uncarved.org blog

1. SPATIAL INTERVIEWED BY JOHN EDEN

An interview I did with Hackney-based producer Spatial is now published exclusively and for the first time at The Liminal.

This piece was originally intended for issue 5 of Woofah, but has been fully updated. (It’s the last outstanding thing I wrote for Woofah, which makes me a bit smiley and a bit weepy!). Spatial is an interesting guy and is well worth checking.

2. MORE TURBULENT TIMES ACTION

Idwal Fisher did a lovely review of my Turbulent Times fanzine, along with other publications.

The zine now has its own page if people are interested in ordering it or knowing about distributors etc.

I have properly started work on the new issue but can’t say when it will be out!

3. AND FINALLY, SOME ADVERTS:

3rd Official Trailer for A Noisy Delivery, by Pete Cann from GX Jupitter-Larsen on Vimeo.

I raved about the Xylitol track a while back for FACT Magazine so can’t wait to hear it on vinyl…. lord knows what the LMG track will be like!

Get yourselves here for more info and ordering details:

http://libertatiaot.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/spectral-set.html

http://xylitolmusic.blogspot.co.uk/

Some related fanzine action from me very soon.

Me on my way to the post office today

Who says the music biz is dieing? Give the kids what they want and you can’t go wrong!

All my copies of Libbe Matz Gang’s soon to be legendary “The First LMG EP” sold out within 24 hours.

Please order direct from the good people at Libertatia Overseas Trading to avoid disappointment. Soon!

Yesterday’s post has also triggered some tremors in the blogosphere, with Exotic Pylon label-meister Jonny Mugwump calling the uncarved hotline to breathlessly say:

“I never replied to you re: Libbe Matz Gang – uncarved just pricked my decaying memory nodes.

Anyway I totally love it – especially as it’s kind of panicked – and makes me feel panicked – and i’m kind of a mind right now that panic is the only justifiable state of existence to be in.”

Jonny also promised to play some tracks off the E.P. on his Resonance FM show, which is 9pm this Friday and will eventually be archived here for posterity. He then COLLAPSED! I had to ring around on my landline and make sure he was alright, but apparently an heroic hauntologistwho wishes to remain anonymous was on hand to administer smelling salts!

Meanwhile the man like Ekoplekz was so overcome that he insisted on a second bite of the LMG cherry with a post over premiere league uber blog An Idiots Guide To Dreaming.

The last word went to godfather blogger Don Kid Shirt, though, who cuffed the young cubs for their insolence, reminding them that he had been in on the act over a year ago!

With this sort of glitterati support behind the group, surely it can’t be long before the inevitable unmasking and backlash?!

LIBBE MATZ GANG – L.M.G EP available now from LIBERTATIA OVERSEAS TRADING.

Ekoplekz – Intrusive Incidentalz Vol 1 (Punch Drunk LP and digital)

More vinyl promo goodness from the Ekoplekz camp puts a big stupid grin on my face. The many moods of Ekoplekz are becoming slightly more apparent over time. This is much more aggy, more urgent than the Live at Dubloaded LP I reviewed last month. (And the standard disclaimer still applies – I am biased. Pro-Ekoplekz.) The tracks are shorter, generally denser, and less spacey. The lo-fi improvised electronic signatures remain.

Punch Drunk’s press blurb says that Nick’s “retro futurism” is tempered with a “post-dubstep sensibility” which makes me cringe a bit and I think is oversimplifying things (although I fully understand that is what a one-sheeter is supposed to do). Intrusive Incidentalz is less about influences and homages and more about intersecting paths in a maze. Bits that recall vintage Throbbing Gristle to an old fart like me will conjur up something completely different to a teenager just falling under the spell of dubstep or (and you can scoff all you like, but they are out there – I meet their parents!).

One of Richard H Kirk’s best contributions to the Synth Britannia documentary was saying that Cabaret Voltaire were trying to soundtrack the extreme political climate and paranoia of the era they were working in. For Kirk, the Brixton riots were inspirational – finally someone was kicking back. Only the most ardent anarchist would say that the recent riots were inspirational in the same way, but they are a good indicator of where things are headed – of the desperation (and desperate opportunism) the UK is soaked with right now.

Making tracks for the dancefloor is an entirely honourable pursuit in these circumstances and will provide that flash of release during hard times for lots of people. But for me, the wonky pummeling of “Clodsteps” or the woozy splinters of “Psionik Trance”  are a more apt soundtrack for September 2011. The sonic continuities with previous eras mesh with the political and social continuities – but so do the variations and innovations. Things are not exactly the same this time around, it’s different – we’re still working through what those differences are and what they mean.

Or perhaps I’m projecting? Nick seems much more down to earth and well balanced than me. Maybe he’s just so well rounded that he’s gone to the trouble of making an album that sounds like how I feel when I have to walk down those grey corridors with a nagging hangover, again. Sometimes I find this album hard to listen to, sometimes I find it hard to write about. Sometimes I sit at my desk, blinking along with the striplights and look forward to submerging myself in it all.

“Intrusive Incidentalz vol 1″ is out now on Punch Drunk. Order vinyl direct from the label and get a free digital copy.

Great cover again by my man 2nd Fade

Ekoplekz plays Cafe Oto in October in collaboration with Bass Clef as Eko-Clef

Ekoplekz interview at Sonic Router

Ekoplekz: Live At Dubloaded (Further Records LP and cassette)

Vinyl promos are as rare as hen’s teeth these days – definitely a mark of seriousness. Although, to be honest, surplus to requirements in this case. I’ve been sent Ekoplekz CDRs, I’ve been sent Ekoplekz cassettes, I’ve been sent yer white label promos. I’ve listened to them all, several times over, and tried to write about them all as well.

There are two reasons for this. The first is that the music is great. The second is that I like the man behind the Ekoplekz project a great deal, having read his music writing since the halcyon days of music blogging in the early to mid-noughties and had all my favourable prejudices confirmed when we finally met before the Ekoplekz / Hacker Farm session on Resonance FM. I like him, and I also like his approach to music production.

It’s easier than ever before to make music – and this should be great, right? A thousand urchins’ unbridled creativity unleashed and unbounded, producing sketchy or symphonic soundtracks that document 2011 or wilfuly fail to do that, chronicling some mentalist polski sklep-fueled dystopian sci-fi nightmare instead.

And yet, my inbox is filled with the same old bollocks – somebody with a very ordinary name (or an ordinarily wacky pseudonym) has made a dark/funky/disco/electro/bass/whatever “stormer” that is being played out or remixed or whatever by lots of other people with very ordinary names. Delete. I am too old for this shit.

I suspect Ekoplekz is too old for this shit too, which is why he has toiled away for years on various bits of non-computer hardware, hiding away from the world to develop his ninja skills and trying and do something else, something that catalyses his influences, but remains uniquely him. New broom might bring the hype and sweep the place clean, but old broom takes its time and finds all the corners.

The album is recorded off the mixing desk, so it lacks crowd noise but is excellent quality (mastered at D&M in Berlin, no less). I think Dubloaded was the first Ekoplekz performance and remember reading that Nick was pretty nervous about it all, but it comes across great. If the Vortex gig in Hackney earlier this year (thanks again to Johnny Mugwump) was anything to go by, Ekoplekz live is one human with a table full of gear, all of which might or might not function at various points throughout the set.

[photo from here]

The album has a hesitant start. You can almost see Nick turning on his various bits of archaic kit and giving them a thump to get them going. This intro bleeds into a swirly Radiophonic Workshop riff, which then gets joyfully tweaked and fucked about with. An off-kilter ambient interlude follows with occasional farty noises, fading into some beats and synths not entirely dissimilar to the best bits of Throbbing Gristle’s “Heathen Earth” album. Pulses. Themes. Thematic pulses.

The beginning of side two is quite minimal, but as with all great minimal music it’s configured to feel like there is still a hell of a lot going on. A more technoey jagged loop shatters the tranquility and Nick starts dubbing things up especially for me. We enter rugged urban nighttime soundtrack territory, where the streets are empty and not always well lit. The journey ends with some rhythmic headfuck material.

I’ve played this lots, often twice in a row. It just… works.

Soundclips and Order direct: http://www.furtherrecords.org/fur-041.html (or get from your usual supplier)

http://ekoplekznews.wordpress.com/

This is the first proper mix I ever did, back in those pre-blog times of 2002. I was interested in tracks that blurred the lines between reggae, dub, electronica and dance music. I still am, but it seems harder to find interesting angles on it these days.

Thanks to Jim Bakhaus for helping me out with a copy of the mix when I found out that my CDR master had gone glitchy.

Sleevenotes and tracklist are here.

A slightly tongue in cheek account of the frustrations of recording it is here.

Download link.

Fanzine of the week #3

With 64 pages, this is the biggest issue of Datacide yet!

It also includes a contribution from me. No time for an extensive review, but all of the material here is well up to the usual high standard.

FEATURES

Christoph Fringeli – “Hedonism and Revolution: The Barricade and the Dancefloor”

Stewart Home – “Dope smuggling, LSD manufacture, organized crime & the law in 1960s London”

John Eden – “Shaking the Foundations: Reggae soundsystem meets ‘Big Ben British values’ downtown”

Alexis Wolton – “Tortugan tower blocks? Pirate signals from the margins”

Neil Transpontine – “Dancing before the police come”

Christoph Fringeli – “From Subculture to Hegemony: Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Industrial”

Nemeton – “From Conspiracy Theories to Attempted Assassinations: The American Radical Right and the Rise of the Tea Party Movement”

R. C. – “How to start with the subject. Notes on Burroughs and the ‘combination of all forms of struggle’”

Matthew Fuller and Steve Goodman – “Beat Blasted Planet. An interview with Steve Goodman on ‘Sonic Warfare’”

Terra Audio – “Free Parties”

Gorki Plubakter – “This is the end… the official ending”

FICTION

“Sonic Fictions” by Riccardo Balli
“Digital Disease” by Dan Hekate
“Infra-Noir. 23 Untitled Poems” by Howard Slater
“Office Work” by Matthew Fuller

PLUS

Record Reviews
The Lives and TImes of Bloor Schleppy
Charts

ORDERING

Available now for EUR 4.00 incl. postage – order now by sending this amount via paypal to praxis(at)c8.com, or send EUR 10 for 3 issues (note that currently only issues 5, 7 and 10 are still available, but you can also pre-order future issues.

Also from the Praxis Webshop.

I don’t spend enough time with my records (who does?). Most of my music listening is done on the walk to and from work.

Sitting at home in my cupboard the other night, I discovered that the ace Dug Out label were re-releasing “Hole Up Your Hand” by legendary north London reggae MC Raymond Naphtali on ten inch. Awesome news!

Then I thought about the pile of records in the living room, sitting there. Not exactly unloved, but certainly not attended to very well. And yes, eight quid plus postage is a reasonable amount of cash to lay down for such an item, but it seemed like quite a lot for something I wouldn’t hear that much and would play out even less (if ever – this is the first year for a while that I’ve not taken to the decks. And actually that is OK).

As TIm P over at Dancecrasher pointed out, Honest Jons are doing Dug Out mp3s for 60 pence a pop. Which is frankly a bit of a no-brainer, even for an mp3 sceptic like me. You get them straight away, for cheap, and you are still supporting a great shop and a great label (and presumably the artist/producer as well).

I splashed out on a whole bunch of Dug Out releases, including the stone cold classic “He Was A Friend” by King Kong, which I had also baulked at buying on wax a little while back. It’s a digital lament to the late Tenor Saw which has been much in demand (I think it was even on the notorious Boomshakalacka “Best 100 tunes of the eighties” list?).

All the tunes are great and I have been listening to them repeatedly on the commute. There isn’t the same visceral thrill of holding the vinyl in your hand and lowering the needle, but this lot will do me fine as a compromise.

Then comrade T-woc pointed out on the Blood & Fire forum that Boomkat has bundled up a bunch of “psyche-dub” mp3s as part of their weekly “14 tracks” special. 14 tracks for 7 quid. Seems about right to me.

I’ve been listening to a fair bit of mad stuff recently, so this fitted the bill nicely: some droney, some noisy, some abstract. But all tied together in a bassy, echoey package. Mostly artists I had never heard of – or had heard of, but not got the chance to investigate properly.

Again, high quality stuff for the most part, that I am enjoying wading through. It reminds me of the seminal Macro Dub Infection and Isolationism compilations that Kevin Martin put together for Virgin in the nineties. Dub as process (rather than a genre) which links the outer fringes of all sorts of mindwarping musics. It’s a great bit of curation in fact – something much needed in the avalanche of new things to check out… I’ve now got some new things to investigate and some future purchases to make.

If people keep doing good stuff like this, then I’ll keep supporting it. Hopefully I’ll not be alone in doing that – which means we might have turned quite a significant corner in terms of our little zone of the music industry surviving.

At the Guardian of all places!

“Waiting For You” is out now on Hyperdub.