been published 18 months ago. Photos from my scrapbooks of flyers, cuttings and memorabilia)

90’s nostalgia

In recent months I’ve felt the first genuine pangs of nostalgia for the early 90’s, a time I generally think of as ‘the last decade’. Of course, it’s no longer the last decade, the beginning of the 90’s being 23 years ago. It’s a time I hold very dear as it shaped my life and career as it is today and the person I started out as in 1990 was very different to the one that saw in the new millennium fireworks over London in 1999.

For me, the 90’s was a decade of music, upon music, upon music. My teenage years in the 80’s were a diet of pop (80-85) and Hip Hop (85-90) – almost exclusively, aside from forays into more guitar-orientated material and the House /Acid /Dance explosion at the end of it all. The 90’s seemed to herald a new music style every year: 90: Rave, 91: Ambient, 92: Intelligent Techno, 93: Jungle, 94/95: Brit Pop, Trip Hop & Drum n Bass, 96: Turntablism & Indie Hip Hop, 97: Big Beat and the resurgence of Lounge and Easy Listening, 98: Post Rock and Krautrock’s reappraisal…

In between all this I was steadily helping build the house of Ninja and getting to travel the world for the first time, acquiring huge amounts of new music in the process. I practically bought my Jazz and Funk collections in the US and Canada in the 90’s, along with plenty of Soundtracks, Moog, Easy Listening and Spoken Word records. Europe yielded Music Concreté as well as yet more Jazz and Japan gave up it’s vintage Hip Hop treasures, at double the price they would have no doubt paid for them elsewhere. All the while back home labels like Mo Wax, Warp and of course, Ninja Tune were pumping out classic after classic alongside a revitalised US Hip Hop scene that had managed to extricate part of itself from gangster-ism with labels like Fondle ‘Em, Stones Throw, Def Jux and Sole Sides. The UK Rap scene was also getting itself together with Sound of Money, Bite It, Jazz Fudge and Big Dada.

Late last year (2011) I did an interview with Joe Muggs for Word magazine about the differences between the world and the music industry in 2000 (when ‘Kaleidoscope’ was released) and how it stands today, now that there’s finally a new album out. The contrasts were, of course, quite stark, being that the music business has gone through one of the most radical upheavals in memory in the last 10 years.

At one point in the conversation though, we went off on a tangent and discovered a mutual love for an early 90’s breed of music he’d christianed ‘Drug Dub’. Never a real scene at the time, more a hybrid existing in those transitional moments of fallout after one musical movement and the coalescing of another. In the music world nothing is ever cut and dried and many strands are working simultaneously in different areas, when these veer into each others paths, you usually find a new style emerging at the crossroads they’ve created.

If you had to bookend the schools that spawned this music you’d probably peg the resurgence of ambient after the acid house come down of the late 80’s at one end and Trip Hop in the early to mid 90’s at the other. Inject a heavy does of Dub into the mix via post-‘Screamadelica’-era Weatherall remixes and acts like The Orb and the On-U Sound stable but bypass the resurgence of Jazz and and Soul and any uptempo Rave tendencies you might have. This is electronic stoner music pure and simple, the big come down after the hedonism of the ecstacy-fulled 80’s all-nighters and the, then current, rave boom. This is B-side music, those odd, experimental tracks tucked away on the reverse side of the club bangers on a Rising High 12″ or on compilations by fledgling labels scraping together an ad hoc roster.

It was mostly faceless, save for the odd name artist like Depth Charge, Coil or Meat Beat Manifesto straying into the territory. Odd tracks here and there by John + Julie, Halftone, Aquamarine, Friends, Lovers & Family, Digidub or The Moody Boys. Whilst the KLF, The Orb and The Shamen were giving the charts a major kicking where dance music was concerned and the Rave tours of the Prodigy and 808 State were in full swing, an underbelly of post-club ‘chilling’ (always hated that word) was happening in the early hours. Coldcut were already mining some of this when I first joined them on their Solid Steel show and one of the first tracks I played was ‘Sexy Selector’ by Original Rockers – one of the tracks Joe had selected for a compilation he’d put together, called, you guessed it… ‘Drug Dub’.

A few weeks later (now 2012) we did a Stealth special on Solid Steel where we talked a bit about what went on back in the day at the Blue Note club in Hoxton, the place where it really kicked into gear for Ninja Tune in the mid 90’s. PC played a set entirely made of tracks we used to play at the time and the rush of nostalgia was almost too much, I found myself grinning from ear to ear for the whole hour as it came flooding back. I’d had to delve into this era two years previously for the Ninja Tune 20th anniversary book but that didn’t involve music, only imagery. The reason we did a Stealth special in the first place was to give listeners who were new to the show a bit of history, because, as one person at the station put it, “now that we are into a full-blown 90’s revival…”


It feels like we’re still at the early stages of the 90’s with The Stone Roses reforming, The Orb celebrating 25 years and Primal Scream having done ‘Screamadelica’ in full last year. Classic House and Rave sounds have been coming back into production and the resurgence of the Amen Break in the last year or so seems to indicate that we’re at roughly ’92-93 currently. Can the Trip Hop revival be far behind? Talking of which, I have an even older, longer post about that coming soon…

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Nostalgia

Looking back over the last few posts it all seems to be nostalgia here at the moment: Bambaataa, Duck Rock, Star Wars figures, Boards of Canada represses and old copies of Sounds magazine. I guess it’s pretty obvious where my tastes lie right now, although that’s not to say I’m not loving any current music. But, since I don’t do any current charts here any more I thought I should maybe put together a list of (new) things that I’m loving at the moment.

Sinoia Caves ‘The Enchanter Persuaded’ – this is actually from 2006 but I totally missed it at the time, discovered because Jeremy Schmidt (aka Sinoia Caves) did the soundtrack to ‘Beyond The Black Rainbow’ last year
Dharma Protoco
l feat. Boy George ‘Coming Home‘ (Psychemagik remix) – no one is more surprised than me that I like this, incredible slice of classic House
Black Moth Super Rainbow ‘Dandelion Gum’
LP – again, a few years old but new to me, beautiful summer analogue lo-fi on LSD
Melt Yourself Down ‘Melt Yourself Down
LP (Leaf) – Pigbag meets Fela Kuti meets Liquid Liquid with a drop of acid electronics, the most exciting new band this year.
Chop ‘Mutant’
EP (Now Again)  – Formally Mr Chop, also awaiting the ‘Illuminate’ LP to drop through the letterbox
Boards of Canada ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’
(Warp) – still on rotation
The Simonsound
‘The Beam’ / ‘In The Shadow of the Skylon’ 10″ (Project Blue Book) – new monorail-themed single from Brighton’s finest
Four Tet & Rocketnumbernine ‘Metropolis’
(Text)
Lone ‘Airglow Fires’
(R&S)
Mark Pritchard ‘Lock Off’
EP (Warp)
Ras G ‘Back To The Planet’
LP (Brainfeeder)
Dawn Day Night ‘Higher Plains’
(Astrophonica)
Yosi Howikawa ‘Vapor’
LP (First Word)

That’s some of it anyway, there’s more that I’m waiting on like the Dark Seed 12″, the ‘Cosmic Machine’ compilation and I’m going to need a new tape player before I can hear the ‘Diabolical Melodix’ Beat Tape that Andy Votel just put out. As far as my own output, the summer holidays have slowed things down somewhat with children to look after etc. but I just  remixed a track for a Playstation game and subsequently had it turned down so that was a waste of time. I’ve also just finished an epic Four Tet interview for the Dust & Grooves website, not sure when it will be published but it is HUGE and was a lot of fun to do.

Posted in Music. | 1 Comment |

Nick Egan and the making of the ‘Duck Rock’ LP cover

Nice interview with Nick Egan over on the Album Cover Hall of Fame blog about the design process for Malcolm McLaren‘s ‘Duck Rock’ LP. Easily one of my favourite records of all time along with being a pivotal influential moment in my musical upbringing. With artists such as Dondi White, Keith Haring and Vivienne Westwood‘s wares vying for space on the sleeve it’s a wonder it all hangs together but somehow it does. I wish the interview had gone into the making of the ‘Duck Rocker’ boombox a little as I’d love to know who made it and where it is now.

The mystery revealed: Ron West – who made the original Duck Rocker(s) posted this on his Facebook page at the end of 2020. It’s lost its horns and the graffiti is in a drawer but that is a copy of the original from the LP cover. Apparently Malcolm lost the original in the States and asked Ron to make a copy for promo purposes.

Duck rocker

 

Posted in Art, Design, Records. | 12 Comments |

Kraftwerk and ‘The Cold Wave’ in Sounds 26.11.77

The now defunct weekly UK music paper, Sounds, had a reputation for championing Rock and Heavy Metal above everything else. Writers Garry Bushell and Jon Savage raved and wrote about Oi and Punk respectively but there was more to the paper. 1977: The Queen’s Jubilee and the height of Punk in the media, right? Not by late November in Sounds it wasn’t, this was also the year ‘Trans Europe Express’ was released.

A stark cover featured Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider photographed on the banks of the Rhine in their hometown of Dusseldorf by Caroline Coon, a two page interview leading the first part of a look at ‘New Musick: The Cold Wave’. Interviews or pieces on Eno, Throbbing Gristle, The Residents and Devo all appear by Savage, Jane Suck and Hal Synthetic (love these writing pseudonyms). Not very Rock or Punk.

Kraftwerk SOUNDS int. 26-11-77

The Kraftwerk interview is fascinating, with Florian almost adding as much as Hutter and the two finishing each other’s sentences. Hutter mentions the term ‘Electronic Body Music’ and they talk about putting together comics detailing the themes of their music, I wonder what happened to them? Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flur aren’t even mentioned although they do appear in at least one of the photos in the piece. It’s interesting to note that Ralf and Florian picked the journalist up from the airport and showed him about the city before the interview was conducted inside their Kling Klang studios. That certainly wouldn’t happen today. See more photos from the shoot, including a smiling Ralf & Florian that were not featured in the article, here.

*After numerous requests, here’s the piece, hope you can read it*
KWSOUNDS261177pg1KWSOUNDS261177pg2The Eno piece is typical, well… Eno, he talks and talks about his ideas, just as he always does, with his sideways looks at subjects ranging from dub reggae to Eskimos engineering US Air Force jets in Alaska. There’s no attempt at cross examination and the ‘interview’ is distilled from five hours of chat into two Eno’s: the non-musician and the theorist. Along with Throbbing Gristle refusing to issue forth any kind of manifesto but the paper giving their ‘2nd Annual Report’ a 5 star review and a fairly scathing feature on The Residents, it’s an odd collection. The rest of the paper features things like ads for The Damned’s second album, Kiss’ ‘Kiss Alive II’ and the new Rick Wakeman LP, live reviews of The Jam, Richard Hell and Blondie sit with articles on Pub Rock and The Eaters (no, me neither) and a very early Savage Pencil episode of ‘Rock & Roll Zoo’.

Ralph Steadman @ 77 Retrospective, the Cartoon Museum

Ralph Steadman at 77 is a retrospective currently running at the Cartoon Museum in Little Russell St., London, WC1A 2HH. Featuring over 100 of his works, most of them originals, from Punch, Rolling Stone, Private Eye and the Observer. His book illustration work is also featured with some of the incredible Alice In Wonderland/Through The Looking Glass images (see below), Leonardo, Fear & Loathing and various children’s books.

Seeing the originals of some of these classic (for me) images was amazing, his line work is incredible but it was nice to see the amount of white out where he hadn’t quite nailed it every time too. The real treat though, was seeing some of his earlier 60’s work that I wasn’t familiar with, a few incorporating colour imagery collaged into the background (see top). Another was an illustration of the infamous Rolling Stones drug bust but my favourite of all was a square print from 1967 called ‘Bedlam’. This circular design of what looked like a board game was unlike many of his works that I’d ever seen, tightly (typo)graphic with all his usual unhinged, unkempt flair reigned in.

Seeing original work like this is one of my favourite past times, with a connection in scale and technique that is rarely captured in the books the pieces were made for. The imperfections and corrections, staining, yellowed paper and sometimes pasted-on additions fascinate me in the same way as a making-of documentary. An artist’s early work, his or her formative years, are always the most interesting for me, the style signposts slowly emerging whilst others are discarded as they find their own direction. Steadman found his fairly quickly and has been mining the same vein for decades now but he’s one of the few that have kept pushing himself into new areas, thus keeping the ‘shock’ factor intact. After the satire and bile of the 70’s and 80’s caricatures he and Gerald Scarfe became known for he moved into promotion for Oddbins, the off-licence, and then on into children’s books, neither of which you would ever have dreamed his material suitable for.

The exhibition runs until September 8th so there’s still a month left to catch it. Entry ranges from £5-3 and children are free. The upstairs houses original art from a lot of classic children’s comics at the moment, the Beano and Dandy being well represented but also a couple of pages from vintage 2000ad too: a Mike McMahon Dredd and a stunning Massimo Belardinelli Dan Dare splash page. By coincidence, Dave Gibbons’ ‘Whaat!?’ piece from the Image Duplicator show also currently resides there too at the moment.

Posted in Art, Event. | 4 Comments |

Trevor Jackson’s ‘Edit!’ mix for Solid Steel 25

DK takes the first 40 minutes then Trevor Jackson cuts up the Tape Edit Kings of the 80’s.

In his own words; “This mix consists of electro/freestyle/miami bass classics & bonus beat edits by the likes of Chep Nunez, Omar Santana & The Latin Rascals, how they did what they did with just tape, a reel 2 reel & a razor blade still defies belief  and continues to inspire me as much as it did when I first heard their work in the mid 80’s
There is no tracklisting & won’t be because I come from a generation when Shazam. Discogs, eBay & Google didn’t exist, when I first heard something on the radio in a club or a mixtape it often took me many months of desperate searching to find out what it was, I’m more than happy to inflict this highly satisfying laborious experience upon you, you’ll appreciate it in the long run.”

The second hour has an interview with Thundercat and DK finishing up with a tribute to George Duke who died earlier this week.