Silent Night 10″ flexi disc advent calendar

Silent Night 12"
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…

Silent Night detail

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Star Wars Identities comes to London

SWI_Falcon
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.

SWI_Falconguns SWI_Falconradar SWI_FalconcockpitSWI_Slave SWI_SDestroyerSWI_CCity SWI_Dagobah SWI_SandcrawlerSWI_Han SWI_Vader SWI_Helmets2 SWI_Jawa SWI_JJ SWI_Droids SWI_BobaTroopers SWI_R2BB8 SWI_Boba SWI_Stormtroopers SWI_Mouse

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Flexibition 2016: F.U.S.E. 6″ and +8 comic

F.U.S.E flexi A2
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.


F.U.S.E. comicF.U.S.E.flexi B

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FourFromFoodFridays 15

FourFromFoodFridays15.2
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

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DJ Food at Spiritland 11.12.16

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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.

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FourFromFoodFridays 14

FourFromFoodFridays14
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″

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John Jacobs – Inside TV VHS collage, 1984

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…

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Last Dan Lish post of 2016

DLishBlackSheepjpg_largeI’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.D_LIshBeatnuts D_LishGMFlash+Furious5 D_LishGMMelleMel D_LishGMMelleMel2 D_LIshMadlib2 D_LIshMarleyMarl D_LIshSnowGoons3 D_LIsh SnowGoons1+2

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FourFromFoodFridays 13

FourFromFoodFridays13
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

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Howlround ‘A Creak In Time’ LP and film


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”.

Howlround CreakLP
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).

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The Diskery, Birmingham

Diskery outside
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…

Diskery est1952 Diskery ceilingDiskery insideDiskery shelvesDiskery dolls Diskery stickersDiskery FCJuddDiskery Action Man Diskery happytime Diskery Huegel Paris Diskery JingleDiskery ListenMoveDanceDiskery Rhythm Diskery SparkyDiskery 3 blind mice
More about this flexi disc in a future post…

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The new Design Museum opens

Science Museum Paolozzi
I visited the new Design Museum off High Street Kensington at the weekend and the permanent collection was full of lovely bits and pieces, including a new film by The Light Surgeons. Perhaps it was because it was teeming with people but the gallery spaces seemed very small and cramped next to the yawning atrium and the cafe was hidden round a corner, almost embarrassed to be seen but packed nevertheless. People were being told to queue as they ascended up the levels to the top floor but we just got in the lift and bypassed all this. An oddly disfunctional design of a space for a Design Museum.

Science Museum Science Museum Kennard Science Museum olivetti3 Science Museum olivetti2 Science Museum olivetti1DesignTLSDesignformats Science Museum TV Science Museum Braun Science Museum timeline Science Museum User Science Museum logos Science Museum shapes Science Museum S

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