uncarved.org blog

Irie Up Vol 1 Issue 1 Jan Feb 2010 – magazine.

From Berlin, in English. Looks very interesting!

FACT magazine: The month in…Bass.

Tom Lea interviews Blackdown and Grievous Angel about the “Margins Music Redux” remix album. Which I am sure is great, but for some reason I haven’t received my copy yet… hmm?

Here is a nice promo video for the album:

Paul is a suitably excitable interviewee as usual, dropping in references to Hawksmoor and Stewart Home along the way…

Coupla exclusive GA mixes available for download over at Blackdown’s blog right now also.

First vinyl release on Ruff Revival, following on from the tremendous debut of Naphta’s “Long Time Burning” album on CD. (See my gushing review in Woofah issue 3). And yes, some heavy involvement from Droid, so I am biased – but only because his programming ensures he always comes correct with this stuff.

El-B‘s remix of “Soundclash” complements the Grievous Angel cut on Keysound perfectly – where Paul Meme boshes it out and makes your adrenaline pump, El-B makes your hairs stand on end with slinky dread bizness.

“Fully Loaded” sees Naptha busting out some proper junglist sub and breaks underneath some cold yardie vocal samples. The minimalism of the intro reluctantly giving way to an incredibly satisfying, yet dangerous maze of warehouse sonics.

Some serious time, effort and thought has gone into this…

http://www.myspace.com/ruffrevival

Yeah it’s a bit incessant but there are so few releases right now that really excite me I’m going to roll with this for a bit!

The Hyperdub bash at the weekend was awesome, lots of nice people, lots of chat and catching up. Bit too rammed, great soundsystem.

King Midas Sound came on around midnight and were great. Kevin on the buttons, mixing it up like an old school On-U Sound session, tweaking the tracks in a raw dubwise style – harder than the album. Roger’s vocals were a bit more forthright onstage as well. They opened with “Cool Out” and it was much more directly in your face than the vinyl version – live and direct, in fact. Hitomi came out stage front a little later on and brought her own styles to the equation – each of the trio has great stage presence.

It was awesome stuff for a group who have only performed live once before, I can’t wait to see them again. The rest of the line up was of similar quality from what I saw – Kode9 and Spaceape live were verging on “stadium” with lots of funky stylings – manging to fill the room up with sound and voice without resorting to wobblers, natch. Which is possibly one of the unwritten laws of Hyperdub.

Mala‘s set in the small room was also a joy, lots of classics that even dubstep cynics like me knew and loved.

Then I got into wandering around, chatting and drinking territory so that’s yer review in full.

Shout out to they guy sitting next to me on the N253 at 3:30am who threw up all over the place. You twat.

Anyway, I daresay all you lot out there are weary of me banging on about KMS given that the album isn’t even out yet? Fair enough! Time for some audio…

First up check out comrade Johnny Mugwump’s interview with KMS over at The Quietus. It is accompanied by an exclusive Kode9 mini-mix that gives a good flavour of the “Waiting For You” album (out very soon! On Hyperdub! ha ha).

Then head over to FACT Magazine and snaffle their exclusive King Midas Sound mix, which features their own tunes alongside some classic lovers rock, soul, arsequake and avant garde business. Mixed by Kevin Martin. Exclusive one-away vocals from Roger Robinson and Hitomi. Yes really. You need this.

King Midas Sound

An interesting development – some exclusive bits of artwork, linkage and lyrics. Oh and the full text of “Scientist Meets The Ghost Captain”, Kevin Martin’s excellent sleevenotes from the seminal “Macro Dub Infection” compilation.

King Midas Sound perform their London debut at Corsica Studios this Saturday as part of the Hyperdub “5″ event:

“Bass is heavy – i.e. it’s not so portable”

wayneandwax.com » Bass Poverty & the Politics of Frequency: Kode9 on Treble Culture.

Actually I don’t, but was interested to see these comments from the ever-readable Paul Stott:

I Intend To Escape ………………….And Come Back : I Hate Rinse FM.

Reminds me of my pirates, politics, parochialism post from a few years back. (We got round the pirates interfering with Radio 4 by getting digital radio in the end…)

Blackdown: where do u call it.

Blackdown: LDN011 Grievous Angel. (check this link for audio and full details)

Two big tunes from my man Paul Meme coming out on Blackdown’s seminal Keysound label.

Side A is a remix of Naphta’s Soundclash from the wicked “Long Time Burning” album.

Flip is more abstract wonky business.

Promo sounds fat as you like. Check.

Clean living in difficult circumstances.

See also this great new blog by a sarf London voodoo practitioner, who has some interesting things to say about Paul’s Devotional Dubz label.

Voodoo and Santeria aren’t discussed that much in my end of the afro-futurist neighbourhood, I guess because they are not exactly de rigeur for black Muslims or Rastafarians. Certainly the Obeah man (or sorceror) comes in for some proper stick in reggae.

So equally interesting to get the above t-shirt from grime crew Roll Deep as one of my birthday presents recently…

I’m far too rationalist these days to believe in this stuff, or even to believe that believing in it would serve any useful function for me personally. But it is undoubtedly an interesting social phenomenon (his says in his dusty library, peering over some specs like Professor Yaffle). Certainly afro-centric magick has a history of spooking the fuck out of colonial types and so can be seen as a slightly bizarre part of the resistance against slavery.

Plus Lady Erzulie Freda Dahomey sounds pretty awesome and you can’t argue with a guy who follows up his erudite musings with this:

I’ve been a bit at odds with the dubstep scene myself ever since I encountered difficulty getting into FWD cos I was wearing a pale grey suit with an early 60s cut, which was at odds with their unofficial dress code of scruffy bastard in a washed out grey hoodie. Fortunately, retro tailoring won out over shit Gap t-shirts and combats, as it always will, and they let me in anyway.

I was pretty excited about visiting Croydon last week for the private view of Georgina Cook’s degree show.

As many of you will know I’ve been a great admirer of her photos for many years and was thrilled when she agreed to let us use her images for the first two issues of Woofah (including the front covers).

Recently G’s work has veered away from documenting club culture and concentrated more on abstract images – a display of her psychogeographical love affair with South London.

Indeed her degree show marks a surprising acceleration into an entirely new, more conceptual, area. “Lost In The Cracks” raises many questions regarding place and surveillance society in the early 21st Century. It is apt that the playfully Kafka-esque installation took place in Croydon, which as well as being the birthplace of dubstep (via the Big Apple record shop) was also where Jamie Reid and the Suburban Press collective vigorously attacked the very nature of post-war “new towns” as sites of grim alienation rather than suburban paradises.

Cook’s installation covers a wide area and I was impressed by the dispersed nature of the work. For example I was greeted at East Croydon station by a friendly bureaucrat who informed me that, despite Croydon technically being in Zone 5 of London’s travelcard system, my Oystercard was not valid there and that I would have to pay a twenty quid penalty fare.

Obviously this raises many questions about what (and where) London actually is, as a “place”. The London of our imaginations is many things, far beyond the representation of the railway map or travelcard zones.

So, as Iain Sinclair has pointed out recently, Stoke Newington has an entirely different character to the rest of the London Borough of Hackney. Similarly Croydon exists in some kind of hinterland, both in London and Surrey, but not really characteristic of either. Whilst dubstep is seen by many as originating in London, it is also suburban in character (cf. comments by Simon Reynolds about dubstep precursors ‘ardkore and Jungle having key participants based in the home counties – most relevantly Essex’s Suburban Base label and shop).

Cook’s secondary point is that the very nature of “place” is formed by social processes. These processes include state and corporate interventions both at “national” and “local” levels. East Croydon station is one of the busiest outside of Zone 1, so perhaps the town itself will be forever associated with the railway and its operating company, Southern.

But Cook also reminds us that these interpretations are always subject to negotiation. The smiling bureaucrat was only too eager to inform me that there was a chance that my twenty quid penalty fare would be refunded to me if I appealed. The message I took away from this is that we must resist the imposition of bureaucratic “place” and formulate our own relationships with Croydon, by wandering about ourselves. This is reminiscent of the work done by the Equi Phallic Alliance to undermine notions of “Wessex” generated by reactionary poets.

Indeed, the latter part of Cook’s installation is composed of a semi-guided derive of the area around the station. My invite directed me to College Road, but on entering the college building there I was informed by a second bureaucrat that I was in the wrong place and needed to head to the H.E. College instead. I continued to wander, enjoying the sunshine, ruminating on the role of educational establishments in confining thought. The almost deserted H.E. College provided even less answers. I drifted happily through its corridors, viewing some of the more conventional work by other students.

There was no trace of Georgina Cook, her invisibility only serving to highlight her presence.