Friday/ Saturday Bandcamp Bonanza

Bandcamp Friday yesterday dropped a ton of new music into my Inbox and while today is a day late in terms of the benefits the artists get from the monthly Bandcamp Friday (Bandcamp waive their fees for one day a month) it's still worth posting some of the highlights- and yesterday was packed full of highlights.

We'll start with a 10: 40 remix of Puerto Montt City orchestra, a song called Hey You, out on Brighton's Higher Love label. By his own admission Jesse's work as 10: 40 has been an ongoing mission to make music/ remixes that channel Spiritualized and this one takes that to the nth degree- cue up Jason Spaceman's Lay Back In The Sun either before or after this and enjoy the sun drenched, blissed out ride....

                                                 

The song is a cover of 14 Iced Bears' Hay Fever, an 80s indie classic. You can get buy the 10: 40 remix of Puerto Montt City Orchestra at Bandcamp.

Next, another murky, underground, radiophonic, analogue synth missive from Pye Corner Audio, the first one for a few months, this one titled Texture Reels. Four minutes and forty five seconds of subterranean, kosmische reel to reel intensity. Get it at Bandcamp, pay what you want. 

Thirdly, Emma. Matty Ducasse records as Skylab. His Skylab International offshoot released a new single onto Bandcamp yesterday, a cover of Hot Chocolate's Emma. Mat plays and produces, Zoe Filthy- Rich songs. The drum machine pitter patters, chunky machine rhythms. The synths ping and blip. Hot Chocolate's mid- 70s pop- soul hit is darker than you might think. Producer Mickie Most asked singer Errol Brown for 'darkness and depth'. Errol gave him lyrics about lost childhood and suicide, a film star 'who can't keep living on dreams no more'. Mat and Zoe dredge up all of the pain and darkness that Errol piled into his lyrics. The EP is at Bandcamp, remix, edit and instrumental.

Lastly, Richard Norris whose Oracle Sound dub project has become essential listening. Richard has recorded three albums of dubs, available digitally and on vinyl via his subscription service. Recently he hosted his friend Jon Carter, who DJed at the Heavenly Social in the 90s and recorded as Monkey Mafia as well as under his own name. Richard wanted to show Jon some new kit. They ended up making a dub track called Ceefax- rocking drums and bass, space echo, melodica and an Ampp Freq live dub machine. The results come in three parts- Ceefax, a Norris dub and a Carter dub. All three are at Bandcamp. As I keep typing. 

You can buy all the music above for less than the price of a pint of lager in central London (and some central Manchester pubs). And while the lager may look briefly colder and more enticing, the music will last longer. 

Music From Two Mats

The first day of March is the first day of meteorological spring, the emergence from winter. It feels like it's been a long winter, the dark mornings and evenings hanging around for a long time. I've been unwell this week, spending two days off work and in bed. And last week I did this to my finger (ring finger, left hand)...

That x- ray shows my dislocated finger, done playing football when the ball struck my hand end on. Straight away I knew it was bad, not an injury I would just run off. I got to A&E at Wythenshawe at just after 10pm last Tuesday night and was told there was an eight hour wait, that I'd be better off going home, trying to sleep and coming back at 8am the next morning. The following morning a very nice A&E nurse sent me for an x- ray (above), diagnosed a dislocated finger and brought in the gas and air for me to inhale while she pulled my finger back into socket. 'Ooh, I felt a click, did you?', she said at one point. I can confirm that gas and air is first rate as a pain killer and can make a patient feel quite light headed. Also that yes, I felt a click too. A visit to hand clinic last Thursday saw me leave with a splint. It's been badly bruised, swollen, various shades of purple and painful ever since. But obviously better than it was in that x- ray where two thirds of my finger are very much not where they should be. 

This week on Tuesday morning I took yet more painkillers and felt nauseous straight away. I went to work and got on with things and took more pain killers near lunchtime. Later on I was sick in my classroom bin (thankfully not in front of any of my classes- memorable for them maybe but not something that I'd choose to happen). Whether I've overdone the pain killers or picked up a bug that the medicines I've been taking reacted with I don't know, but by the time I got home on Tuesday evening I was done in and spend most of Wednesday and much of Thursday in bed. I'm also currently taking an anti- histamine for my chronic sinusitis and eustachian tube dysfunction (long standing and ongoing, possibly an after effect of Covid, possibly an allergic reaction to something) and statins (inherited high cholesterol, diagnosed last summer). Pills 'n' thrills and bellyache, as the Happy Mondays had it on their album of 1990.  

Enough of my moaning- today is therefore not just the first day of spring but the first day I've felt any better this week so here are two different recent releases from varying ends of the electronic music spectrum. First, some calming and beautiful ambient/ modern classical music from Mat Ducasse. Mat was once Matty Skylab, one of the four people in Skylab along with Howie B, Masayuko Kudo and Toshio Nakanishi. Their back catalogue is full of weird and wonderful electronic delights, experimental mid- 90s trip hop and electronica. In recent years Mat's solo recordings have been excursions into deep listening, ambient soundscapes. His latest release is two versions of Song For David, a track recorded in memory of a friend who died of prostate cancer. Both versions, one with bells and the other without, are sublime, with oscillations, washes of synth, long chords and brightly hued ambience. You can find Song For David here. 

In 1997 Mat Ducasse remixed this song along with William Orbit, Psyche Rock, by French pair Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier, a song oringally from 1967, a leftfield, rocking late 90s update on mid 60s Franco- psychedelia. 

It provides a nice link to Elexperimental by Matt Gunn, a four track EP that came out yesterday, described by Matt as 'akin to Kraftwerk and LCD with a bass after a night on the sauce'. This is music that is vibrant and up for it, music that thumps out of speakers and blows the dust away. Golden Graham is breakbeats and fuzzed up synths over a white knuckle bassline, kicking and jerking around. Bingo's Crime (with Louis Gordon)is electronic funk and long keyboard chords beamed in from Dusseldorf four decades ago, bleeps riding on top. Third track, Drive Thru Century, starts with the sound of cars spinning their wheels and revving their engines, a souped up take on Autobahn, then more drum machines and synths/ keys from West Germany, a lovely padding bassline and the sound of the future, then, now. The EP finishes with We Are Ninja, in collaboration with Toffeetronic, mid 80s electro- pop, fizzing, bubbling synths, needle scratches and a vocal chanting the title. Lots of fun, something for everyone and also tracks that never quite do what you expect them to do. Buy the Elexperimental EP here. 

Two Years

Isaac died two years ago today. In normal terms two years would seem like a long time but under these circumstances it doesn't feel like very long at all. Part of me still thinks he might come in through the front door at some point, dropped off by his college bus after a week away. I can recall the last few days at home and then in Wythenshawe hospital so clearly and vividly that it could have happened yesterday and it doesn't take much for me to be back in the room in the hospital with him, those days and hours that led up to him leaving us, at 1.45pm on Tuesday 30th November 2023. Or standing in the car park on the phone to my parents. Or the walk I took behind the trolley with the two porters through the hospital corridors to leave him at the mortuary. Or arriving back at home in the dark without him, the three of us suddenly in a new world we didn't ask for. I don't think about these things that often but I have done this week in those moments where I haven't been distracted by something else, driving to and from work especially. I'll be glad when today is over I think, another anniversary navigated and survived. The anniversary of his death and his birthday exactly a week earlier are paired in away which is really difficult. Last week we took him some goodies for his birthday. Today we'll go to the cemetery and take him some flowers and try to remember him as he was. 

Nick Cave writes about grief a lot. At his Red Hand Files he encourages people to write in to him and he'll reply, unfiltered. A lot of people write to him about their own grief or his and he replies eloquently and with experience and wisdom. A lot of it rings true with me. On Carnage, the album he made with Warren Ellis in 2021, an album I bought while in a record shop in Manchester in the hazy, unimaginable weeks after Isaac died, there's a song called Lavender Fields. Carnage has many great, explosive, funny, horrific and image laden songs, songs about white elephants, Black Lives Matter, Botticelli Venuses with penises and the hand of God. Lavender Fields is none of these things.

Lavender Fields

On Lavender Fields Nick sings of being 'appallingly alone on a singular road', walking through the lavender fields and how the flowers stain his skin. He describes the world as furious and how he is over it (the world). The line, 'Sometimes I hear my name, oh where did you go?', I assume is about his son Arthur, who died in 2015 (and the whole song is I think, although Nick said at Red Hand Files that the song is about change, about 'moving from one state to another'). Warren Ellis' music is simple and stately, rising and falling organ/ synth/ strings, church music. It becomes elegiac and choral, the backing vocals swelling as the synths ascend and then fades out slowly. 

'Sometimes I see a pale bird wheeling/ In the sky/ But that is just a feeling/ A feeling when you die'. 

Nick then shifts up again, emotionally and spiritually, the song transporting him (and us- well me anyway)...

'We don't ask who/ And we don't ask why/ There is a kingdom in the sky'

At Red Hand Files recently he was asked about writing about grief through music. This is a part of his reply...

When I started to write Ghosteen, my intention wasn’t to write a record about the death of my son, but as I scribbled away, Arthur inserted himself into the process. He became the ruling force, perched there at the end of every song to exert his sovereignty. He showed me how to write the record and I simply had no choice in the matter.

Nowadays, when I sit down and begin to write, I feel the dead, all the dead, ferrying the words forward. They are not necessarily the subject of the songs, rather they are the spiritual energy that runs through them. The dead are always with us, holding us in their sway. We, the living, are the exuberant and temporary anima of their departure. As songwriters we scratch away, writing ourselves into existence in order to enliven the spirits of those who have passed on.

I can't articulate or explain exactly what Nick means here but I get it. It reminds me of the poem we had read at the graveside, The Dead by Billy Collins. 

'The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes'

A few weeks ago I met Mat Ducasse aka Matty Skylab. Mat makes music, once as part of Skylab and more recently under his own name. I've posted some of his music here before- Love Theme and Bunny's Lullaby are both impossibly beautiful, cosmic ambient pieces, profound and emotive. In September he put out a two track release called Juniper Songs and I'm not going to attempt to describe the two songs on it, I'm just going to point you towards them. You can find them here. We had a chat for a few minutes and we asked each other how we were. 'We abide, we endure', Mat said to me, and those words are as true as anything anyone has said to me recently. Thank you Mat. 

Love Theme

This is very lovely, a new one from Mat Ducasse and available at a name your own price deal at Bandcamp. Synths and twinkly melodies, some xylophone and a bit of Vangelis in there in inspiration I think. Two versions, Love Theme and Love Theme (Remix). Back in March Mat released a gorgeous cosmic lullaby with guitars from Kenji Suzuki and the ever wonderful Chris Mackin (who went above and beyond last weekend for me). Bunny's Lullaby was written for Chris' friends Charles and Lisa when they lost their baby, and, well, that's pretty close to me at the moment. All proceeds from Bunny's Lullaby are going to Great Ormond Street Hospital. When I posted Bunny's Lullaby earlier this year The Swede described it as 'moving and profound' and I can't do any better than that. 

Monday's Long Song

This was featured in the middle of David Holmes' recent show at NTS (posted yesterday) but I've been meaning to post it in its own right since I bought it, it's nine minutes long so fits in perfectly for this long running Monday series and is in aid of a very good cause. 

Bunny's Lullabye, nine minutes of beautiful guitar playing (courtesy of Chris Mackin and Kenji Suzuki) and some twinkling synths, is a gorgeous piece of music and send off, a cosmic lullaby. Buy it at Bandcamp. All profits from its release will be going to Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital.

Mat Ducasse is/ was Matty Skylab. Back in 1999 Skylab remixed Holmes' 69 Police, the lead song from Homer's Bow Down To The Exit Sign, an album of instrumentals, guest vocalists (Bobby Gillespie, Jon Spencer, Martina Topley- Bird) and street sounds. On this remix Matty loops the organ sounds and adds some squealing guitar or sax, maybe both, over a dusty chuggy rhythm. Music for a nightclub scene in a dystopian future film. 

Radiation

Very nice, slow moving, ambient music, cosmic in tone and scope, from Mat Ducasse (ex - Skylab).  The first one of the pair is cinematic, a widescreen instrumental theme for satellites spinning round the earth, asteroids shooting past the Milky Way, the International Space Station sweeping overhead. The second heads into the modern classical area, orchestral, swelling strings. All proceeds to Macmillan cancer support.

Monday's Long Song

This is an epic twenty one minutes of sound, a wrap around, found sound collage called We Are Stardust, with voices flitting in and out, layers of radio static, echo, bursts of transmissions, the sudden appearance of strings or guitars, Geiger counter noise, alien sounds, the distant remains of Joe Meek's New World reverberating. It was written, recorded and produced by Mat Ducasse who some might remember as DJ, producer and musician Skylab.



Mat also recently released this one, Lord Of The Cosmos, twenty one minutes of ambient, cosmic drift, the soundtrack to a film about space exploration that hasn't been made yet. This one is more musical, synth sounds, drones and chimes.

At a pound each they're excellent value for money. Played back to back they make a very good, forty minute way to kick off your day. Maybe put some appropriate visuals on at the same time and sink into space.