Coldcut meets The Orb – The Return Trip

Late last year DK and I were chatting on the phone about potential guests for Solid Steel’s 25th anniversary year in 2013. We were aiming high and had decided to ask any prospective guests for themed mixes or collections of tracks outside of their usual comfort zone. The idea of collaborations came up, maybe Fourtet and Caribou could team up or Aphex and Vibert? What and who would make people sit up and say, “holy shit, I HAVE to check that out?”. Suddenly the thought bubbled up, why don’t we get a rematch between Coldcut and the Orb? It’s no secret that their original New Year mash up from the end of 1991 is very high up on my list of greatest mixes ever and the thought of a new sound clash 21 years later was very appealing indeed.

We put it to Matt and Jon, who loved the idea, and promptly contacted Alex Paterson and Youth. Convening at the latter’s Butterfly studio on the anniversary of JFK‘s assassination the four of them, along with Coldcut studio accomplice Dor Wand, got down to it. The resulting session produced over 3 hours worth of material, Matt excitedly collaring me a few days later to rave about what a blast it had been.

He wanted an independent opinion on the results and I immediately volunteered to take on the edit job to sculpt it into the shape needed for a Solid Steel mix. Luckily they had recorded everything to multi-track and just before Xmas I sat down to construct a 2 hour show from the chinese puzzle in front of me. After sifting, editing, compressing and discarding over a 3 to 4 week period I finally had something to send the guys. Matt came over to the studio to run through some finishing touches with fresh ears and we now present 133 minutes of mind-melting madness.

In a time now saturated with mixes by everyone from the famous to the unknown to your mate’s mum it’s sometimes hard to grab people’s attention. This year we start off with something that we don’t normally do, we’re giving the entire show over to four artists to present one mix. To say that I’m pleased with the result is an understatement, not my contribution to the edit so much as what we now have because of a fanciful suggestion I made a few months ago. It’s a very different beast to their first excursion, how could it not be? 21 years is a long time and the whole mix is rooted in dub of all permutations, layer upon layer of sonics to pick apart including many unreleased tracks, versions or remixes by all participants. Lee Perry, Killing Joke, Sun Ra, William Burroughs, Teebs, Ry Cooder, Actress, Prince Jammy, Iggy Pop, Monty Python and Hank Williams are all in there plus probably a hundred more, some submerged, others strutting their stuff, you can have fun trying to guess who played what and who is who hiding behind a pseudonym. We haven’t included all the spoken word samples in the track listing because it would just get way too confusing but you’ll hear John F Kennedy, Hal 9000, William Burroughs and more swimming around in there.

We will continue celebrating a quarter of a century of ‘the broadest beats’ every week throughout the year with exclusive mixes from: Four Tet, J Rocc, Skream, Kirk DeGiorgio, Trevor Jackson, Chris Carter from Throbbing Gristle, Toddla T, Benji B, Photek, Andy Votel, Z-Trip, Tom Middleton, Richard Dorfmeister, Greg Wilson, DJ Kentaro, James Lavelle, Giles Peterson, Don Letts, Jack Dangers, Future Sound of London, Kid Koala, Luke Vibert, Laurent Garnier, Congo Natty, Gaslamp Killer, Andrew Weatherall, Francois Kevorkian, Fink, Ross Allen, Mixmaster Morris, Manasseh and the first guest to appear on Solid Steel back in 1988, Juan Atkins (and that’s not even all of them…).

Posted in Mixes/Solid Steel, Solid Steel. | 9 Comments |

Dome Club

Starting this year at Birmingham’s Think Tank Science Museum is Dome Club, run by the Planetarium manager Mario Di Maggio. Named after a random remark I made to Mario after a 2 hour screening session (“the only rule of Dome Club is: Everyone must talk about Dome Club”) he’s gone ahead and set one up. His site has wisely used a different motto:

‘No-one can be told what Dome Club is. You have to see it for yourself’

This isn’t hyperbole as anyone who has been to a planetarium will tell you, you can’t put this on YouTube, it doesn’t work like that, instead of looking through the window you’re inside the room with a dome film.

Every Dome Club evening will begin with a variety of fulldome shorts, followed by one of three main performances:

•       Chaos & Order – forty scientific visualisations set to superb original music in four movements
•       Fractals! – the record-breaking fulldome spectacular by the Fractal Foundation (you may think fractals are old hat, you won’t think that once you’ve seen them shown on a dome)
•       The Search Engine – the first fulldome music production by London’s DJ Food (*cough* – this won’t begin until April though)

They also have two special performances of Dark Side of the Moon scheduled for Thu 7th and Fri 8th March. Additionally, supporting the Birmingham Art Gallery exhibition Metropolis: Reflections on the Modern City (23 March – 23 June 2013), they will be screening tempus ruhr weekly at 5.30PM over that period. Dome Club ticket holders who arrive early can see tempus ruhr for free.

Tickets are now available for weekly Dome Club evenings – every Thursday – for all scheduled performances up to 20th June: They have allocated seating available with seats in the rear three rows (the sweet spot in any dome showing) costing £6.00 and the front three rows £5.00 (£1.50 and £1.00 for tempus ruhr).

It all happens at Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum, Millennium Point, Curzon St, B4 7XG, UK.

Posted in DJ Food, Event, Film. | No Comments |

Terminal Radio Transmission: FSOL 2 hr tribute mixes

A new mix series called Terminal Radio has just launched by fans and musicians from the FSOL online message boards. Members from around the globe were asked to make a 15 minute mix each and eight of these were collected and mixed together into a 2 hour trip.

Each volume will feature eight more alternate universes converging into one super quadaural meta-brain: (says Craig who has organised all this). If you’re a fan of the Future Sound of London there’s a lot here that will be right up you’re street.

Transmission 1:

Transmission 2:

Posted in Mixes/Solid Steel, Music. | 1 Comment |

25 Years of Solid Steel in 2013

I can’t quite believe it’s been a quarter of a century since Matt Black and Jonathan More combined their Mastermix Dance Party and Meltdown Party shows to form the Coldcut Solid Steel show on the pirate station Kiss FM in London.

Both had separate shows on a Friday afternoon on the station, Matt’s at midday and John’s at 4pm with Danny Ramplin(g) sandwiched in between and Judge Jules‘ Family Funktion, Bobby & Steve’s Zoo Experience and Jazzie B‘s Soul II Soul shows following. Check out this amazing line up from an old Kiss 94 FM newsletter (94 was the frequency it was on before it went legal in 1990 and switched to 100).

No sooner than they had joined forces – we think sometime in the latter half of ’88, no one is quite sure – Kiss went off the air at New Years Eve. In an attempt to gain a legal license they had to stop broadcasting for 6 months as a show of faith to the DTI. As it turned out they didn’t get the license until Spring 1990 as they lost out to Jazz FM in ’89 which is why there are no shows from that year floating round on the web.

DK has raided the Coldcut tape cupboard to put together a show comprised of snippets of both Matt and Jon’s separate shows in the first hour and a later Solid Steel on the legal Kiss 100 FM in the second. Spot the signposts in Coldcut’s early career, hear now classic tracks played in their heyday and vintage adverts for gigs now a distant memory.

New shows arrive on Fridays, you can listen to the show every week on Soundcloud and also subscribe and receive the podcast through iTunes. We have some very special mixes coming up throughout the year from big guests both new and old that we’ve asked specially to contribute.

We’re looking back in a different way this time, no more archive shows but guests who we’ve admired and played the music of over the last 25 years have been asked to do something special for Solid Steel in 2013. More announcements next week and a whole show devoted to a totally new return trip from Coldcut and The Orb…

Also for anyone wanting to know more about the Kiss FM story there’s a great documentary on Vimeo that tells the tale.

Posted in Mixes/Solid Steel, Solid Steel. | 5 Comments |

Calendar for 1970/71 and personal 2012 highlights

Fabulous Hallmark calendar from 1970-71, designed by Push Pin Studios and containing 16 months. Seen via the ever-excellent Voices of East Anglia website who, themselves cribbed it from the Flickr of Mewdeep who has the full thing.

2012 was a busy year for me, probably one of the best yet in terms of new things achieved and unique experiences. I’m always striving to do something different and at the end of each year I remember the line from The The‘s ‘I’ve Been Waiting For Tomrrow (All of My Life)’, “another year over and what have I done?”.

Thankfully 2012 has been a golden year in terms of ‘getting things done’:

Finally getting ‘The Search Engine’ out there was a good start as were the Greenwich Planetarium launch shows and exhibition with Henry Flint at the Pure Evil Gallery, all in January.

Featuring on a Cineola podcast, being interviewed by Matt Johnson alongside an exclusive remix of ‘GIANT’.

The Kraftwerk month and mixes I did on my blog going a bit viral in March.

Having The Amorphous Androgynous remix one of my tracks for a release on Record Store Day was a massive thrill. Hearing it played on 6 Music was great too.

Going to Montreal to learn about and present The Search Engine show in their SATosphere was one of the proudest points of my gigging career to date.

Having J.G. Thirlwell pop round for tea and a chat one afternoon.

The Food & Flint exhibition, hosted at the Factory Road Gallery in Hinckley by Sarah & Leigh was amazing fun.

The Sacrum Profanum concert in Krakow I took part in after an invitation from Skalpel was one of the most fantastic concerts I’ve ever seen and gig of the year for 2012.

The Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’ mix I did with Cheeba and Moneyshot making waves on the web.

Playing a small part in some of ZTT‘s Element reissue series and getting to edit one particular master recording for a future issue.

Providing images, sleeve notes and audio for a reissue compilation of John Rydgren‘s work on the Australian Omni Recording Corporation label.

Instigating and then editing the results of a new meeting of Coldcut and The Orb for the 25 years of Solid Steel mixes in 2013.

With so much out there it was inevitable that some got missed.

Things that came out in 2012 that I still didn’t get to see or hear:

Berberian Sound Studio

Cabin In The Woods

Lone’s – Galaxy Garden album

The Amazing Spiderman

The B.P.R.D. hardback editions

Butcher Baker comic

Can : The Lost Tapes compilation

The last few issues of Godland comic

GOAT’s ‘World Music’ album

Posted in Art, Design. | No Comments |

The Life & Work of Barney Bubbles book

I was lucky enough to receive this fantastic book for Xmas this year after the first printing in 2008 disappeared and started going for silly money. Luckily this 2nd edition has extra info and images so waiting paid off and I can’t recommend this book highly enough for fans of music design in general. Until the middle of the last decade the name Barney Bubbles wasn’t widely known or recognised aside from music business associates from back in the day or the odd rabid fan.

The reason for this is not because his work was hidden away on obscure releases – he designed covers for several classic albums as well as a fair few hit singles in the 70’s and early 80’s. It wasn’t because the work wasn’t good, most of it is stunning, all the more so when you read into the detail he put in each and every one. It was more to do with the fact that Barney often didn’t sign much of his work, and when he did it was under some super-coded pseudonym only a few close to him would recognise. He also didn’t go out of his way to publicise himself and suffered from bouts of depression which, sadly, caused him to take his own life in 1983, thus halting what could have been a groundbreaking career in design.

I say this because Bubbles was that rare thing in that he spanned two very distinct generations and worked seamlessly within both of them, a rarity these days and hard to pull off as most designers get associated with a particular style or genre and become known for that only. He started in the midst of the 60’s and became a full blown hippy, journeying to San Francisco in the summer of ’68 . He returned to produce graphics for the scene in London – the name Barney Bubbles was given to him after he started his own psychedelic light show mixing inks on overhead projectors. A long association with Hawkwind followed and he designed some of their most innovative sleeves such as ‘Space Ritual’ and ‘X In Search Of Space’ – both fold out wonders the likes of which were abundant in the 70’s.

But come the year of punk, when all this was to be washed away and the reset button pushed, Barney fell in with the newly hatched Stiff label with Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe among others and seamlessly altered his style(s) to fit with the times, coasting through into the 80’s unscathed. He was the first person to mimic the Penguin book covers now so ubiquitous, parodied Blue Note sleeve design nearly a decade before it came back into fashion with Acid Jazz and took De Stijl and Cubist designs as inspiration before many others. He even dipped his toe into furniture design and early video promo making before he passed (did you know he directed The Specials‘ ‘Ghost Town’ video? no, me neither).

Until the publication of the first edition of this book, tirelessly put together by journalist Paul Gorman, who has since helped curate displays at the V&A of famous pop memorabilia, the design world had largely ignored Bubbles even though many pieces have featured in Record Cover collection books over the years. The drawing together of his output and the joining the dots between the various phases, pseudonyms and uncredited work has finally shone a spotlight on him, something it’s doubtful he would have gone out of his way to do had he still been alive.

I certainly wasn’t aware of how far he reached with his work but plenty of his sleeves and designs were familiar to me even though a lot of the music wasn’t something I listened to. The logo for the NME paper from 1978 through to 2010 – that was Barney, the Stiff Records logo, Billy Bragg‘s ‘Life’s A Riot With Spy vs Spy’ sleeve, Elvis Costello‘s ‘Armed Forces’ LP package, The Blockheads‘ logo, the first Depeche Mode LP cover, the first Damned singles and albums…

An incredible body of work and an amazing book, lavishly illustrated that chronologically treads the paths that Bubbles did with plenty of input from the artists and friends that he worked with. My only nitpick with it is that the images are almost always out of synch with the text, the illustrations always seemingly several pages behind which is frustrating when you’re trying to get a sense of a sleeve being described only to find it 6 pages later.

His death is also almost a minor entry in the narrative and, having heard Mark Hodkinson‘s harrowing ‘In Search of Barney Bubbles’ documentary on BBC Radio4 it’s all the more tragic when you see everything he’d achieved up until that point. Treat yourself to this book and revel in his work as he finally takes his place among the greats of music design in the 20th Century.

Posted in Art, Books, Records. | 4 Comments |

My Life in The Bush of Ghosts variations

A couple of weeks ago I posted about buying a fifth copy of The The‘s ‘Infected’ album upon finding a test pressing secondhand. Whilst record shopping in Montreal this summer I found a new copy of the Nonesuch vinyl reissue of Eno & Byrne‘s ‘My Life In The Bush of Ghosts’ – another of my all time favourite albums. The CD reissue in 2008 with the bonus tracks is already in my collection but the double vinyl version added multi-track parts to two album cuts on the fourth side as well so I couldn’t help but pick it up.

Add to the bonus audio that the whole package was housed in a beautiful, heavyweight card gatefold sleeve with notes and it was an instant sale. Around the time of the reissue a special website was created with additional content such as extra sleeve notes by Paul Morley, recording session photos and discarded screen captures from the original artwork. Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated and now all you can get is the home page (possible out-dated Flash plug-in is my guess) so here are some of the artwork outtakes.

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I now own five versions of this seminal record – the original vinyl (with the track, ‘Qu’ran’ which was later removed), original CD, Nonesuch reissue CD and vinyl. There’s also an Italian bootleg CD called ‘Ghosts’ with demos and original versions before samples were removed or tracks reworked which features a couple of things not on the reissues. I also have the two 12″ singles that were released originally in the early 80’s but not the ‘first edition’ vinyl bootleg of demo versions.

Apparently above is a scan of an earlier version of the album sent to the record label. Because of ‘sample-clearance’ issues (this was 1980, such a thing was unheard of) the record was delayed and later some of it was reworked by Eno and Byrne. Some tracks were dropped or titles changed, some mixes were redone and some new tracks were added. Most of the dropped tracks were reinstated on the reissues on Nonesuch. I never tire of this record and the reissue is the rare exception of the bonus material actually adding to an enhancing the original rather than just padding it out.

Much like Malcolm McLaren‘s ‘Duck Rock’ album this record is a product of its time and exists almost in a vaccuum, barely dating in the 30 years + since its release. You can hear echoes of the sounds Eno & Byrne created here on either side of their respective discographies around the time but they never fully reached the other-worldliness achieved on this album

Posted in Design, Records. | No Comments | Tags: , ,

John Rydgren on the Omni Recording Corporation

Earlier this year I was contacted by David Thrussel who runs the Omni Recording Corporation label in Australia. He was interested in reissuing John Rydgren recordings and – knowing that I had a pretty decent collection – needed someone who knew the material. He also needed imagery and good quality scans of cover art, which I provided from the LPs I had and the super-rare book Rydgren published, ‘Tomorrow Is A Handful of Together Yesterdays’ .

Finally after months of additional research, liner note editing and remastering in NYC being halted by Hurricane Sandy – the 2CD 64 track reissue of the bulk of John’s best work is here.

For anyone familiar with Rydgren’s work, ‘Silhouette Segments’ is the album to get, originally a double LP sent only to radio stations but later edited down and bootlegged as a single record, it is restored and remastered in full here on the first CD. The two other LPs on many collector’s wants lists are ‘World of Youth’ and ‘Cantata For New Life’ – both feature here in their entirety too and, whilst not as ‘hip’ as ‘Silhouette…’, they are full of great material.

Even rarer, so much so that it’s virtually unknown, is an album titled, ‘They Say’, full of 20 Silhouette Segments for radio broadcast and, along with the two former albums, never reissued or bootlegged before. The release comes with a booklet packed with photos, cover scans and liner notes from collectors and those who worked with ‘Brother John’ before he passed away.

I’m very pleased to be rounding out the year having had a hand in this release. Check out some of the other reissues via Omni or the vinyl counterpart, Roundtable.

Posted in Music. | 4 Comments |

McBess ‘Malevolent Melody’ book and 7″ record


I can’t resist a comic or book with a record on the inside cover and the 7″ size of McBess‘ ‘Malevolent Melody’ made me grab it off the shelf in the NoBrow shop in Great Eastern St. earlier in the year.

The name McBess was unfamiliar but his images floored me and I immediately bought this as well as another oversize book by him called ‘Big Mother’. Seldom do I come across someone who has such a strong, fully developed visual style that stands out so immediately.

Shades of Kid Acne and Pete Fowler‘s style permeate throughout but not a hint of colour and some of the smoothest draughtsmanship I’ve seen in a while.

I was in love with his style from the minute I saw it, my favourite artistic discovery of 2012. Check out his site here.

Posted in Art, Books, Records. | 1 Comment |

Unused ‘negative’ designs for the Search Engine


When I do a design project there’s usually a fair few versions of things that don’t make the cut, variations on ideas to see if something will work etc. For ‘The Search Engine’ I made a series of ‘film poster’ designs, some of which cropped up in other things like a short reel telling people the timetable at the Planetarium gig or animations for a video that didn’t happen. These are ‘negative’ versions of some of those designs where I particularly like the colours.

Posted in DJ Food, Openmind designs. | 1 Comment |

iPhone image dump – 2012 end of year version

I neglected the iPhone image dump this year so here’s a little selection I always intended to post but never got round to. Top to Bottom, L-R: Cabaret Freaks backdrop and Eyeball prop, France, Occupy stencil, Paris, Matt&Jon&Kevin&Darren T-shirt by Megatrip, Zaku toy by Ashley Wood, Kissbot toy, Jamie Hewlett Absolute vodka for the Olympics – bottle and tube poster, London, Swiss architecture, UK Hip Hop legends poster, Switzerland, Science Museum sculpture, London, inflatable alien heads, France, Space Invader, France, Lego DJ minifigure.

Posted in Photography. | 2 Comments |