Blimey, blimey! We have some new stuff from Phlu (this guy is hyper productive) in the pipeline, and some of it is swell sounding, nothing like you’ve heard him do before – nice! I’m also eagerly awaiting a few tracks from Eddie, which we will hopefully be able to release pretty soon (although I’m not exactly holding my breath on this one, haha). Oskars Herlins, who released a wonderful record on the label a good three years back, have just sent me his second record for the label, and boy is it sweet! Modern classical music at its best, no wonder this guy is getting commissions and gigs all around his native Latvia at the moment. We also have a few very interesting edits by Wasserfall lying around, which will be released soon enough. Finally, Stegan Tango just showed me some of the stuff he has been working on recently, which we will hopefully release whenever he has the material for an EP – and it’s sounding very good, something like a mix between an upbeat version of Six Orders of Addmittance and Bibio.
So, no reason to not stay tuned – smell the fume from the loom, June!
A walk through the dire mud of everyday life, sprinkled with the occasional sunshine penetration. Mental dwarfs looking for pussy behind doors, blow pads, metal piece nose separation. A neurotic cartoon ‘Nirvana’, oozing sprays of sticky aromas, clinging to matter like tar sand. To enjoy light, one must also appreciate darkness. Balancing on the thin line stretching over the nuclear waste covering parts of a flourishing meadow. The king of snooze-techno has returned, and it’s an LP! 12 new tracks, damn!
Ulf/Phlu produced this record over the rainy summer, which gives us a few pointers to its ambivalent nature. There are some wonderfully warm melodies on show on this record, as well as some much welcomed rhythmical experimentation. ‘Juxtapositive Minds’ skips along like a slightly damaged old record, while ‘Another Re-Detached Surface of Thought’ explores a different musical realm altogether. Artwork by Ulf.
Preview the track ‘Juxtapositive Minds’;
Tracklist;
1. Weak End
2. Blabbering Of The Quitter
3. Hippielusions Of Grandeur
4. Psychobabble Theft
5. Juxtapositive Minds
6. Five Joints Left
7. Disconcerted & Discombobulated
8. No Use For A Brain
9. Another Re-detached Surface Of Thought
10. Decomposed Soil Of The Soul
11. Dark Lights
12. End Station
Snared, under his new moniker, Eddie Tambongo, will play an hour long live set at Gamla (Oslo) next Saturday (25/6). His new stuff is absolutely fabulous, so be sure to come check it out. 100 NOK, at 2200. Oh, and he’s playing alongside Grandma’s Funkyard and Metafusion Sound System. I’m guessing Mads Meskalin will VJ some crazy shit too.
Ulf returns with his silver tailed dream character moniker ‘Phlu’, and with him he’s got a couragous mission; reclaim your sleep! And it’s a mission well worth fighting for. For what better, more noble activity can man partake in without causing this world any further pain or misery? Lulled away on distant alien shores, quietly flying about observing an ever changing absurdly exotic environment. Talking to another version of you, playing fantastic sounding music on a three sided elephant with a conch-like marshmallows trunk, having your arms float up in space, only to drop two parallell velcro curtains bursting out naked ladies with caramel tits. This arcadian existence time and again disrupted only by the sound of an alarm clock. Waking up. Going to work. Misery.
These tracks are an ode to the art of sleeping in. To travelling away to the lands of our actual dreams. Spiritual perfection, light and creation. Turn off your alarm clock and sleep in, it will change your life. Artwork by Ulf & Morten.
Preview the track ‘The Awakening’;
Tracklist;
1. Days In The Sun
2. Snoozing
3. Dreams Evolve
4. Sunbeam Walk
5. The Awakening
6. Road
7. The Working Week
Welcome to a schizofrenic battle of the weirdos. It kicks off with a noisy processed violin by Jokkemaskinen & The Police, when Gunerius Quack answers with an eleven string meditative improvisation in the style of John Fahey and Robbie Basho. Jokkemaskinen & The Police then tries to go ballers with the guitar, but ends up making it sound more like home, coffee and newspapers on table (resting on couch). Big Chief then plays (and sings) a standard blues song that Jokkemaskinen & The Police steals the reverberation from, and showcases a minimal drone, before turning it into an electro piece. At the very end Thomas Bergsten comes with a minimal organ duet similar to the early minimalist works of Philip Glass and Steve Reich.
So that’s sixteen minutes and fourty two seconds of hazy Wednesday evening vegetable patch card game music for ya! Artwork and track names by Morten.
Preview the track ‘Paradigm Mom’;
Tracklist;
1. Calibrate For Ice-Hockey
2. Paradigm Mom
3. Goloc House
4. Experience ISO
Just a quickie to inform you of some of the upcoming releases on the label. We have an EP containing some older tracks from Stjerna coming out shortly, titled ‘Bekkestua Bronx’.
Seminole Bingo has two releases in the pipeline, one titled ‘Late For Work’ and another one called ‘Unfinished Business’. There might even be a little something from the legendary Fruktnøtt Productions (Seminole Bingo & Stjerna) coming out some time in the not too distant future.
We’re also eagerly awaiting Snared’s next release, but it’s hard to tell when it’s going to be finished. Anders has been polishing and remixing it since September.
Finally, we will hopefully release some of the tracks from the absolutely incredible punk-rock band Cock Invaders some time soon. So, if you want to get laid, motherfucker, stay tuned for more.
Speaking of releases, my former electronic music teacher (Monsdrum) has just released a swell sounding album with singer/songwriter Martin Høybye. You can check out all the tracks at their Soundcloud. Some incredible musicianship on show, be sure to check it out!
On the topic of Soundclouds, there’s a couple of new mixes out over at Kaptein Eidsvåg’s Soundcloud too. Gouranga!
I was told to put my application for next year’s Kaospilot Team 18 out on the internet, so here it is.
—- My Dream Project – The ABC
The basic idea is – A community based action group, called something as original as; “The ABC Group” (Action Based Community Group).
The idea is to gather people from the local community, listen to how they would like to shape their local community, and in accordance with these wishes and in continuous cooperating with the local community carry them out in action. Young people in the community could for instance wish for a skateboard park or a community club where they can come out and hang out with other kids. In co-operation with the local authorities, we could take back control over “dead spaces” and potentially also abandoned or unused buildings, and make them something the people in the area could use for whatever purpose (for instance a studio for musicians or artists, a local bar, shop or whatever).
The aim is to create a permanent (or more dynamically changing) physical change to the streets in our cities, make them more welcome to people, and make them places where the people living in the cities can express themselves more freely and feel more at home. People should be able to influence their local community.
There is a need for the people to take back the good old “hanging out in the streets”, we can’t let the streets and public spaces rot away to become filler space between targets we’re moving towards, A’s and B’s, say work and shops. Especially in cities, there’s a huge potential to make something positive out of the experience of simply hanging out in the streets. We really own these areas, yet we don’t tend to use them.
Imagine for instance a street in an area, where artists, painters or sculptors, can be let free and make a mark, make the street seem vibrant, give it some feeling and color (like the mayor of Tirana in Albania has allowed to happen in Tirana). These areas and streets could potentially become tourist attractions due to their vibrant looks, which in turn obviously could harness money for the local community and the state.
The values we want to adress are in the vein of “reclaim the streets”, give public areas back to the people. Let people be able to put their mark on their local society, and do what they want to do there without any commercial enterprise lurking about. Strictly forbidden for larger commercial actors to be involved in the project, as they have a tendency of taking over local communities completely, make them boring and lifeless, local shops and initiatives should be more than welcome however.
The market and need is potentially everyone living around the specific area. To create a more vibrant city outside of commercial areas, make culture and fun flowing again.
The project will survive through government funding during its first initial phase, and hopefully through a sort of co-operation with shops and industries in the area. Later on it could potentially support itself through what it has created. People working at these places could get some hours off every week to work with projects in the local area, yet still get paid from the business they are hired by. This could be seen as some sort of local tax the businesses should be paying to taking up space and people in the local area. It would obviously need a sort of political drive to get something like this through, but with the right planning and funding, it could be possible.
The project could also have an ecological focus, and try as far as it is possible to re-use old materials to build new things. Say, to finance a skating park, you need a whole lot of concrete, the basis for this concrete could be found at demolished buildings, for example. I don’t really know if that is safe or the way to go about making a skateboard park, but you know, along those lines, something is surely possible.
The project could potentially involve social workers, builders, creative people of all sorts and basically everyone in and around the area where the project would be initiated, in an effort to create a more direct and local democracy, where people feel involved instead of alienated from their jobs and their local areas. If you can physically participate in making the local environment for your kids better, I think people would generally be happier and feel a sense of worthyness, and possibly, we’d see the price of health care bills go down drastically as people’s lives would become more prosperous.
The Business Map
The ABC project could initially be divided into six working groups.
The main group organizes the remaining five.
The Meetings-group invites people to meetings, arrange meetings, keeps track of suggestions, investigates suggestions etc.
The Dead Space Monitors monitors so called “dead space” in the area, are in contact with the local government and land owners over these areas.
The Material Group is in charge of finding suitable building materials or materials needed for any type of project.
The Financing group are working with the local community with regards to sponsors and finding monetary or material support for the projects.
The Workers group consist of people from the community, that gets a few hours paid by their employer every week or month to do work for their local community through the ABC Group.
This EP just in from an alcoholic cowboy who thinks he’s an indian (The Native American kind); Big Chief. His first release, a cassette called New adventures in love-fi (released on the Big Chiefs Traveling Medicine show label) was a lo-fi folk record, but this EP takes a strange new path. The singing is inspired by people like Frank Sinatra and Scott Walker, but that really doesn’t shine through. The songs are about murder, and the simple instrumental melodies are fronted by reverb soaked drunken crooner vocals.
Murder EP is a taste of what’s to come from Big Chief. These seven tracks are written, recorded, performed and produced by Big Chief (unless otherwise noted), but the coming full length have contributions by (amongst others); Frank Benjamin Finger, Children and Corpse Playing in The Streets, Stefan Remen, Jakob Myhre and Andreas Lande to name but a few. Artwork by Morten.
Preview the track ‘I’ll Be Running From The Law (Feat. Red Velvet)’;
Tracklist;
1. I Want To Murder You (*1)
2. I’ll Be Running From The Law (Feat. Red Velvet)
3. Jingle Jangle Murder (*2)
4. Bohemian Friend
5. I Knew It Was Tomorrow
6. Paralyzed
7. God Came In Through My Window
*1 The bassline is co-written with Ace of Spades.
*2 Words and melody by Eri Myhrebonus and Big Chief, synth by Ace of Spades and Big Chief.
