Four From Food Fridays – a weekly look at four things that have been doing it for me. They can be new or old, any style so long as it’s been getting some rotation in the studio. From top left:
Trevor Jackson meets Trevor Horn (NTS) Interview
Clocolan – Nothing Left To Abandon (Enpeg) LP
Manuel Gottsching – E2:E4 (MG.ART) LP
DJ Food – Live at Spiritland 11.12.16 (Mixcloud) DJ set
Great gig to finish the year with – clipping. at Corsica Studios.
After a very moody door exchange where I was asked first for photo ID and then if I either worked for the police or the council (!?) we got inside an absolutely rammed room.
Clipping deliver a shot blast to the inside of your skull, sometimes it’s sheer noise and you can’t make out the beats or tempo and then it suddenly locks in and you find the whole room head-nodding in unison. Daveed Diggs‘ incredible delivery propels each song using multiple time signatures, single, double and even triple time raps, dancing all over the rhythms eked out of little more than beats, bass and static. At times it seems that the roof is about to come off but there’s so little actual sound in the track that it feels more like floating in space. You want to mosh but there’s a 130 bpm tune actually only bouncing at 65 but with builds that sound like the nastiest German techno but no 4/4 kick drum to pin it down.
What was great was hearing kids 25 years younger than me rapping along word perfect, every line, every nuance, every shift in rhythm, just as I and my mates had done at Beasties, Cypress Hill or Public Enemy gigs a quarter of a century ago. This is their equivalent. They knew the old stuff best and when the group finished with the avant garde space opera of ‘Splendor & Misery’ and dropped into tracks from ‘Midcity’ and ‘CLPPNG’ they got the response they wanted.
‘Wriggle’ burst into its 303 acid second half and then got pushed up into an AFX Amen-punishing d’n’b version and ‘Body & Blood’ is still the most terrifying sex with power tools track ever.
With monochrome static and bit-crushed graphics projected across the band in the tiny run down black box of a room this was absolutely the best place to see them. So refreshing, so exciting, so far out I’m not sure it even qualifies as hip hop.
Trevor Jackson‘s 3hr interview with Trevor Horn from his NTS show is unmissable. Aside from being full of track after track of Horn-produced classic pop and experimental remixes it also manages to yield details and anecdotes that even on old devotee like me who’s listened and read everything going hasn’t heard before.
Great to hear something about ‘Legba’, ‘Relax’ just never ages and ‘Don’t Cry… It’s Only The Rhythm’ is broken down for you. Great work Trevor.
A curious object I found in a South London charity shop earlier this year. It was stuck to the wall and the light reflecting off it suggested it had grooves in the middle. On closer inspection I saw that the centre was some sort of flexi disc and the outside a series of doors forming a circular advent calendar. 50p later it was in my bag and a fairly traditional version of ‘Silent Night’ emerged from the crackly surface upon reaching a turntable. ‘Made in Denmark, copyright L. Levinson Jr. Ltd, No. 3242′ is the only info on it apart from the title in multiple languages. All doors are still sealed except #2 which has been torn off. Apparently it dates from 1965.
This blog seems to suggest that L. Levinson Jr could have specialised in making Advent calendars – anyone with more info please leave a comment…
The Star Wars Identities exhibition opened last month in London at the O2 in Greenwich. Over 200 props, models, costumes, paintings and designs are collected around a 10 step trail based on building your own personal characters within the Star Wars universe. There have been a few additions and subtractions since I first saw it in Montreal four years ago but it’s essentially the same. Just check some of the pictures below and you’ll get the idea, absolutely essential for any Star Wars fan and very child-friendly. So nice to go into an exhibition that doesn’t discourage photography too. It’s on until September 2017 and you can buy tickets HERE.
A Ritchie Hawtin pseudonym, F.U.S.E., released this 6″ flexi disc and 20 page comic in 1992 on his +8 Records imprint. Showcasing pounding, shouty techno on one side and soothing ambient on the other it’s an odd combination subtitled, ‘The Unreleased Experiments’. It comes wrapped inside a comic book drawn (and written?) by Alan Oldham which displays all the hallmarks of the Rob Leifeld style of the 90s.
Four From Food Fridays (except it’s been a very busy weekend so it’s Sunday) – a weekly look at four things that have been doing it for me. They can be new or old, any style so long as it’s been getting some rotation in the studio. From top left:
Agnes Burnelle & Desmond Leslie – The Lost Noises Office – (HMV) 7″
Howlround – A Creak In Time (psyche-tropes) LP
Rendezvous – Suoni Della Paura II (Origin Peoples) Mixtape
The Soulful Strings – Little Drummer Boy (Cadet) LP
These go on sale today, we all know what they’re derivative of, how Ashley Wood is getting away with this without a license I don’t know but they look amazing.
Sunday night saw my second set at Spiritland, this time for a 5 hr slot instead of 4. The chance to spread out and play a non dance floor selection in public is always welcome and the sound system there is particularly good with highly polished electronic music and deep bass tones I’m finding. In the mix you’ll find a short Xmas medley and part of an exclusive 54 Minute fan mix of The Orb’s ‘A Huge, Ever Growing, Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre of the Ultraworld’ interspersed with some special mixes of Grace Jones‘ ‘Slave To The Rhythm’ that I compiled. Some of the photos below are by Karla Davis and Arthur Arkin.
(The mix is a bit quiet, you need to turn it up) I’ve remastered the file now for maximum volume.
More record gold from Scarfolk
Four From Food Fridays – a weekly look at four things that have been doing it for me. They can be new or old, any style so long as it’s been getting some rotation in the studio. From top left:
Graeme Miller and Steve Shill – The Moomins OST (Finders Keepers) LP
Bad Lip Reading – Seagulls! (Stop it now) (YouTube)
JG Thirlwell – Music of The Venture Bros Vol.2 (Ectopic Arts) LP
Radio Trip / Left (Markey Funk remixes) (Delights) 7″
After the amazing feast that was Foetus on Triple J – the John Jacobs plunderphonic interview with JG Thirwell from 1986 on Tim Ritchie‘s show – we rewind even further back to 1984. In a continuing series of lost Antipodean radio-phonic works unearthed by DJ HDD, and preceding a series entitled The Worx, we have another Jacobs piece, ‘Inside TV‘.
“A comedic cut-up/critique of Australian television thrown together by John Jacobs with a pair of domestic VHS decks… The edits are rough and jumpy, an analogue pause-button aesthetic. The sync rolls, the loops swing. The image is smeared and lurid as it goes down the grimey tube of VHS generations. Not having any outlet for these pre-Internet video cutups, John took the moniker ‘Built in Ghosts’ and secretly dubbed them back onto the ends of hire tapes for random late-night discovery by fellow video junkies.
Hopefully more to come…
I’ve not posted any Dan Lish Egostrip images for a while and he’s been crazily busy doing covers for all sorts of artists so it’s good to see the world catching on to his talent. As always, you can buy various giclee or lithograph prints over on his site and hopefully 2017 will see him complete the 100 drawings he wants to do before he collects them for a book.
Above: Black Sheep. Below: The Beatnuts, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, Melle Mel 1, Melle Mel 2, a revised Madlib/Lord Quas/MF Doom, Marley Marl, Snow Goons ‘Goon Bap’ album artwork.
Four From Food Fridays – a weekly look at four things that have been doing it for me. They can be new or old, any style so long as it’s been getting some rotation in the studio. From top left:
The Karminsky Experience Inc. ‘Beat!’ LP (Patterns of Behaviour)
Various Artists – Selected Ambient Covers Vol.2 (Bandcamp)
David Sylvian – Gone To Earth (Virgin) LP
? – A Huge 54 Minute Mix Mk2 (unreleased) CD-R
I’ve been looking forward to this since I had a sneak peak about a month ago, the new Howlround album is also the soundtrack to a film called ‘A Creak in Time’. Two years in the making, “A Creak In Time is a film directed by Steven McInerney exploring the interrelation of the macrocosm and microcosm navigating its journey through time in two parts. The soundtrack has been composed entirely from creaking objects and manipulated on magnetic tape machines.”
The film is “…Taken from source material discovered in London, Yosemite and the Mojave desert, these sounds, through simple manipulation, gradually cast off their moorings and head into space, leaving their original identities far behind and chiming perfectly with the film’s recurring themes of transformation and altered perception, switching scale in a heartbeat from microscopic topography to the vast distances of the cosmos. Shot entirely on 16mm film with a musique concréte soundtrack, it’s both science and fiction and marks a dramatic new direction for all involved”.
Available to pre-order on McInerney‘s audio-visual Psyché Tropes label now, the LP comes with a download and link to an online stream of the full film. You can order it here or, if you want to see it and hear Howlround live they’re playing a launch party in London on Dec 10th at Iklectik as part of Pascal Savy‘s two day residence. The night after they’ll be doing a more traditional tape loop set at the Brunel Museum as part of the Film Sound Performance weekend – more info and tickets here (no tickets on the door).
Found this in an old sketchbook recently – more of Brian’s Forbidden Planet promo work here
I’ll be doing this next Feb at Echoes, something new with something old. Tickets here
Last weekend I played at The Dark Horse in Moseley, Birmingham and a fine gig it was too. The day after, Thomas, the promoter, and DJ Cro took me to The Diskery, supposedly the oldest record shop in the UK. It’s the kind you only run across occasionally these days, seemingly held together by the records pinned to every surface. Stuck in a time warp, a perfectly preserved example of your classic secondhand record shop of old, despite the Record Store Day banner in the window. There were so many records in every nook and cranny, on several floors, that I barely scratched the surface whilst I was there. We were offered tea almost immediately on entry and the two hours I had before my train yielded some great 45s, some of which are below. Definitely one of my favourite record shops in the UK and I want to go back and spend the whole day in there…
More about this flexi disc in a future post…