It's not surprising that there's relatively few films made about pirate radio, when being collared with illegal broadcasting equipment or running a station can land you in jail, with an unlimited fine, or, in the infamous case of DJ Slimzee, receiving an ASBO banning you from the upper floors of buildings in London. Drowned City, a documentary by UK filmmaker Faith Millin that's been gestating over the past year or so, is an attempt to rectify that situation. From the title I was expecting some apocalyptic, Ballardian essay film – the name, it turns out, comes from a track by Dark Sky – but viewing a selection of rough cuts suggests the opposite. It's a personal, intimate film dealing with those who risk their livelihoods (and lives) keeping the pirates on air. Some of the stories are familiar from urban myth or recycled anecdotes – driving around for places to put aerials, shinning up pylons – but this is one of the first times the pirates speak for themselves, albeit often with hooded faces and under the cover of darkness.

The narrative of Drowned City is the familiar one of people doing it for the love of the music, but it's no less emotionally engaging for that. One pirate recalls picking up secondhand broadcast equipment and messing around with it with mates in the back garden, culling what he needed to know from YouTube and the net. There's footage of pirates shinning up electricity pylons overlooking London and the surrounding counties and accessing power for transmitters by breaking into electricity substations (surely cast iron proof that they're not doing it for self-interest).

Of more direct political import are accounts of pirates getting placed on lengthy periods of bail after arrest, and having their partners questioned for supposedly supporting their activities. From these anecdotes, the behaviour of Ofcom, the quango that regulates radio and telecommunications in the UK, seems odd – they expend serious money and police resources to keep small pirates off the air, with relatively little in the way of explanation. "They disrupt the vital communications of the safety of life services, particularly air traffic control," runs one rather shaky-sounding argument on the Ofcom website – surely air traffic control doesn't rely on the FM band?

The film is apparently still evolving as more figures from the pirate underworld are drawn into the film; as yet all that exists in the public domain are some relatively brief teasers, essentially just standard trailers for the forthcoming film. But judging by the work in progress, Drowned City could turn out to be an important document. The intimate conversations with the pirates show you some of the toil, the dirt under the fingernails, and the scars of those who struggle to keep pirates on the air. "They take from, rather than contribute to, the communities they claim to serve," states the Ofcom website. Drowned City looks like it could offer a positive counter to that argument.

Drowned City teasers:

Derek Walmsley 31|05|2011

Tags: Drowned City | london | Multimedia | pirate radio | Uncategorized | video

"Accordions are banned from the office," comes the judgement as yet another lame East/West dance fusion disc gets abruptly slung out of the CD player. Like any rules, there's exceptions of course, and I'm sure we'll be giving this new Pauline Oliveros album a spin at some point. But It did get me thinking about funky accordions, and in the mid-2000s it seemed you could hardly move for sick beats busting a squeeze box.

Roll Deep "When I'm 'Ere", produced by Danny Weed. This sent the Roll Deep producer spinning like a dervish through a million takes on this style.

Cut-up accordion action!

But not as amazing as this remix, beatless in parts, that surfaced around the same time, just an accordion riff ran backwards and forwards (Eliane Radigue eat your heart out) over a minimal beat. On pirates around this time they would mix two copies of the records so they could just stretch out the beatless intro for minutes at a time (and the MCs could take a breather after a heavy set of bars).

A couple of years after "When I'm 'Ere" first appeared Danny Weed returned to the theme with the amazing "Heat Up". What struck me about these accordion tracks was that a couple of years earlier violins had been all the rage. Somehow the more incongruous the instrument on a grime track the better - synthetic string quartets, fake hoe-downs. Like the use of Eastern melodies on Grime tracks, producers were teleporting themselves out of the ghetto with sampled exotica. A year or two later Wiley was sticking bluegrass fiddle on his tracks.

Of course, around this time, Madlib was rocking an accordion too, and Doom even manages to make a rhyming couplet out of it.

The push-pull nature of the accordion makes it a clumsy beast to play or to sample, and it's hard to make it sing. But like a jazz violinist, when you find player or producers who have the knack, they're rare gems indeed.

Derek Walmsley 05|05|2011

Tags: Accordions | Danny Weed | Madlib | MF Doom | Roll Deep | Uncategorized | video

The last thing we need is more record lists, right? Well, maybe. No doubt we suffer from a glut of rock-lists. Glossy consumer mags use lists of all types as selling points ("you need these in your life"). When it comes to UK music monthlies, it usually means the same old rock albums, reinforcing the canon with each iteration. Books and websites are now adding to list-fatigue: sites divide lengthy lists-of-the-best-ever into several pages, thus increasing their click thrus but making for fractured reading (the very opposite of what a list should do); meanwhile, those godawful 1010 Records To Hear Before You Expire books conflate musical experience with the dying of the light.

Of course, the idea of a record list is inherently problematic. It immediately raises questions: records of what type, and limited in what way? What and whose criteria are we judging by? The very existence of a historic list presupposes a musical 'record' of some kind, which rules out the vast majority of music experienced by homo sapiens since time began.

Yet lists are worth celebrating, especially now. Lists are rarely about completism. Only a tiny minority of those who read a record list attempt to collect ’em all. Instead, a list provides a rough-and-ready survey of how the land might lay, and what waypoints on the map might be significant at the present time. Like an old style maps with sketchy outlines of countries and continents and uncharted waters beyond, they are open to correction by the user. And like the notion of music genre, the flaws and exceptions of a list are as important, notable and (crucially) useful as the inclusions. The very idea of a list of records is an acknowledgment that we're in a state of constant change.

A select few lists have been crucial in The Wire's world, and several others have been crucial in setting the agenda since the internet expanded the music world. The Nurse With Wound list is still a thing of wonder with over 200 way-out records (Airway, Brainstorm, Come…) that, contrary to rumour, do all genuinely exist. Thurston Moore's Free Jazz list for Grand Royale magazine contained such obscurities – private press releases, European releases by US exiles, loft sessions – that at the time I thought it could be some kind of jazz head’s wet daydream. "Seeing as there’s no “beginning” or “end” to this shit I have to list as many items as possible," Moore wrote, suggesting that free jazz, far from dead, was still resonating in global after shocks. Alan Licht's minimalist top 10 ("I like minimalism because it ROCKS.") was crucial because it posited minimalism as the hidden wiring of whole swathes of underground music. His original list mentions Niblock and Palestine, but in a third instalment for Volcanic Tongue (which goes all the way up to eleven) he knitted in Harry Pussy and Earth to the minimalist pantheon.

Two record lists stood out in the early internet era, and became, if not bibles, then certainly user's guide to the hidden depths of record collecting. Kirk DeGiorgio's Hall Of Fame (which has more or less disappeared from the internet, but can still be just about browsed here) was a list of primarily soul, funk, jazz and disco, but its forensic ear for producers, engineers, session men, arrangers, songwriters and other unsung heroes meant it elevated David Axelrod, Arthur Russell and George Duke to visionary status in their knitting together of black music, white music and everything in between in the 1970s.

Woebot's 100 Greatest Records Ever, is wonderfully playful despite (or because of?) its pompous title. His list makes a mockery of the idea that the album is king, with white label 12"s from Ruff Sqwad, and places Joni Mitchell and Pere Ubu next to Acen and David Lewiston as the true geniuses of modern music. Woebot's list is rough and opinionated, making you alternately snort with derision and wonder where the hell he found such riches.

Consumer guide record lists can weigh you down, but a good list should open things up. The lists above are about sharing the riches. One of my best musical experiences ever was a week-by-week record swapping session with a close friend, working the way through our respective top 50 albums. This is what the best lists do – facilitate an intimate engagement with someone's world. Despite the proliferation of lists, we need good ones more than ever.

Derek Walmsley 26|04|2011

Tags: Alan Licht | Kirk Degiorgio | Nurse With Wound | Think pieces | Thurston Moore | Uncategorized | woebot

"Sound itself is queer." I was struck by this quote from Drew Daniel of Matmos while flicking through a video of a Q&A I did with them at Mutek last year (the Mutek people have kindly just put it online, a series of four interviews from the 2010 edition that they're putting up in the run up to this year's event). Queerness is what exceeds values and structures, he explained. So if sound qua sound exists outside language and and the usual hierarchies of taste, then is sound queer?

While Drew Daniel was riffing on this idea (22 minutes into the interview) I was in the presenter's chair with one half of my brain pre-occupied with thinking of the next question to throw back at him. But nearly a year on it resonated with ideas that have been rattling around my head in the meantime. Right now I happen, oddly enough, to be listening to disco genius Patrick Cowley's "Menergy". Disco was able to evoke desire precisely because it could be so direct and, hey, crude. From pop to metal to rave to noise, music can be so complex, chaotic and endlessly fascinating because in formal terms it is so cognitively simple and sensorially direct compared to other artforms. I'm not well-placed to comment on the idea of queerness in sound – check the clip for Drew's more eloquent thoughts – but this kind of thinking, exploring how way sound escapes objective analysis and exists outside most conceptual frameworks, at least gets us a little closer to why music has such power.

Derek Walmsley 28|03|2011

Tags: Drew Daniel | Matmos | Multimedia | Queer sound | Uncategorized | video

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.

Derek Walmsley 16|03|2011

Tags: download | Fast Chat | John Eden | Multimedia | Paul Meme | Smiley Culture | Uncategorized

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.

It sent me back to what I knew of UK hiphop in the rave and immediately pre-rave era. UK hiphoppers couldn't win: put on a US accent and you sound like a fake, rap in a UK accent and it sounded ridiculous. George Mahood, ex of Big Daddy Magazine, pointed me in the direction of the Aroe & The Soundmakers' two comps of UK hiphop, the Crown Jewels Volume 1 & 2. Mindboggling as these comps are, with incredible rarities and one-offs from some seriously obscure crews, it's frustrating that they're essentially mixtapes. Surely this era is ripe for rediscovery now? Estuary English even has a real nice flow to it, for me at least (do excuse the pun). It's high time a UK record label stepped up to the plate and properly compiled and documented the music of this era.

Sub-bass! Gunshot’s album Patriot Games pictured them sitting intently facing each other in a circle, holding mics, as if they're about to become blood brothers, or head off on some kind of a suicide mission. Nuclear war is referenced everywhere, in titles and samples from the movie War Games – perhaps surprising, as by 1993 and with the Berlin Wall a fast-fading memory, the UK wasn't in imminent danger of apocalypse (check out Gunshot's "World War Three", where the "Three" sample is from De La Soul. You can almost see the daisies wilting in the radioactive fallout). But that threat of apocalypse is echoed elsewhere, in The Criminal Minds' 2000 AD-style artwork and titles like "A Taste Of Armageddon" (whose samples are ripped from the darkside of the charts: Duran Duran's doomy, fatalistic bad-romance ballad "Save A Prayer" and Adamski's "Killer").

It's not reportage but a form of gothic – I can't find a single reference to the Gulf War (still fresh in the memory) anywhere in Patriot Games, but instead the album seems stuck in some kind of extended Cold War shellshock. You get a sense of lingering militarism everywhere – of US military bases in mainland Europe, of political subservience and impotence, of Chernobyl blowing up and blowing the bad dust in. Both groups reference a "reign of terror" (Gunshot sampling that line from TCM’s original track), but it's never clear who is doing the reigning.

Another theme which TCM and Gunshot share is the Old Bill. The police versus the people was another hidden war in the UK, with the silent majority happy with the boys in blue, who it later turned out were involved with low-level torture (in Northern Ireland), miscarriages of justice (the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four) and corruption. Blacks accounted for only around 5% of the population in the 1980s, so if you were white you were probably relatively sheltered from the stop-and-search and regular harassment which led to riots in Brixton and Tottenham in the early 80s.

The police references in Gunshot and TCM are to "Illegal Procedure", "Rough Justice", "Interception Squad" and Flying Squad – forces within forces, a police state which still maintains a semblance of normality. Gunshot kick against this by bigging up pirate radio and, in a skit which begins the album, tuning into the police frequencies. There's an echo here of Bomb The Bass's "Beat Dis", Tim Simenon's chart-topping sample/scratch fest which gave a kick start to both hiphop and house in the UK, with its barked introduction/call to arms "keep this frequency clear".

In Gunshot's great scheme of things, the effect of police harassment and living in fear is anomie – not the kind of psychology you usually associate with hiphop. MC Mercury's first line in "25 Gun Salute" could be straight outta Gravediggaz: "from the brink of madness comes one...". He trumps this in ”Social Psychotics“: "it's like I've got 12 voices singing in my head". Another Mercury line, "psychotherapy is needed for Bexleyheath" (the latter a Kent suburb of London), sounds faintly absurd, but accurately illustrates a particular kind of British small-town mentality where it's quietness and conservatism and your mum and dad who eventually fuck you up.

Gunshot described what they did as hardcore rap, which resonated nicely with what was gestating in rave at the time, and they painted themselves at outsiders – "some try to ban us/for cavorting round the hardcore banner". Whether they really were outsiders or not is a moot point, considering that they were widely discussed as the next big thing in UK hiphop for many years in the early 90s. But that's not necessarily important: anomie and outsider status becomes a fuel for the UK hardcore hiphopper. UK hiphop couldn't borrow funk and soul, and it had no real coherent community, so it had to take the sense of dislocation and find merit in that. The idea of UK hiphop being reviled had some truth in it, but it also becomes a convenient foundational myth which helps sustains the intensity of the music. This is where Gunshot, for instance, join forces with Napalm Death. Like grindcore, the shock value is a way to try and jolt UK society out of complacency.

This kind of shock value feeds into the brilliantly cartoonish samples of TCM. Why did no-one think before of putting Bernard Hermann’s Cape Fear theme under a fat hiphop beat? (On "Urban Warfare" they stick the "Death March" from the Star Wars soundtrack under an even more stoopidly fun rhythm).

It's just a short step from here to the sampledelic bombast of Acen's rave classic "Trip II The Moon".

Ferreting around on YouTube and checking out Aroe & The Soundmaker's comps yielded loads of great moments, and the dividing line between hardcore and hardcore rap is so thin as to disappear entirely. These tracks are so grimy and abrasive you begin to wonder, fancifully, if it's down to the records they sampled being that much further from the epicentre of funk and soul. You can almost see gaudy record covers emblazoned with James Brown Twenty Golden Hits (Includes Funky Drummer).

But more likely the abrasive, inventive grain of the beats is because it was the sampler talking here. UK hiphop was a music of kids in bedrooms working without the benefit of soundclashes, communal events, any real heritage of funk/hiphop/soul, or even an accepted dialect to rap in. Being outsiders, self-declared or not, sent them back to their bedrooms with even more determination. The sampler is the ultimate translator for hiphop – everyone understands a ridiculous beat – and this is the one thing they could excel out.

Derek Walmsley 11|03|2011

Tags: Aroe & The Soundmakers | Britcore | Gunshot | hiphop | Music discussion | The Criminal Minds | Think pieces | UK hiphop | Uncategorized

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 usual magpie sample theft of hiphop, Zapp & Roger did their own version of "California Love" later:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMa62lS0iVI

This much I knew already – funnily enough from the soundtrack to the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas computer game (whoever compiles those soundtracks has got a seriously great record collection). But what I didn't know till now, thanks to a bit of googling, was that "West Coast Poplock" itself borrowed it's main riff from Booker T And The MG's "Boot Leg":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZK2t1YnDPs

And that track has its own hiphop history, having been borrowed by Cypress Hill:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8at2twL6gBI

With this dense web of connections, moving both back and forth along the timeline, "West Coast Poplock" seems something like the keystone of hiphop, a crucial multi-way node in rap history. But perhaps out there is the another track which has even more points of connection – the Higgs boson of hiphop, connecting everything to everything:

Whatever it is, my guess is that DJ Funktual in Fort Lauderdale, Florida has already found it. His long running series of ten-minute shows on YouTube breaking down who-sampled-what are compulsive viewing, and take you as close to the sheer time-shifting delight of finding these connections as anything out there:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfqlG8gSkeA

Derek Walmsley 02|03|2011

Tags: 2pac | Booker T And The MGs | Cypress Hill | Dave Tompkins | DJ Funktual | Joe Cocker | Multimedia | Roger Troutman | Ronnie Hudson | Think pieces | Ultramagnetic MCs | Uncategorized | video | Zapp

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 read this is that lo-fi is just a kind of backyard exoticism, a mindless delight in an 'other' which happens to come from a fucked-up effects pedal. On a practical level, lo-fi can blur the most ugly playing into vaguely graceful shapes, like a blob of vaseline on the lens.

As a side note, it's worth noting that criticism can be complicit in obscuring what's going on in lo-fi music too. There's a swarm of stock ideas that music writers reach for when they hear lo-fi methods and cheap reverb: ideas of distancing, haunting, ghosts in the four-track, some of which stick, others of which have become lazy rhetorical flourishes.

This explosion in the last few years isn't simply down to Ariel Pink, but many of the albums that come through the office echo the lo-fi dynamics of his amazing run of homemade CD-Rs from the 2000s (House Arrest being the one that turned my head around). So these questions about the potential worth of lo-fi methods sent me back to his work to try and recover what's fresh about them.

The way you work with a 4-track is to record tracks, bounce them down on top of each other, overdub more to taste, and then the whole thing is pretty much set in stone. Once you've bounced down tracks you can't rework them, and tape bleed means the elements blend into each other. But this whole mass can be worked with as malleable blob of rhythm and form, with tracks EQ'd together, and sped up or slowed down en mass. The attack of the drums, the fizz of the percussion, they can be squeezed and moulded away from the usual physical constraints of whacking real drums in a real studio. You lose all sense of actual physical scale, of large events versus small events, and it all becomes flow. When you'd expect a guitar solo, a pure ejaculation of distorted tone is all you need.

All this is a way of saying that the formal flow of Ariel Pink's older work is, for me, far more exhilarating than in his later, more hi-fi work. Tracks have rhythms that work because of the way the 4-track blends it all together – whacked biscuit-tins become huge splashes of noise, mouth sounds create intimate percussive shifts.

Ariel himself sounds like a different person on each track, and sometimes within each track. From gravelly growls to pristine helium vocals, the 4-track blends them all together. Sometimes there're no actual words being sung. On "Hardcore Pops Are Fun" and "Interesting Results" he's actually commenting on the production process itself – "going through this big transition phase... here we go again... I'm not going to try any more.... it may not be much but let's see what you got." There's no static protagonist stationed in the words, but a burbling inner monologue reveling in a state of total sensational flux.

What I dug from revisiting Ariel's methods was how amazingly malleable the lo-fi process is. Ambiguity of sound and lyrics is a springboard for formal innovation rather than just a reverse-snobbish taste for abrasive sounds, or a way to mask shoddy playing. Every single track on House Arrest sounds completely different, a line-up of imaginary groups, a process which resembles plastic sculpture more than it does the step-by-step process of the usual recording studio.

There's absolutely no denying that Ariel Pink's work is retro to the max, and for some the mere echo of 80s pop music immediately causes a gag reflex to kick in. But the music of that decade was so ambitious and chaotic that there's still enough gold among the shit for a canny operator to recover and remould. These kind of methods in the hands of new players like Hype Williams, Matrix Metals or LA Vampires are still valuable tools.

Derek Walmsley 16|02|2011

Tags: Ariel Pink | LA Vampires | Lo-fi | Matrix Metals | Think pieces | Uncategorized

I've been alarmed recently to see how Grime's history is fading away, at least in the digital domain. Aficionados are probably familiar with how some of the most important tracks never even got a release. "Headquarters" by Essentials, the original version of their track "State Your Name", is a paradigm case, a posse cut Grime track where each MC would state their name and location before spitting 16 bars of lyrics – when time came to release the track commercially, the track's big name MCs such as Kano and Crazy Titch mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps it was contractual obligations, but either way, commercial releases seemed just an echo of the real music.

In retrospect it's easy to see why - some tracks were just CD-Rs sent to DJs to play on air, or in the case of Essentials, thrown into the crowd at shows. This stuff circulated quick, but old tracks would get left on old harddrives, or copied over, etc etc. But it illustrates an uncomfortable paradox: that this most digital-savvy of musics could get cut and copied until it was unrecognisable from what really happened.

(some cases in point: you can hardly find any tracks online by Essentials, although you can check out "Headquarters" via a tape rip; the amazing "Sidewinder" by Wiley, Flo Dan, God's Gift, Trim and many others is available to watch right now, but half the time I look for it it ain't there; and one which really tears at my heart is that Wiley's "Dylan's On A Hype Ting", an extraordinary response track to Dizzee Rascal, can't be heard anywhere)

Anyway, anyway: the point of this post is to introduce the excellent Grime Historian YouTube channel, which while it isn't remotely exhaustive, at least goes some way to plugging some of the gaps in Grime's history which have been punched in the last few years. There's over 200 tracks on there thus far, and it's been worth it for me simply to check out many long-cherished tracks by Ears, one of the best Grime MCs of the mid-2000s who somehow never really quite broke through and whose work seems to have disappeared into the ether. How can you resist a track called "Verb And Pronoun Boy"? I certainly can't. Ears was known for a tongue-twisting, syllable-mangling vocal style which somehow managed to always sound precise and elegant, and it's put to good effect on "Backwards Riddim", where he neatly tip-toes around a reversed version of Dexplicit's "Forward" rhythm. Finally, you can check out a version of Ears's "Fine Fine" – this is just a snippet, but this track is absolutely devastating, a sing-song delivery which darts in and out of the most futuristic body-popping beat that I'd ever heard, at least back in 2005. Back to the future...

Derek Walmsley 02|02|2011

Tags: grime | Grime Historian | Multimedia | Uncategorized | video

The man (men?) in the marshes above is performing a very rare Position Normal live date at The Outer Church tonight: well worth checking out I'd say – their self-titled last album, originally released on tape, was one of The Wire's Top 50 Records of 2009. Our own Joseph Stannard will be DJing, and best of all, it's free.

And a small competition: if you can identify where the photo in the great Lila Hunnisett flyer above was taken, email myself at The Wire, and you'll get some on-the-hoof field recordings done by myself at an appropriate location.

Derek Walmsley 11|08|2010

Tags: Uncategorized