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So Romborama, the debut album from The Bloody Beetroots has leaked, like all albums, ahead of it’s official launch.
Not going to post any music, Steve Karaoki doesn’t need anymore reason to drown his Dim Mak sorrows in Grey Goose. Should you want to hear it, ask Google
It does however give us the opportunity to ask wtf is going on with the coverart?
Do The Bloody Bees really keep their masks on when nature calls?
For the fourth release on their label Think 2wice, Tactic employ themselves as remixers, adding a dash of tribal percussion and some nice sub bass to Control, a collaboration betwixt San Franner Phosho and rapper Cerebral Vortex, last heard by Slutty Fringe adding a touch of vocal Marmite to Rustie’s productions.
Breezing effortlessly to the top of my summer playlist over the past weeks has been the reissue of The Units synth punk standard High Pressured Days on Relish Recordings.
For label boss Robi Insinna akaHeadman, a longterm fan of the band, it can be seen as something of a personal triumph having tried and failed to include the track by the West Coast act on his 2003 Dance Modern compilation for Eskimo Rec.
Six years later, having finally made contact with the band and cleared High Pressured Days for reissue it’s out on a lovely looking 12″ replete with remixes by Headman himself and Rory Phillips.
It’s the latter we’ve developed a woozy lust for as Rory P flirts with the track as opposed to fucking with it, the results being the perfect amount of jerky discopogo for the dancefloor.
You would expect no less from a resident of the sorely missed Our Disco and Durrrr
Being the anti social types The Horrors will leave you hugging the edge of the galaxy whilst they sneer all the way back to their Dalston hovel to perfect their cosmiche Joy Division impression in time for Field Day.
Thankfully Sail A Whale are on hand to guide you right back through the cosmos with their entrancing remix of Surfin’ by Memory Cassette which evokes memories of The Field in his pomp.
Sail A Whale’s remix is one of five commissioned by the awesome Acephale in anticpation of the forthcoming Call & Response EP and tossed carelessly at the internet without pause for monetary gain. The others being coaxed out of CFCF, Shadow Self, the previously SF featured Friend and Weird Tapes.
Weird Tapes being both Memory Cassette and Memory Tapes – one to wrap your head round as you pass Jupiter
Perhaps the most striking thing about the Major Lazer project for Slutty Fringe is Switch’s current penchant for printed shirts, flat caps and Wogan esque decisions in the pant department.
Mercifully, others prefer to focus on the musical knowhow of Wes & Dave. New York label Mishka for example who loaned the reins attached to their Keep Watch series to the duo and their fictional Jamaican Man of War for episode 10.
Our friends at Dissident are soon releasing the third volume of their label compilation which handily stacks up a dozen or so of their rather limited and rather expensive vinyl releases from the likes of Cage and Aviary, Photonz, Barrsica, Naum Gabo and G&S on one little CD for less than the price of 20 Lucky Strikes.
Big haired Dissident boss Andy Blake will be celebrating the release this Saturday with a DJ set at Bethnal Green disco spot Say Yes alongside the residents Nadia K, Rory P and Thommy W – those who attend can get el cheapo copies of Dissident Vol 3.
Aside from having a charmingly catchy name, Liverpudlian Tony Lionni has been releasing varied techno/house for only a year now, just having done an RA podcast and recently playing alongside Benedict Bull and Casper C at High Horse.
Despite the fact that messageboards and forums devoted to electronica tend to attract some of the most maladjusted argumentative people online, the genre has thrown up surprisingly few good old fashioned diss tracks.
So it’s quite refreshing to hear one (must remain nameless) producer vent his frustrations at pretty much every other bedroom knob twiddler in several minutes of grin inducing autotune heavy electro funk that takes aim at nearly every cliche within sight.
I missed the first wave of acid house, my descent into the strange labyrinthian world of clubs, warehouse parties and raves starting around 1992 (which horrifically may still be before some of you were born), but there was still a lingering sense that all the old rules had been swept away and we were working with a clean sheet.
Of course in retrospect we were in many ways retreading a well worn groove laid out by previous generations, but at the time trapped in the eye of the psychedelic hurricane it was easy to believe we were generally pioneering something dangerously new and exciting.
From jungle to electronica every party, frequently in venues which if you managed to clear your head and look through the smoke you realised were quite possibly someone’s office during the week, seemed to throw up strange new sounds which though today might play in the background of a Tampax advert seemed so utterly alien at the time.
Of course nowadays with every piece of music recorded at our virtual fingertips it’s easy to deduce the subtle evolution of music from one form to another, one slight mutation in every generation inexorably leading us forward, but at the time it was easy to assume the mantle of sonic creationists believing that in the blink of an eye we’d somehow conjured up these delirious new sounds.
What did and to some extent does still seem so revolutionary though was how club culture, the good and unfortunately the bad, swept the nation through the mid to late nineties. From underground cult to mainstream hegemony, the rise of dance music and its avatar the DJ was as astonishing as it was unstoppable.
In the short space of a few years I remember going from screaming rows with my parents over the weird druggy music I was listening to, to waking up to the sound of my mother hoovering the house soundtracked by Fatboy Slim’s ‘You’ve Come A Long Way Baby’ album, a remarkably apt title.
One of the best books to make sense of this strange time was Matthew Collin’s Altered State. Published in 1997 it charted the rise of acid house and club culture in loving detail, from the orbital raves to the impact of the Criminal Justice Bill and the pirate radio stations that at one point seemed to be transmitting from every tower block (shout out to Don FM!).
This month sees the release of a new updated version, with Collin charting club culture’s trajectory past ’97 as it rose and rose and then spectacularly collapsed under it’s own weight around the turn of the century. If you were around at the time you’ll want to buy this to remember exactly what on earth you were up to, if you weren’t well buy it and learn from history, so much of what is sometimes missing from today’s commodified club experience can be found within these pages.
Carrying on the theme another book published later this month is Raving ’89, aimed squarely at the coffee tables of those who once wore knocked off smiley t-shirts but now actually own coffee tables. A beautiful collection of Gavin Watson’s photographs from the year acid house exploded, it’s a perfect document of a time before camera phones had become ubiquitous in clubs.
Published by the esteemed chaps over at DJhistory.com, this really is an essential document for anyone interested in seeing the early raw days of rave and has brought back some awful memories of my own sartorial mistakes (the drugs were very strong then, ok!).
For a sneak peak check out this sampler of the book.
Luckily for you we have 2 copies of Altered State and a copy of Raving ’89 to give away, simply email the answer to the question below before Friday 17th July and we will pick a couple of winners at random.
Q. Where was Danny Rampling’s Shoom originally held?
Anyway all this reminiscing calls for some music so what better than a brand new mix of old tunes courtesy of the always quality Placid
With the sun seemingly waving goodbye to London for the rest of the summer, there’s a sense of suitable smugness in the fact I’ll be basking in the glorious rays of central Barcelona all next week.
By way of musical segue from the above information, here is the Allez Allez remix of Hot Chip’s cover of Joy Division’s Transmission that was included on the War Child Heroes Compilation released earlier this year.
Yet more reason to get all flustered about forthcoming original material from Allez Allez!
Ever the purveyor of relevant journalism, we interviewed Tim Noakes, Music & Deputy Editor of Dazed & Confused Magazine (the first of many wasted hyperlinks to come, one may as well be a capybara) in the Old St office-come-warehouse on a busy Thursday morning.
Flo: Hi Tim. So what do you do? Tim: Well it’s a varied role, but basically I commission all the music features and co-edit Dazed with Rod Stanley, the editor
Flo: So you don’t have a separate music editor, you’re deputy and music editor? Tim: Yeah, that’s the thing with Dazed, because it’s an independent magazine, we haven’t got a huge budget to hire a lot of people, whereas in bigger companies like Conde Nast they probably have 20 people trying to do what 3 people here do so, we wear a lot of hats.
Flo: And what did you do to get there? Tim: I slept with a lot of people.
