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The Mire

Comus and Ultra-red on Adventures In Modern Music

Adventures In Modern Music, 11 June with Rob Young: Comus are one of the great forgotten English progressive folk groups. Their 1971 album First Utterance was a blast of savage pagan energy directed against hippy complacency. Amazingly, the group have reformed and will play First Utterance in full at this week's Equinox Festival . Rob will be joined by the group's main singer and songwriter, Roger Wootton, to discuss Comus's history and influences, and play a selection of music by Comus and their contemporaries. Resonance 104.4 FM or online , 11 June, 9PM BST On Saturday 13 June Anne Hilde Neset will be hosting a special extra edition of AIMM where she'll be joined by the international art/music collective Ultra-red (who currently have a show on at London's Raven Row Gallery ) members Dont Rhine and Robert Sember to discuss their various projects. Resonance 104.4 FM or online , 13 June, 3:30PM BST

The Mire

Varèse and the jazzmen

The WFMU blog has a number of MP3s that purport to be 1957 recordings of composer Edgard Varèse conducting a jazz workshop group that includes Charles Mingus, Teo Macero, Art Farmer and others. The music is very moody and abstract and well worth hearing. Claims that it somehow represents ground zero for free jazz should be taken with a major pinch of salt, however.

The Mire

Adventures In Modern Music Thursday 4 June

On Adventures In Modern Music this week, Derek Walmsley will be talking to Simon Reynell of the Another Timbre label and organiser of this month's Unnamed Music Festival in London and Leeds. We'll be talking about the state of improvisation today and Simon will be playing some choice selections of recent music. Listen live on 104.4FM or online at the Resonance FM website . The show is available to download here

The Mire

Only Built For Logan Mills

Not sure who Logan Mills is, actually, but the illustrations he's done of Wu-Tang sleeves as Blue Note covers are absolutely fantastic ( via ihatemusic )

The Mire

Straight To Your Dome

... the Tuffnell Park Dome in North London, that is, straight from Syria. Friday was an amazing Sublime Frequencies show with Group Doueh and Omar Souleyman. Footage of Omar Souleyman raving it up

The Mire

Follow The Wire On Facebook

We've just set up a Facebook page, if you'd like to follow us there, click on: HERE It's still a bit basic but we'll fill it out over the following weeks and then update it regularly with (mostly) relevant info about the magazine, our web exclusives, news and other tidbits...

The Mire

Mixing It

Two amazing You Tube clips of beatmatching. Delia Derbyshire on the ones and twos and threes reel-to-reels (via Gutterbreakz ) Greg Wilson , first DJ to beatmatch on UK TV on The Tube, despite being hassled by an irritating Jools Holland (via Dissensus )

The Mire

Continuous Flow

A search for Company Flow on Amazon yields the following book suggestion: Natural Laws Applied to Production: Show How Modern Industrial Organization is Based on the Principle of Continuous Flow . by Mathews Conveyer Company. Funnily enough, the title sounds rather like a Company Flow lyric.

The Mire

Jackmaster mixes it up for The Wire

An exclusive mix from Glasgow's Jackmaster which was originally broadcast on our Adventures In Modern Music programme on Resonance FM last week. Jackmaster is a resident at Numbers , works at Rubadub , and has his hands in a number of labels as well, including Dress 2 Sweat and Wireblock . Originally I asked him for half an hour, but he provided over an hour's worth of music and with so much unreleased material, I wasn't going to protest! Thanks, Jack!! I'm not sure what it is about Glaswegian DJs (maybe one day I'll bore you all with my theories about places like Glasgow, San Francisco and Detroit), from Optimo to Kode9 to all of the Numbers crew, but they tend to mix it up a bit more and Jack's tracklist is no exception. A good mix all around which is especially interesting to reflect the changing face of UK dance...

The Mire

You Tube linkage

Two highly recommended You Tube selections for you – on the Fact Magazine site Droid of the Woofah magazine and the Wearie website has selected 20 ridiculously good ragga tracks . I'm unacquainted with quite a lot of it, but there's several foundational beats here, including some of the rhythms that forged reggaeton. With artists with name such as Major Mackerel and Gregory Peck, you can't really go wrong. If your appetite was whetted for Omar Souleyman by Clive Bell's piece in The Wire 304, check out this video . I can hardly imagine how good weddings in Syria must be.

The Mire

Basic Replay

Honest Jon's night at Plastic People last night – Sleeparchive, DJ Pete/Substance and Mark Ernestus of Basic Channel, some of the best German electronic names essentially – had a strangely arse-about-face feel. Not that that's necessarily bad, far from it. Around 11.45pm Sleeparchive was banging out Minimal Techno, the crowd fully locked-in, although this was unapologetically functional music. DJ Pete then played solely dubstep for an hour or so. For the crowd, which thinned out noticeably, it was odd for someone to come all that way just to lay down the same stuff we're used to hearing week in week out. It was almost like the early 90s, when rock 'n' roll's original Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis, stooped so low as to profess a love of this new MTV fad. The set certainly 'worked' pretty well, with DJ Pete cranking the faders and EQs maniacally, gleefully unleashing fat basslines, locked in to the music. Strange, then, that the...

The Mire

Alexis O'Hara mix tonight

Just a heads up that I'll be playing Alexis O'Hara's special guest mix tonight (Thursday 7 May, 21:00 BST) on the Adventures In Modern Music show on Resonance FM . She's currently in the middle of constructing her Squeeque: Speakerbox Igloo (yup, an igloo constructed from speakers) at Galerie Skol in Montreal. The exhibition is up for just 2 days. More info here The tracklist for the mix includes, according to Alexis, "montreal musicians who are all my friends. it runs the gamut from bluegrass to electro to dance to experimental to noise to pop"...

The Mire

ad-miring the 'nuum

Here's my slightly revised presentation from last week's Hardcore Continuum seminar (thanks to Steve and Jeremy for making it all happen). I was actually going to do more revision, but as K-Punk reminds me, one can endlessly revise and then it'll never get posted or published anywhere. Plus, perhaps it'd be disingenuous to present something here superior to or bearing little relation to what was actually presented there. For anyone interested who couldn't make it, you can find Alex Williams 's and Blackdown 's pieces on their respective blogs already. As well, if you haven't seen it already, footage of Simon 's talk on the 'nuum from earlier this year can be found from FACT Liverpool's site here . And of course, his original articles which outlined his ideas about this have been made available on our own website, (introduction to the online re-publishings here ) Redefining Hardcore As an American living in...