Boards of Canada – Tomorrow’s Harvest

After a week of clues in the shape of records, radio and TV broadcasts, soundcloud clips and outside projections, all six numbers have been found. A page asking for a password (the 36 digits in correct order) appeared today and gave us this.

Then a link to this – the pre-order for the new Boards of Canada album, ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’, out June 10th – at last! Can’t wait :)

Posted in Records. | 5 Comments |

2000ad Prog 1830 cover

Opening the wrapper to my subscriber’s copy of next Wednesday’s 2000ad, I audibly gasped upon seeing the original (and my personal favourite) logo across the top. With retro fonts, aged paper and Ben-Day dot effects, the reinstated offworld credits and the 235p price tag (it was 8p when it launched in 1977), it bought a nostalgic smile to my face.

The reason for this jump back in time? A story inside exploring the niche genre of comics about comics, a fan finds a rare issue and tracks down the reclusive artist before making a shocking discovery. Also in this issue, Al Ewing and Henry Flint‘s Zombo has gone off the weirdness scale and they now inhabit the throne of bizarro, surrealist pop-culture quoting horror/humour that Brendan McCarthy vacated some years back.

Posted in 2000ad, Art, Comics. | 1 Comment |

I love vinyl and record shops but…

Why do I enjoy record shopping? Entering a record shop is like walking into a huge exhibition of the best and worst music design and packaging from the last half a century. The difference being that the filtering of the collection is up to each shop, a democratic selection based on local tastes and trends, not a predestined selection committee, omitting pieces that the curator deemed unworthy. Not only is there too much to possibly see but it’s a selection that’s ever-changing from week to week, full of surprises and totally free to enter. Best of all is that you can handle the exhibits (apart from the extra special ones on the wall or behind the counter) and if you wish you can leave with your favourite parts, bank balance withstanding.

To use another analogy it’s like leafing through a catalogue of both the known and unknown images of our age, an alternate musical history always nestling just a sleeve away from the accepted giants we’ve been told are ‘the greatest’ or ‘essential’. If one takes your fancy you can just tear out the page and add it to the ever-growing audiovisual scrapbook you’ve been curating since you had enough money and taste to start a collection. I especially like used stores because of the randomness and the fact that they exist outside of the ‘current’ music scene somewhat. Go into any new store and you’ll see a similar selection on the walls and in the New Releases racks, usually in multiples. Used stores inhabit a strange ‘now and then’ place, largely filled with unwanted items from the past but peppered with occasional upfront promos that some eager DJ or journo has already traded in to clear space. The unpredictable is what I like, the ‘Misc.’ section, the promise of buried treasure, the never knowing what you’ll find.

Record shopping for me is a visual, physical experience, rarely dipping into the aural aside from enduring whatever the staff want to torture their punters with to show how hip they are (I mean does anyone REALLY like Nico albums?). Of course some shops have a listening deck and I do use them as too many expensive ‘chances’ in the past have told me that I can’t afford such luxuries anymore. I still actually like the thrill of leafing through the unknown and spotting a sleeve or piece of packaging that invites me to pick it up through its cover design alone. I regularly buy used records because of their sleeves (foldouts, die cuts, special inks), intriguing handmade covers, odd vinyl pressings (colours, sizes, picture discs) and, sometimes, the design is just too nice to leave in the shop regardless of the music. As a format and carrier for art and design I find I’m drawn to records (and sometimes CDs too, there’s plenty of great CD packaging out there) even more than art books or prints and posters.

I like to think of this as ‘Record Roulette’, you take a chance that something that looks good or interesting might actually sound the same and it’s hit or miss of course (sorry, bad pun). But the excitement of the unknown in the bag for when you get home mirrors the buying experiences of old when shops rarely had listening posts and portable turntables were a luxury. One of the most enjoyable buying experiences in recent years was the Secret 7″ exhibition last year, where a combination of unknown art and music purchases had me tingling with excitement to see if I’d got the track I wanted. Also, in this on-demand web preview world, is the chance that maybe, just maybe, you’ll find a hidden gem that no one told you about. At the very least, you’ll have a nice item to hold and look at.

Whilst in a bargain basement recently I overheard a conversation that went something like this:

“I got given a turntable for Xmas, only thing is, I lost all my records when my life turned upside down over the years. Thing with the iPod is that you keep any old crap on there don’t you? But when you buy a record you really have to make a choice that what you’re buying is something you want to keep around”.

Having always had records and turntables I’d not thought about the current vogue for owning a deck in such terms and I found it interesting that this was probably being played out all over for people of a certain age. It also highlighted something that made me think that it wouldn’t be long before the harsh economic reality of this trend (here comes the ‘but’…) would essentially stop it in its tracks… the price of vinyl.

Another conversation heard later in the same shop:

“Are old Hendrix records all expensive?”

“If they’re in good nick, yes, unless they’re some old compilation, but the original albums are all pricey these days”

“Well I would go for the reissues but when you see the price of them then it’s not much difference is it?”

People ask me all the time in interviews, ‘do you still buy vinyl’? Yes, of course I do but in nowhere near the same quantity as I used to. There are a couple of reasons for this that have nothing to do with the digital age though. Firstly, I have close to 10,000 records, CDs, tapes etc.  I’ve done a lot of buying in my time, 30 years worth, I have a lot of what I want, my wants list is minimal, also I don’t have the space for much more, in fact I’m actively trying to get rid of stuff, not accumulate more. Secondly, I have a family to support and new records aren’t exactly cheap anymore.

As much as I love vinyl – mostly for the size, sleeve, physical side of it – I don’t go so much for all that ‘it sounds so warm’ ish – if I’m looking at a £20+ vinyl copy against an £8 digital version then I’m afraid the digital is mostly going to win these days unless that LP has some pretty fine packaging around it. Being that I’ve been DJing digitally since 2006 I don’t need a physical copy, let alone that some releases aren’t even ON vinyl these days – something that’s thankfully a rarer occurrence though. With a ‘resurgence in vinyl’ story seemingly popping up somewhere every other week in the last few years I’ve also witnessed a steady growth in the prices of new records with some crazy totals in the last year alone. £18 for a 10″, £29 for a single LP with a stick on sleeve, $30 for a 10″ with coloured vinyl, £12 for a 12″ and that’s before we even get into the deluxe box set territory which will total a months record spending budget in one fell swoop. One online retailer recently offered a batch of ‘warehouse find’ copies of a 5 track 12″ released in 2010 at £18.99, the original price only 2 years earlier? £12.99.

I’m not going to name and shame because a lot of these records are by people doing the independent thing, hence they’re making copies in limited quantities so their margins are tiny. But if you look amongst the racks there are also plenty of similar stories with major label artists too. I work in the industry, so I have a basic knowledge of costing out releases, I know roughly what costs what and I can see when someone is taking the piss with their prices. It’s not always the shops that are to blame either, several of the prices quoted above are from online retailers or labels selling direct with no physical shop or distributor to pay. Stores will buy in at a certain price and add their % on top as they do with everything, it’s in their interests to offer it at a good price because they’re in competition with all the online shops too so they can’t hike their prices unrealistically. I’ve had friends who’ve been turned down by stores because the cost price they wanted to sell their records at, so that they could break even, was too high for the store to retail it at once they’d added their percentage.

I understand that if you’re a hot artist or label then people will pay over a tenner for a one-sided, white label 12″ with no artwork and you can, for a while, name your price. I understand that is you’ve got a hand assembled, stenciled, stickered, screen-printed sleeve with coloured vinyl then you’re going to have to charge more and that’s fine, I’ll probably be in the line waiting to buy one too. I understand that for most artists a vinyl release is now little more than a vanity item, done in such low print runs that if they break even it’s a bonus. But the ceiling has been raised so high now that I feel some of the current pricing is preying on the hipster vinyl ownership crowd and it’s turning regular record buyers off.

*I started writing this months back – since then, Record Store Day 2013 has happened. I could probably add another hundred price hike horror stories to the above list but I’ll add just one. My own RSD 4×12″ repress release is currently being sold on the Ninja Tune webstore for £19 but I’ve seen it priced at £28, £32 and £38 in various physical stores since April 20th. Given that most towns will be down to one or two independent stores these days if they’re lucky then it shows that some will just name their price and see if it sticks.*

Nowhere is this more apparent than on Record Store Day, something I dearly love but has already been reduced to a scrum of genuine fans queuing for overpriced discs SO limited that you’d think the demand for some mainstream groups had shrunk to a few hundred. The new Blur single of a couple of years ago is a prime example, a print run so small that most shops were only allowed three copies. For a band of that size, releasing their first new music for some years, you wonder what the thinking was at the label aside from, ‘let’s really piss the record buyers off’. Facing off against them are the flippers ready to list as much on eBay before the day is out so that they make the tidy profit, not the artists or labels.

* see ex-Marillion Fish‘s statement that widely did the rounds post-RSD*

I saw so many major league artists who had runs of records in the hundreds, not thousands, which boggles the mind when the promotion for such an event means that attendance is tenfold. Major labels have the resources to press far higher quantities than indies, sure, and pressing more copies means margins come down and so should prices. I’m betting that there would then be plenty more buyers if those prices were sensible too. It’s not like there aren’t people selling records cheaply out there, there are plenty of labels with sensible pricing, even when something is limited. Unfortunately we seem to be getting locked into this limited edition, niche item spiral now (I saw a standard 12″ listed as ‘deluxe’ the other day) as well as being in the middle of a recession and all I can see is people pricing themselves out of the market.

(All photos taken at Record Palace, Amsterdam except the last panorama; Death of Vinyl, Montreal.)

Posted in Records. | 10 Comments |

Geographically correct London Tube map

After posting a circular version of the London Underground map earlier this week, this version was bought to my attention. Everyone knows that the traditional map has locations forced into places that they aren’t so as to make them fit a cleaner, clearer design. Mark Noad decided to make a geographically correct version of the map in September 2011 and his excellent website has various versions available for download inc. step-free access, journey times and walking links.

 

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Iron Man 3 – YES!

Saw this last night – VERY good indeed. If you’ve seen the trailers, they are pretty misleading is all I will say. Some absolutely incredible special FX plus Downey Jr at his best, Guy Pearce and Ben Kingsley stealing the show and the gorgeous Rebecca Hall. Go see it.

Posted in Film. | No Comments |

New Quasimoto LP!

Appearing out of nowhere with only a brief tweet from Madlib a couple of weeks ago showing a test pressing of ‘the new Quasimoto album’ – here it is.

Available now on the Stones Throw store as a pre-order (with free 45) plus the album immediately available as a download.

Check the cover too, Lord Quas has gone for a Velvet Underground-esque sticker that reveals his insides when peeled. Who ever knew he had a bone in his nose?

Posted in Music, Records. | No Comments |

Boards of Canada mystery 12″s and codes

In case you haven’t been in the loop for the last few days it seems that Boards of Canada are finally coming out of hibernation with what appears to be a set of coded records placed anonymously in record stores around the world. Two have been found in New York and London with 20 second pieces of music and a code number that seems to be part of something bigger. Another code cropped up in a YouTube video on the Hell Interface channel (old BOC alias) and another was played on Zane Lowes radio show. Naturally BOC fans being what they are, theories have gone off the scale online and the updates seem to be coming daily at the moment. Keep an eye on the 2020k site for the latest updates, the best of which is that a close friend of the band has confirmed an album release for June this year – great news! :)

Posted in Records. | 1 Comment |

RIP Storm Thorgerson

Things have been so manic this weekend that I’ve only just found time to write something about Storm Thorgerson who passed away last Thursday. As part of the design group Hipgnosis, alongside Aubrey Powell and Peter Christopherson (also no longer with us), they pretty much defined the look of the rock album sleeve in the late sixties, seventies and beyond. You will know their work even if you don’t realise it; Pink Floyd‘s ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ being the most famous if not their best (as Storm used to admit). 10cc, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Scorpions, Peter Gabriel, The Who, Black Sabbath, Yes, ELO, AC/DC, Paul McCartney and many more… without their work it’s doubtful magazines like Mojo and Record Collector would have much to fill their pages with these days :).

Seriously though, it’s hard to think of anyone else who dominated sleeve design more in the seventies with such a distinctive brand of photographic surrealism, all made pre-computer, on budgets most designers could only dream of these days. It was the age of the gatefold sleeve, Led Zeppelin led the way in deluxe packaging and the sleeve as canvas was in its heyday. Even though Hipgnosis disbanded in 1983 Thorgerson made the transition out of the rock seventies and into the flasher, poppier eighties, still designing for Pink Floyd but adding XTC, Def Leppard, The Cult and more to his portfolio. After Hipgnosis he moved into video direction before returning to sleeve design in the nineties and noughties for bands like Biffy Clyro, The Mars Volta, Muse and Dream Theatre, all wanting some of that retro record sleeve surrealism.

Pick up any book of album cover art and it’s a sure bet that he or Hipgnosis will feature, in some cases heavily although he did co-author the 6 Record Cover Album books in the 80’s so that’s no surprise. His sleeves for Peter Gabriel and The Scorpions used to freak me out as a kid first visiting record shops and I absolutely loved the tribal mask constructions on the Ellis, Beggs and Howard ‘Homelands’ LP sleeve. He’ll probably best be remembered for his work with Pink Floyd and I get the sense that he was at his most relaxed and playful with them, especially is the various compilations and re-imaginings of his past work he was called upon to do, the best being the ‘Echoes’ compilation imagery.

These days the art of the record sleeve is getting reduced to a thumbnail, hidden away, then forgotten, in pdf ‘booklets’ attached to download packages and lower resolutions for the web. When budgets are so tight that album design duties are relegated to online competitions for fans to enter, it’s important to remember and recognise how important the work of Storm is and was. He and others like him shaped the visual language of parts of the music industry and showed that artwork can be as important, controversial and powerful as the music it surrounds. * Special mention for the excellent Hipgnosis Covers blog too, I could spend all day there.


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Circular London Underground map

This debuted in January this year apparently but I only just saw it, I rather like it as a new take on the standard London Underground map. The redesign isn’t official however but was done by Dr Max Roberts, based on concentric circles, partly inspired by the orbital London Overground. He posted it on the Going Underground blog earlier this year because he felt the regular map was becoming too crowded with the recent addition of new lines like the East London Line. It’s probably not geographically correct but then neither is the regular tube map, it does show however, show unbalanced the South of London is in relation to the North where transport links are concerned.

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Salon des Refusés V opens today, 1 week only!

Salon des Refusés V opens today at 201 Portobello Rd, London, W11, a pop up gallery and shop of 30 artists curated by Scraffer. Including work from names like Remi/Rough, Luke Insect, Pure Evil, Kid Acne, Inkie and James Jessop it should be a pretty diverse selection.

The overriding theme of the show is artists that are pushing boundaries, with the work of established artists hanging next to that of ‘up and comers’; there is something for everyone, both stylistically and fiscally.

I have an original collage piece on show called ‘Think of a Space’, one of the first of a new series I’m doing at the moment. The Scraffer site will also have two new colour versions of my ‘Skullstronaut’ print on sale shortly after the show.

The show will be on between 22nd to 28th April only and doors open between 10am and 7pm each day.

Old School Hip Hop mix on Solid Steel

This week on Solid Steel I put together the best of a set I made for the De:Tuned party in Antwerp the weekend before last with the I Love Acid crew. They asked for an old school Hip Hop and Hip House set (I think I probably own about one Hip House record so it’s more heavy on the electro to be honest). Anyway, it’s a trip back to the 80’s but with an added bonus for Solid Steel that the Antwerp crowd didn’t get. The first seven and a half minutes consists of selections from the first mixtape I ever made in 1987, extracted from an old TDK AD90 cassette and unheard by virtually anyone for 25 years.

Let me explain a little about the mix, it was made over many months in various sections once I traded in my first mixer (a Tandy model with no crossfader) and bought a Soundlab model – hence the name, ‘The Soundlab Mix’. At the time I had very few records, maybe less than 100, I had no parental collection to raid as they never had a record player and my younger brother had none either. So, I was forced to use what I could find alongside the few import 12″s I could afford and the limited UK releases of US Hip Hop that were available. People forget that a lot of early rap never got released in the UK in the first half of the 80’s, we were mostly forced to survive on Streetsounds Electro compilations and the few ‘hits’ that the Sugarhill, Tommy Boy and Def Jam labels produced until the rest of the industry caught up.

This meant that my early mixes have tracks from 7″ singles given away free with music papers, carboot soul and funk compilations and even a flexi disc I had found attached to a magazine in a paper recycling shed at school. As you will hear, the mix is massively influenced by Double Dee & Steinski‘s ‘Lessons’ series and Grandmaster Flash‘s ‘Adventures On The Wheels of Steel’. Kicking off with the Thunderbirds theme, the idea to mix well known soundtracks over beats seemed like a no-brainer but I’ve spared you the 007 and 2001 themes elsewhere on the tape. In the spirit of the aforementioned ‘Lessons’ I decided I needed an ‘old’ song to mix over some beats, similar to the ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ section in Double Dee & Steinski’s masterpiece. For this, I used the flexi disc which happened to contain, ‘The Inquisition’ from Mel Brooks‘History of the World Part 1’ film, not very politically correct by any means, sorry, I had to use what I get my hands on.

Anyway, I wanted lots happening rather than having to mix live and change records so I would record a short section of two records, wait until one had finished and pause the tape on the beat. Rewinding to the best point, I’d cue up another record and jump back in at the appropriate point, sometimes for as little one line of dialogue. Neither of the decks were Technics 1200‘s and only one had a pitch control so each record had to be pitched to beat mix before the next section. Actually the ‘pitch’ control wasn’t anything of the sort, it was a tiny screw next to the tone arm that I found, if you inserted a small screw driver into it, you could fine tune the deck speed faster or slower. At times I would have to release the pause button and start scratching immediately so a lot of it is a little shoddy, also, occasionally the initial edit was sloppy so I had to rewind and do it all again until I got a clean join between the two separate recordings. It was a learning experience and I would record small sections with what I had and slowly build on it as and when I got new records so that the side filled up over the course of about a year, eventually ending with some chart acid and dance music in amongst the beats, rhymes and film snippets.