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The Mire

Resonance FM fundraiser

This weekend, from 12 noon on Saturday 19 March 2011 until midnight on Sunday 20 March, Resonance FM is holding a live, on air fundraiser to raise money to keep the best radio station in the world up and running. A whole slew of unique, collectable and plain beautiful objects and experiences are available for auction. Notable items include a 90 minute bass guitar lesson with Led Zep's John Paul Jones, two weeks in Annapurna Eco-Village, Nepal with all creature comforts provided, one month's entry to London venue and Wire fave hangout Cafe Oto, signed Chris Watson Records, Bob Cobbing posters, red wax from Anish Kapoor’s recent Royal Academy retrospective, a one hour sitar lesson with Baluji Shirvastav, and much more. You can find details of all the lots and how to bid at resonancefm.com/auction . As for The Wire 's offering this time around – it's a rare, art-edition release of a one-sided LP by The...

The Mire

Smiley Culture 1963-2011/Lyricmaker Mix

I'm saddened and shocked to hear of the sudden death of original UK mic-man David Emmanuel, aka Smiley Culture , after a police raid at his house. I'm not going to add much to the other tributes elsewhere , but I'll gently point you in the direction of an excellent mix exploring the fast-chat era of the UK reggae deejays, of which Smiley was a crucial part. The Lyric Maker mix by John Eden (of the Uncarved blog) and Paul Meme (Grievous Angel) is a great introduction and, most importantly, a crucial selection of Cockney and JA chatters.

The Portal

Portal 16/03/2011

March 2011

This is the first of four conversations to be uploaded in the lead up to Mutek 2011. Remaining Q&A's feature Matmos, Kevin Martin (aka The Bug/King Midas Sound) and The Caretaker.

The Portal

Portal 15/03/2011

March 2011

Online radio series by Barcelona's museum of contemporary art, with programmes covering the history of collage and sampling in music to the German home recording tape scene and much more...

The Mire

Britcore

I came a little late to Rephlex's recent compilation of late 1980s/early 90s recordings by UK crew The Criminal Minds, but over the last couple of weeks it's completely blown me away. The comp spans their early hiphop recordings through to the vital Eureka! moment of the breakbeat and a little way beyond. There's so much to take in: the density of the music, the abrasive grain, like tarmac grazing your flesh, the cheap thrills of messing around with samplers, and a gawky sense of yoof-telling-the-truth about tough times in the UK (which actually seems more resonant in these recessionary times than, say, five years ago). The friction comes as hiphop meets the brutal torque of hardcore and early rave, with just about enough lyrical flow to stop the whole machine from overheating. The energy, physically and mentally, is amazing, several notches up from much of what emerges from the UK underground these days. ...

The Portal

Portal 11/03/2011

March 2011

Free download of the second volume of Numero Group's Eccentric Breaks & Beats. Mix by Adam Calman from Parallel Thought.

The Portal

David Bedford Portal

March 2011

"The many strands of BASCA's activity include the lobbying of politicians, civil servants and industry bodies; celebrating achievement through such events as The Ivors, the Gold Badge Awards and the British Composer Awards, and fostering a community in what is frequently a solitary freelance world."

Essay

A-Z Of Electro

March 2011

In its original incarnation, Electro was black science fiction teleported to the dancefloors of New York, Miami and LA; a super-stoopid fusion of video games, techno-pop, graffiti art, silver space suits and cyborg funk. Now that Electro is back, David Toop provides a thumbnail guide to the music that posed the eternal question: "Watupski, bug byte?" This article originally appeared in The Wire 145 (March 1996).

The Mire

Back With Another One Of Those Poplocking Beats

Still in the electro zone following Dave Tompkins's The Wire salon (see The Mire passim), I find myself slipping through wormholes of sample sources, song theft and shout-out references. Today in the office we're booming Zapp & Roger's "So Ruff, So Tuff": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eksaGYygLsw Which sends me back to a personal favourite, Ronnie Hudson And The Street People's "West Coast Poplock", which borrows a chunk of Zapp, and adds the iconic lyric "California knows how to party" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmJXjDhpA_s Documentary evidence of real-life poplocking to Ronnie H can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02HxXrVlr2U The Hudson lyric was later, of course, borrowed by 2pac's "California Love", which featured Zapp's Roger Troutman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWOsbGP5Ox4 Which melded it with the sample from Joe Cocker's incredible track "Woman To Woman": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmRNUToamI A track which itself had been sampled by the Ultramagnetic MC's late 80s track "Funky": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq_C01YkmnM In a neat reversal of...

The Portal

Archive Trails Portal

March 2011

The Archive Trails project – a twelve week residency at the School Of Scottish Studies Archives with Aileen Campbell, Alasdair Roberts, and Drew Wright – is featured in The Wire 325

The Mire

Baroque & Bassline

Still reeling from Dave Tompkins’ fantastic presentation for his book on the vocoder How To Wreck A Nice Beach , at The Wire salon last week. Both the book and his talk are full of little coincidences and serendipitous overlaps. One that was particularly mind-boggling for me was Dave interviewing Florian Schneider and Wendy Carlos on the same day. I’d be quaking in my boots at the thought of talking to even one such towering figure in modern music, much less two in one day! Naturally, ensuing office chat after the talk turned to Carlos’s Switched On Bach . Some (no names, ahem) don’t see the appeal, but I had to admit that I own the Switched On Boxed Set (you can listen to some audio clips from it here ), which I bought a few years ago when I was listening to a lot of Bassline. That little revelation beggared another...

The Mire

Off The page competition winners

Thanks to everyone who entered our competition to win an Off The Page booklet. The question was: which of the Off The Page speakers selected John Cage's "Goal: New Music, New Dance" (from his book Silence ) as their favourite piece of writing on music? The answer was: Matthew Herbert. The first five names out of the hat with the correct answer were: George Hardy, Richard Moss, Suriano Rafael, Philip Rhoads and Lawrence Roberts. Your prizes will be winging their way to you any day now.

The Mire

New Adventures In Lo-fi

Another day, another bumper pack of technicolour LPs, bundled up in cardboard and scrawled with marker pen, arrive in The Wire office from the US. The LP sleeves are homemade swirls of paint and typeface, quickly made and capturing a moment of frantic creation. Before even putting them on the record deck, I have a fair idea as to how these discs might sound: long reverb trails on the guitar, deep hues of fuzz, and an intuitive, lo-fi feel. The explosion of lo-fi rock from the US in recent years has carried some revelatory moments, a fair amount of uninspired dross, but it all fizzes with a certain energy and can-do methodology. It raises a key question, and one which cuts across a great deal of music passing through the office at the moment: is the vogue for lo-fi more than a taste for sonic texture, a fad for scuffed-up surfaces? Another way to...

The Mire

Off The Page: A further digression #4

Once you've popped 'n' locked to this obscure slice of early 80s Transatlantic electro-soul, check for the credits, which harbour an unlikely link to one of the events happening at the Off The Page festival this weekend (and I don't mean Dave Tompkins's talk on the history of the vocoder: the track might be a prime slice of cyborg funk, but all the silicon synthesis is in the low end; the vocals remain strictly carbon-based). Anyway, back to those credits: edited by Double Dee & Steinski, produced and engineered by Adrian Sherwood, mixed by Sherwood and Tom (Tommy Boy) Silverman, issued by Body Rock Records, a subsiduary of Tommy Boy itself, the original channel for technologized R&B. So far so good. But what's that? Hmm, a familiar looking name in the writers' credits. 'S Beresford'. Could it really be? You bet your life it could. But who'd'a thunk it? We all knew he was the...

The Portal

Portal 09/02/2011

February 2011

Resource for music and sound enthusiasts with content focusing on the more experimental aspects of audio production.

The Mire

Off The Page: A further digression #3

The closing event of Off The Page this coming Sunday promises a collaborative and performative lecture by Claudia Molitor, Sarah Nicholls and Jennfier Walshe that will “muse on radical (or irreverent) modes of music notation”. What form this event will actually take is as elusive and mysterious as all the projects initiated by these mercurial composer-performers, who between them incorporate elements of film, theatre and multimedia into aesthetic strategies that playfully subvert the furrowed-brow, testosterone-heavy atmospheres of the kind of 'New Music' scenes they all emerge from. When I asked Claudia for some inside information on her role in the scheme of the thing, she sent me the following photographs. They look a little like images of hennaed hands, but with Persian tracery replaced by notes on staves. The mail from Claudia that accompanied the photos referenced...

The Mire

The Wire Salon: 
How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The 
Vocoder From World War Two To Hiphop

The Wire ’s monthly series of salon events returns after an extended Christmas and New Year break with an illustrated talk by the magazine’s former hiphop columnist Dave Tompkins on the history of the vocoder. The talk will be based on Dave's acclaimed recent book on synthetic voice phenomena, How To Wreck A Nice Beach (available from Stop Smiling Books ) In anticipation of the salon Dave and Monk One have made an exclusive edit of their How To Wreck A Nice Beach mix for The Wire . You can download it here . Also, click here to read Dave's extensive annotated track list for the mix in all its unexpurgated glory . The Wire Salon: 
How To Wreck A Nice Beach: The 
Vocoder From World War Two To Hiphop takes place at...