Comics as Paperback books

Now a design cliché whilst highlighting just how adaptable those old designs were, the object as Penguin book gets another outing here. We’ve had record sleeves, film posters and more but now it’s the turn of comics to get their chance in the spotlight. When they’re done as well as these then I don’t mind at all, more examples by Fonografiks over here.

Posted in Books, Comics, Design. | No Comments |

Sinoia Caves ‘The Enchanter Persuaded’ album

Really enjoying this at the moment, by Sinoia Caves aka Jeremy Schmidt, who was also responsible for the soundtrack to ‘Beyond The Black Rainbow’. Said film was flawed but visually and sonically gorgeous, due in no small part to Schmidt’s dark and terrifying electronic score.

This album is a lot lighter, much spacier and, with a couple of tracks over the 15 minute mark, much more of a cosmic trip. The 16 minute ‘Dwarf Reaching the Arch Wonder’ is the missing link between Tangerine Dream and Vangelis and wins title of the week by a mile.

I’m well behind on this as it was officially released in 2006 (after a self-release in 2002!). I can only hope that the constant fan rumblings for a proper release of the ‘…Black Rainbow’ soundtrack will be heard some day.

Posted in Music, Poster / flyer. | 2 Comments |

Nigel Peake – new book, ‘In The Dark’

A package dropped through the door last week and I instantly knew it was from Nigel Peake. He always addresses packages to ‘Master K. Foakes’ in the old tradition my grandmother used to. Inside was a new book, something of a departure for him as it’s a story this time rather than observational illustrations based on a theme.

Drawn during the winter month in Austria and Switzerland between 2012-3, ‘In The Dark’ tells of a boy’s fear of the dark and can be enjoyed by adult or child alike. With all the current talk of ‘Supermoons’ it seemed apt that the moon featured large (literally) in the story too. It’s self published and available from his website for £14, as are several other of his books and his Ninja Tune family tree poster. Check out Nigel’s equivalent of a ‘Fragile’ sticker too, ‘careful please’.

Posted in Art, Books. | No Comments |

The Second coming of Sigue Sigue Sputnik

This post has very little to do with anything currently happening in the music world but it’s come about because I’ve had my head buried in a huge pile of Melody Maker papers from ’88 and ’89 recently. They’re a fascinating snapshot of particular music scenes as they happened, at a time when current political events were also included alongside the music features although this had largely been phased out by the late 80’s. Anyway, onto the subject matter in the title, the return of Sigue Sigue Sputnik for that difficult second album and what was, effectively, the death of the band’s original run even though they’ve resurrected themselves several times since in different forms.

The original hype had died down, they’d hit big with ‘Love Missile F1-11’ but the singles had seen diminishing returns. Their look was a love it or loathe it mix of cyberpunked-up futuristic sloganeering with band leader Tony James playing the media game as best he could with both sides winning and grabbing headlines until the first album dropped. With Giorgio Moroder‘s name firmly back on everyone’s lips these days, his finest moment (‘I Feel Love’ aside) is still the Sput’s debut album in my opinion. It dazzles as an example of a multi-layed, sample smogasboard, throwing everything AND the kitchen sink into the mix, dubbing the life out of it and to hell with the song arrangements.

But that was ’86 and now, as Acid House had bought us the second Summer of Love in ’88, we find the unthinkable on page 2 of the November 12th issue of the Melody Maker:

For me, this killed any anticipation or will to listen to the band in a single one page advert. Not that there were hoards of fans anticipating a come back, by this time the press had long since turned on them and James and lead singer Martin Degville were regularly ripped to pieces in the weeklies.

Firstly, the photo of the band. So wrong. This wasn’t ‘The 5th Generation of Rock n Roll’, nor was it ‘High-tech Sex and Rockets (baby)’. It certainly didn’t look like ‘T-Rex cuts Disco at the roots of Dub’ either. This was a bunch of pasty holiday makers jumping on the Acid bandwagon, laughing it up by the pool in Ibiza. To add insult to injury the words ‘Produced by Stock Aitken Waterman rolled across the bottom of the ad. How could this have happened? The unthinkable. SAW stood for everything that was wrong with the latter half of the 80’s chart slide into cheese, chintz and manufactured, identikit Pop pap.

You almost have to admire the balls of a band who had any prior cred even dreaming of getting into bed with the trio, especially with Sputnik’s previous rep. Sex, Violence, Designer Drugs and Video Games were definitely not on SAW’s remit. Theirs was love, love, love all the way to the bank, dripping with a sugar sweet innocence that would barely even admit to intercourse before marriage. All thoughts of being taken seriously were out the window at the sight of this ad although they’d taken the precaution to pre-empt the backlash. ‘The group you hate to love’ is bigger than the single title and the multiple format ‘products’ are ‘flogged to death’. James knew exactly what he was doing and was launching some damage limitation before they were shot down.

And shot down they were, despite the Hit Factory’s incredible run of hits in the 80’s, the combination of SAW and SSS could only manage no.31 in the UK charts. It didn’t help that the song, ‘Success’, was an out and out stinker, an unashamed piece of commercial crap that screamed, ‘Love us!’ in a desperate attempt at attention seeking without a whiff of their previous danger. Coupled with the blatant Acid House iconography and mixes, at least six months too late (even Bros had Acid remixes by this time) – it just felt so wrong. The image said summer holidays and here we were nearly at Xmas, they were back but already four months too late. This unfortunate review appeared in the same issue of the Melody Maker as the ad above and it was custom on the weekly singles review page to place single of the week in the top left hand corner of the page.

They were following where they had previously led and let down their guard with their image, something James has even admitted to in his excellent breakdown of the group’s career on Sputnikworld.com. “What you see is as far removed from those original first photos of the band in the subway at midnight as you could possibly get. We had looked like no other band on the planet. Now when I look at the Brazilian footage, I see exactly what we had become – five blokes by the swimming pool in our swimming shorts having a laugh.”

The album followed six months later and – ‘Success’ aside – it’s actually pretty decent, if a pale imitation of their debut. Thankfully that was the only SAW production on the record and they largely mined the same vein of Suicide-meets-Eddy Cochran-plus-samples but lacked ‘the shock of the new’, rather ‘more of the same’ only minus Moroder this time. That’s a bit unfair actually, there were some changes; the singles, ‘Dancerama’ and ‘Albinoni vs Star Wars’ were different and the closing track, ‘Is This The Future’, a ballad that is probably Degville’s finest moment. The genius tagline of ‘…this time it’s music’ on the ad always makes me laugh.

From here though it’s a free fall of bad management, estrangement and apathy as the money and momentum runs out and so does the band’s interest. They had some success in Brazil and a final, fourth, single was pulled from the album in the form of ‘Rio Rocks’. ‘A slogan free advertisement’, reads the bottom of the advert – even James was admitting defeat here, the band split shortly afterwards, less than a year after the comeback.


Tumblr finds x2

I love that I can find things like this on someone’s Tumblr site but what really pisses me off is that the site strips away any title the original file had. If the person putting it up then doesn’t credit the image (which few seem to) then that info is lost or takes an amount of detective work to find. It’s exactly this that exasperates me when the copyright laws making the use of ‘orphaned work’ (ie images found online with no discernible author attributed) then give users a better legal position to exploit it rather than protect the original owner.

Posted in Design. | 6 Comments |

Photos from A Few Old Tunes last night

Photos by Emma Gutteridge from last night’s Boards of Canada-inspired do, ‘A Few Old Tunes’.
A great time was had by all, the atmosphere was relaxed, unhurried, the DJ booth set up shambolic at times, people drank and chatted, some even danced. A hell of a lot of great music was played with enough decent visuals to draw attention away from the fact that we were in a very basic bar in the middle of Shoreditch.
Of the four of us playing, Mach V, Tom Central, Josh Posthuman and myself, there were absolutely no expectations, no money involved and no idea how it would be received. Which is what made it so nice when people turned up and stayed, some until 2am, and packed the place out with smiles and familiar faces everywhere. Some had come quite far, I heard of people trekking from Oxford and Kent, one guy was in town with friends from the West Coast too. Complete ambiance and spoken word skits were dropped in the middle of the dance floor and no one batted an eyelid, there were no requests for Daft Punk and it was one of the most enjoyable London gigs I can remember since the old Solid Steel days at Ruby Lo.

Posted in Gigs, Photography. | 7 Comments |

Pat Hamou Osheaga poster set 1-4

The Osheaga festival in Montreal, Canada is just coming to a close and Pat Hamou has created these 4 posters for different concerts across the month. Released one a week they also all join up to form a landscape featuring the bands’ names – beautiful work from Pat although I think he’s probably sick of drawing bricks now.


and here’s one of them all together…

Posted in Art, Poster / flyer. | 2 Comments |

Kid Acne – Council Pop 10th anniversary edition

Check these out, Kid Acne has unearthed a pile of his old ‘Council Pop’ LPs and given them a makeover inside and out, added new material and more. He’s got them on sale in a very limited edition over here in a package that includes an extra disc of instrumentals and a customised ‘Radio Music’ 12″, the original single from the album. Three customised discs in an edition of 33 for £33 plus postage – bargain.


He made this 10 years ago with fellow artist Req One and it’s a possibly one of the most honest British rap albums you’ll ever hear. Totally unpretentious, Ed writes about what he knows and sees on the street rather than pretending it’s all about bitches, bling and being bad, he’s more likely to rap about dogs, dracula and going down the dole office.

Below is the piece Ed and Req One did that features on the back of the album cover.

Posted in Art, Records. | No Comments |

Edit* – 2nd version of ‘Semena Mertvykh’ video

http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/BOC-Semena-Mertvykh-2-web.mov
I decided that the imagery in the Boards of Canada video I made for ‘Semena Mertvykh’, in the post before, was all wrong. Whilst both being excellent clips, the tone was over-bleak with too much grey and black and there wasn’t any warmth in the film. This track has really captured me from the new ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ album – it’s dark and bleak but there’s warmth, hope and beauty there too, an incredibly hard thing to pull off. I thought it deserved a different approach and decided to make a new edit using the opening scenes from Richard Stanley‘s 1990 film, ‘Hardware’.

Posted in Film. | 3 Comments |

A Few Old Tunes – this Thurs at Catch, London

http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Semena-Mertvykh-web.mov

This Thursday is a special one-off night that Josh from Posthuman and I came up with called ‘A Few Old Tunes’. This is a Boards of Canada-inspired night of music and visuals that we’ll be doing alongside Tom Central and Mach V at Catch on Kingsland Road. It’s free and we’ll be playing BOC and various things that either inspired them or that they inspired from 8pm until 2am.

The video above is something I edited up this morning using footage from Mischa Rozema‘s ‘OFFF Barcelona 2011 Main Titles’ and a film called ‘Forgotten Places’ by Zac Boyet, both sourced from Vimeo, over the final track from ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’, ‘Semena Mertvykh’.


Posted in Film. | No Comments |

African-themed Solid Steel with Melt Youself Down

This week’s Solid Steel has a definite African slant and I kick things off with a mix of music I call ‘Afreaka’. Percussion heavy funk with a tribal feel, from Madlib sample grabs to Malcolm McLaren or Eno & Byrne‘s imagined ethnic soundscapes. For part two we welcome Melt Yourself Down into the guest slot for a whole world fusion of flavours from Ali Hassan Kuban to the Mad Decent stable.

The band release their debut album on June 17th via the Leaf Label after a trio of killer singles that fuse post-punk Pigbag skronk funk with acid electronics. Catch them on tour across the UK right now with a must see live show that recently ripped Jools Holland‘s ‘Later’ show a new one. Check out their site for date, music and merch.

Jon More fills the Solid Steel 25th slot with a mix of African music proper. Over the past quarter of a century, if there’s one continent that has been well represented since day one, it’s Africa. Coldcut have always dug deep into it’s rich musical heritage and Jon More displays another fine selection of Afrobeat and African inspired music. There’s Bala Miller from Nigeria, Alemayehu Eshete from Ethiopia and Julien Babinga from Congo, plus music from Ocote Soul Sounds, Shina Williams and Troubleman.