No Pain In Pop

This Heat and This Dirt, Again

2008-08-01T18:40:00.006+01:00

One day we’ll stop fluttering our charred 'lashes in your direction, glowing acolytes, we promise – but for now, it’s Friday night (threshed, deathless Friday night). About to head once more for the mire of drunken London, we flutter, gobs agape, teeth on parade, knowing not how to do anything other than bring you something else vaguely Italo, something else vaguely disco.

Except it’s not – not at the outset anyway, which seems to swelter in what remains of thiz dayz rayz. No; at the outset Hecuba seem bottom half-buried beneath fading liquid – water, sweat, Amontillado, whatever – as the lax mouth of Isabelle Albuquerque surveys lost gulls and fragile hookers in a manner calm enough to make the mind’s eye section her off behind the blacked-out window of an ailing Capri. For the most part, 'Baltimore's a dark-eyed dub bound for the soft clink and sangria velvet of the private members' club, but still... it's definitely bound for somewhere.

And, first and foremost, it's bound to the sorry earth that holds it, mutilated with concrete growths and drunk ticks finding beds between the thatch of lamp-lights grown damp and splintered in the rain; bound to the sensation of passing through a maddened city; bound to the man-made-motion of star-ward ascent, grown giddy in pursuit of its own pulse, 'til - ahhh, there they are, those springing, faltering rushes of Italo-synth, we knew it all along, the disco's nothing - just an un-destination for world-weary, kohl-toxic black-holes. Suck it up and suck it in - it's out into the heat and the dirt, yet again.

Hecuba - Baltimore

Live in the Night : U.S. Girls on WNYU, New York

2008-07-31T01:03:00.013+01:00

On air ~~NOW~~/// 2000-2100 EDT; 0100-0200 GMT/BST
w/Buckets of Bile

Click for ~~hi-freq~~
Click for ~~low~~
ARCHIVE - Download

Click for home
for U.S. Girls
for Buckets of Bile

Any body receiving ? ? ?
Tin can phantom
Spectre sceptre Spector spoke

Enormous Twelve Inches... #2

2008-07-29T16:53:00.008+01:00

Like much of the music that we carry in our record bags, this 12" was discovered through the fucking amazing Cybernetic Broadcasting System. The CBS is an internet radio station run by I-F, who you might know (if you've ever been a cunt with a fauxhawk) from his beef with electrocash godhead DJ Hell, or more likely (if you have any taste) from his beyond classic electro anthem "Space Invaders are Smoking Grass". It broadcasts creamy disco, raw Chicago house, long-forgotten new-wave and all kinds of other electronic oddness 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And for that, I and many other Italodisco fiends can be truly grateful.

Anyway, as is so very often the case, I heard "Dancing on the Berlin Wall" on CBS, creamed my pants, cleared up the mess, and promptly forgot all about it. As is so often the case, I saw the record in a Music Video Exchange a couple of years later, snapped it up, and fell in lust all over again.

"Dancing on the Berlin Wall" is the best Kraftwerk parody you've never heard. Over the barest arpegiattor sequence, our laconic hero narrates last night's excesses in Alexanderplatz. Siren sounds and a deadpan titular chorus ("We're dancing... on the Berlin Wall/ yes, we're dancing... on the Berlin Wall") make this cold war nostalgia of the most fun kind, long before "Goodbye Lenin" made East Berlin look like anything other than the shitty depressing hellhole it most likely was in the early 80s. It makes sense, then, that Rational Youth were not in fact Stadtkinder but Canadian...

Rational Youth- Dancing on the Berlin Wall

Thanks, Enormous Members Club..

Chest Pains for God and Godden

2008-07-29T13:39:00.017+01:00

Photo of John Maus by Nic Amato + Beaterblocker logo

Is John Maus the millennia-bored voice of the almighty? He’s leant his hand to the work of Noah Lennox and Ariel Pink, but it remains hard to tell. On 'Bennington', an exclusive track pulled a while from the new Beater Blocker compilation ('Read On’ for details), stone-throat John looms as he has always done, somewhere above and beyond it all, a spectre trapped in a hidden zone. He's reaching out here though, succumbing to an earth-bound mortal whose "fucking eyes" he just won't forget, aiming a love song down from on high but tumbling in the process, below his beloved, elevating the girl to divine status and sucking the natural order of things inside out like a petty black hole. Claustrophobic swirls of synth-silk worry and toil to wrap and save the fall from grace, but it's too late so all they can even hope to do is swell, spread and brace and try to hurl him back to his pedestal, parachute-cum-catapult, a trampoline for a God limbs clumsy and in tears. How fucking absurd.

John Maus - Bennington

Find John Maus kicking around with the busy tastebuds at Upset! The Rhythm, who manned decks at the launch of heart-attacked Ed Godden's Beater Blocker charity compilation (alas we couldn't make it, proof exists that we were here).

Buy Beaterblocker from Phonica here for £7. For more on the comp plus an interview with Godden Read On... Ed Godden is 21 and lives in London. Last year he was out in Bristol, took too many drugs and had a heart attack. At 21. NPIP imagines that sucked – yeah, pretty much – but luckily for Ed the staff at Homerton Hospital were on hand to guide him away from death’s gaping rot of mouth and back onto the smiling streets of Hackney, where fried chicken bones fall from the sky and street corners are guarded like fires. Rejoice!

‘Cept there was a guilt that clung and couldn’t be shook. You can understand I suspect. Watch poor elderly unfortunates trolleyed off under blankets and you can x the usual dryout day guilt something exponential. So Ed did what any young buck with thanks to give would do and made a mixtape. Beaterblocker has 15 tracks from people like Vladislav Delay, Alex Smoke and Dirty Projectors' Angel Deradoorian (as well as the John Maus track featured earlier) and it’s on sale now for £7 from all the best places - Rough Trade East, Pure Groove, Boomkat, Phonica et cetera. All the proceeds will go to the people who kept Godden breathing at Homerton Hospital. Find the full list of tracks after this short stretch of dialogue.

How’d it happen, Ed?

I was out in Bristol for a friend's birthday. A few of us got some cocaine in (a couple of friends thought it was primarily speed - but I've never taken that before). I wasn't crazily addicted to the stuff - more like a payday treat. As the night went on, I didn't feel too ace, but carried on taking it.

And then? Bad times, right?

I got lost – I just couldn't stop thinking how 'hilly' Bristol was and ended up at a random house party somewhere. Eventually I found a mate and asked if I could crash at his house. I couldn't sleep and my chest area felt like a screwed up crisp packet. I was lying down with my head in a pillow for hours still wired. I had no idea what a heart attack would feel like or whether the pain was being exaggerated by my state – I thought it could have just been heartburn so I put off going to see anyone about it. I didn't end up going into hospital until two days later.

I was always under the impression it was an instant, chest-clutching, rushed-to-hospital thing with heart attacks. How long did they keep you in for?

I was in the Homerton Hospital for just over a week, just resting up the majority of the time and having loads of ECG/blood pressure checks and quite a bit of morphine to start. I was very dazed the first few days. I had an angiogram (where they put a wire through your largest artery either via your groin or your wrist - thankfully my doctor chose the latter). This was to see if I had any serious problems, as my Dad had trouble with his heart in the past. Fortunately I was given the all clear but it hit home that at 21 I was incredibly unhealthy - drinking all the time, smoking, hardly ever eating dinner, no fruit and veg, very little exercise...

Sounds worryingly familiar…

I've changed my lifestyle big time, but I really don't want the whole thing to be some anti-drugs campaign. This sounds incredibly corny but... whilst I was going out having all this fun, there were so many wonderfully good natured people looking after really sick people and I just wanted to say as big a thank you as I thought I possibly could.

Was there anything or anyone in particular at Homerton Hospital that prompted the comp?

An old man was wheeled away in my first day of being on the ACU (Acute Cardiac Unit) ward and then another man the day after. All the doctors and nurses that work there, helping people for a living. They were really nice and calm. I don't do much to help anyone else ever, so I wanted to repay some gratitude - especially as my case was self-inflicted. I felt very guilty indeed.

How did you go about getting the artists involved?

I started by asking a few friends based in London and the South East to put tracks on. I then e-mailed Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay) about a possible contribution and he was quite shocked to hear about it, as he'd had major problems with his heart that were drug related in his twenties. Once he gave the OK I contacted a lot of my other favourite musicians and everyone tried to help in any way they could. The whole project's been really fun.

Did you ask the artists involved to write around a theme at all, or did they just contribute whatever they had?

Yes. Some. Due to label agreements a few artists couldn't provide exclusive material, but allowed me to choose anything previously released so I aimed to make it as fitting as possible to the cause. A few of the musicians were on lengthy tours so they let me have one of their hidden gems! So maybe they’re not all related, but I’m just really chuffed with all the donations.

Any plans to continue Beater Blocker after the compilation's released?

A label, I think! The launch on Thursday was awesome. I definitely want to put out more records and put on more parties. I have material that was offered in recent months but the disc was full…

Various - Beaterblocker compilation
Rhodri Davies & Louisa Martin - Soldercup [edit]
Marissa Nadler - Diamond Heart
Marsen Jules - Yara Series 1
Alex Smoke - It’s A Carni Life
Dead Leaf Echo - Anti-Matter
Loren Dent -Winter During Wartime
Vladislav Delay - Raamat
Robert Babicz - If I had A Dream
Abdullah Flex - Tell Me
Ghosthype - Sufferah
Qwerty - Butterjam
John Maus - Bennington
Women & Children - The Wolfman’s Tick-Tock
Klimek Kingdoms - Here We Come
Deradoorian - Grey Teeth (of Dirty Projectors)

Parts & Labor

2008-07-28T16:42:00.006+01:00

No Pain in Pop has been a while enamoured with the artisan pop music of Brooklyn’s Parts & Labor. Recently expanded to a quartet (the acquisition of guitarist Sarah Lipstate adding a flash of naïf charm to a sound storm that was always noble in its toil, drummer Joe Wong mooring the whole thing with motorik anchor) P&L return later this year with a new record. Receivers is the successor to last year’s Mapmaker longplayer, the band’s fourth full album and – by the sounds of new single ‘Nowhere’s Nigh’ – it towers in melodic altitudes only hinted at by the band’s past; cutting a dash between pop and noise that compels us into sundreams of The Left Banke sweating a builder’s broth as there’s laughing with friends in the swelter of a humid city, all good work, cash in hand for some of Tom Wolfe’s “good ol’ boys” as they give up their days to earn weekend money for a short roadtrip to Rockaway. They'll be back in work dead on seven Monday morning though, for sure.

Parts & Labor - Nowhere's Nigh

Receivers is released in the UK on the 3rd of November (10/21 in the US) through Jagjaguwar.

Ballardry : sounds of sonic fiction

2008-07-26T11:15:00.009+01:00

"Ultrasonic music, employing a vastly greater range of octaves, chords and chromatic scales than are audible by the human ear, provided a direct neural link between the sound stream and the auditory lobes, generating an apparently sourceless sensation of harmony, rhythm, cadence and melody uncontaminated by the noise and vibration of audible music."

More..

T B A > S W 1

2008-07-25T11:44:00.003+01:00

Long Enough for the Light to Change

2008-07-24T15:01:00.008+01:00

They’re having boat parties in America! All ‘cross the territories, from Italo-disco glides tracing the very edges of New York to the viney boondocks of Missouri, citizens are hauling bold bodies to the waterside and filling aquaways with bustle and blood, red cells under a transient spell of summer. NPIP, too! - in shilly-shally dock shoes and rolled-up jeans, holidaying in the surf, talking to the faces. Faces to listen to, too! - punk sons of out-of-work raftsmen talking all Tom Sawyer; sons of richer men falling in with the wrong crowd and - better - daughters, chewing on river-reeds and shooting doe; bug-eyed acid kids floating in a cherry-pink spume, vigilant sentries for any angry langoustine and (god forbid) kill-krill. We sang and boister-bought as the light changed over our heads, put bricks through the window of the run-down boat-house and ran off guffawing into the woods to doze like drunken apes in trees.

This is a deck of lies of course. NPIP spent last night on the banks of the Thames, glugging kidnapped cans and looking on as the party boats, pumping stale sound out into the air, pottered up from under London Bridge and far enough past the one that shook ("synchronous lateral excitation") to disappear on the way to Vauxhall or Westminster or Blackfriars, before returning, louder and drunker and, somewhat inconceivably, with even worse music wafting from their tow. YMCA?! Balls to Village idiots. We need our own boat party. Come, Teengirl Fantasy?

Teengirl Fantasy - Customize It

'Customize It' is nascent (not even appearing on this head-turning Dublab mix recorded last month) and it is what's referred to in inter-planetary boat party parlance as 'a banger'. Teengirl - Logan and Nick, two teenage Ohioans who cry eyes and laugh sherbet - bring seven and something minutes of lean dance rapture that's as limber Lindstrom as it is Foucault dizzy-reeling on a gilded Balearic isle, pumped and bruised, utterly danced.

Catacomb Cotillion

2008-07-23T13:02:00.005+01:00

“Death is not final, only a misunderstanding of time.” So sayeth the voice looming above Shackleton and Vengeance Tenfold’s ‘Death is not Final’, the 9th Skull Disco cut Appleblim and co released into the world like a creeping, green kill cloud back in early spring. Having no recollection of a first-hand death experience NPIP may be getting ahead of itself, but as ready as we are to wire up to sub-bass for sunk-eyed excursions ‘round this city it’s good to know there’s something else down there in the dirt and the lost spaces, God forbid us dead boys and girls are ever in the mood to cross bones in a post-life futility fuck.

In truth, Xeno and Oaklander are sweeter than that curse, if no less haunted. There’s something in the naivety of synths that seem to strive to imagine the afterlife and the French language in general that immediately makes me think of death. Or dying, at least. For all the heavy talk, a remarkably sprightly beat kicks along somewhere out back, momentarily homing in on Dan Deacon as he sneaks below Paris to break the fourth wall for all the skulls awake and restless in the catacombs, an oafish Indiana tumbling down through ruins time-unbounded and a cobweb colony to return Trippy Green to whence he came, some neon rogue sat atop the Cotillion shooting looks into empty eyeholes surrounded by kohl, crossing-hands with the happy residue of Guy Debord as howls and screams clatter off distant walls to carouse with the aching, throbbing throng.

Xeno and Oaklander - Cèleste

'Cèleste' appears on Analogue Electronic Music 2008, the second compilation from Brooklyn's Wierd Records.

Ellen Rogers

2008-07-22T15:58:00.003+01:00

photo: 'Yelena at home' by Ellen Rogers

Our friend and artist Ellen Rogers has gone and got herself a new website that shows off her multifaceted work in at least pixel form (do some shows Ellen!!). Her work ranges from serene and intimate photographs to naive, often comical, defacings of different classic mediums. It is always drenched in honesty and an openess to share deep, hidden feelings.
Please spare a moment.

www.ellenrogers.co.uk

Music For The Dybbuk

2008-07-22T15:26:00.006+01:00

Ross Blake, of the band Buttonhead, has cast us a spark from the fires of his multi-instrumental genius in the form of his new and joyous soundtrack compilation 'Music for the Dybbuk'. Though only bearing the name of one it is comprised of his musical musings across several plays that he's been commisioned to work on over the last year or so.
The songs meander from graceful piano driven durges through glorious orchestral assemblages like the opening 'Mesmeric Fashnu' to, sometimes neck twisting, assualts on the ears. Our good brother Tobias Warwick Jones is also at the helm for mixing and mastering on some of the tracks of the compilation.
Best of all Blake is giving the whole thing away free from his myspace.

Lovely

Baby boom, no babies.

2008-07-22T15:21:00.001+01:00

Astronomers have uncovered an extreme stellar machine -- a galaxy in the very remote universe pumping out stars at a surprising rate of up to 4,000 per year. In comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy turns out an average of just 10 stars per year. more

Thanks: Warren Ellis

Night Union

2008-07-21T16:40:00.039+01:00

Photo: Tobias

…then the broken light came tapering through the gaps in the glass, sun shattering on a pane it’d beaten vivid, first, then faded into an amaranth, cerulean, fern prose that told loud and wry the time and the weight of how things are now. Just another day under the rainbow dome for London’s Gentle Friendly, who awake to find alarms chiming new hours in and old ones away towards the weather and unchecked foliage that creeps outside. There’s a stretch and a pause as bones click and break the silence again, triumph falls flat in the distance, through the din of trees all palm and shawly, in the shape of a paper plane plummet, awesome awesome silent sight and a martyrdom more necessary than anyone can tell yet even if they were watching what you were. Twenty seconds or so of falling and then it disappears behind the canopy before anyone in this dome comes within eyeshot – other eyes watched its descent, perhaps, some distance flung afield, but for now the moment’s passed: dead rocket, solemn somewhere. Still, now a half-thought of weary and noble noise ties together to tear the skyline, cloud-hopping curios with fighter pilot helmets and three grubby stripes that chart the gap between shoulder and elbow like a grazed knee, Messrs Daniel and David stretch out, again, there are drums to bang and ridmic knots to be laced; skyward leftenants, hear dem angels yez?????

Gentle Friendly - Five Girl Night

On a planet ruled by a falling sun everyone is Icarus; dead rockets waxy wings.

Across the dorm the prolapsed star is rousing Arch M from however many minutes of sleep was had in between the hot hours. Lobes are still plugged to the loop of grandfather’s music box, the data now battered and worn common as old tape and like they said it wouldn’t by the rise in temp. Through soft hiss melody persists, valiant still as Italian bill-boards rotted and scattered across the plains of the small-hours, bawling and baleful, pen-pal appalling. Corey came from the West coast US four years back to this sinking city, before Bradford Cox’s soul seemed so street-corner.

Arch M - 21st Union

Brains boiling in skull, '21st Union' leaks out through the ears as a dazed, humid sob, the residue of fever dreams. Sentient in sleep, a beat pulses carefully through the treacherous coves of the subconscious (dread on the right brain, sex on the left) - an intruder! - to wake the puppet with a start. Wiping bleary eyes thoughts turn to the last night and the next night and the swelling tender surf of all the other nights still to come, before they notice the back-turned shadow staring out past the glass, fists aclenched and the brain, stretching its aching bones up and out, makes ready for the day that's ahead and appearing to expand in all directions around it, desperate gills fluttering like young, burning leaves.

----- „„„¡This is NPIP's pop music plantation, consider yourself conquered!“““ -----

Nail The Cross

2008-07-10T21:55:00.003+01:00

www.nailthecross.com
www.myspace.com/nailthecross

I shot Andy Warhol but I did not shoot Telepathe

2008-06-15T14:29:00.023+01:00

Poor pun. It doesn't even make sense. But sometimes things that make no sense can sound out clearer than those that do. So here's a refix of Valerie Solanas beat between sentiment from gleefully naive no-wave youths... S.C.U.M.

Read On...

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore..."

London is becoming stale, stuck in monochrome. The scene fashioned by the Horrors but to whom ‘the Horrors’ is now a dirty word is caught up in its own inertia, dressing in its own clothes, trapped in black and white. Against this b(l)ackground, S.C.U.M play a no-wave garage psyche seemingly in with ‘the scene’ yet strangely detached. They stick out like a well dressed sore thumb as they have one special, special quality; in a time of affluence and boredom they are exciting.

"Males are emotional cripples…"

S.C.U.M. are self-confessed “sentimentalists and seditionaries”. Thomas is the frontman. Bradley plays machines, Samuel synth, Huw bass and Ruaridh drums. They’re all from South London, in their teens, and at that weird crossroad point where they carry both a clear conception of the music they want to create and the impudence to care not whether anyone else likes nor understands it.

They don’t really like anyone else but themselves. “Who do I believe in..? Myself, love, and darkness”, says Tom, speaking to the sky and then his feet. “And shoes”.

“It's not ego satisfaction…”

Their live shows center on Tom throwing reverbed vocals and slow motion poses over a pounding wall of sound. They kind of sound like a live Suicide, but not as much as they sound like live self-harm.

Looking beautiful and acting up, some will no doubt dismiss them as fulfilling every Selfish Cunt cliché possible. Others will find them exhilarating; a mess of youth and machines running together, an elegance with industry.

"It’s organized noise, organized disorganization, controlled noise,” snots Sam, “but anyone who says its just noise obviously doesn’t understand the dynamics of how we make music”.

"The effect of fathers, in sum, has been to corrode the world…"

S.C.U.M. are musicians who claim no musical influence. Instead, they take inspiration from Vivienne Westwood, feedback and themselves. “We like reverb and delay”, says frontman Tom, “we like to get lost in sound rather than chord changes”.

“Eventually S.C.U.M. will take over the airwaves…”

Their plans for the next six months are to “creatively develop until the point of complete satisfaction”. Of course they mean self-satisfaction, but sometimes passion, pretense and poise can be worth more than product.

“The Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. The male is an incomplete female… a walking abortion.”

Yes Valerie, maybe they do lack a chromosome each. But what they lack they more than make up for in bollocks...

S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Valerie Solanas, 1968.
http://www.myspace.com/scum1968

Written for the June edition of TANK magazine.

Go spicey.

2008-05-20T12:00:00.002+01:00

Probably worth sticking your head round the door at least.

The leaves that are green...

2008-05-10T00:44:00.004+01:00

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Change is the only mechanism that we can trust.

Have no fame but an age

2008-05-07T00:09:00.006+01:00

'I would buy records from a notional record label that released no records at all but produced beautiful sleeves, posters and stickers from bands and performers who didn’t actually exist.

from brainjuice

Faces get worn like old tyres, scenes are obliterated in the flashing of a bulb. We face the sun as it rises once again. A cult, an empire, an age. This summer is yours to dance the dance of the Mad March Hare. Enjoy it

Quivering, Aching, Lame, tired, paranoid, drugged, fucked.

W h i s p e r S words

2008-05-06T05:31:00.005+01:00

If only you knew the secrets we know, yoursideswou ld burst.

You're young, staggering, knockkneed and pallid.

Choose expression and experim e n t.
Be at HOME when lost.

We hate you but at least you're a bad dream that gets us out of bed.

Thank you

NPIP Event - 16 May 2008

2008-04-17T13:25:00.001+01:00

"MUSIC IS NOT ART"

2008-04-07T05:30:00.017+01:00

Take this and invert it completely. There, you now have the reasons why I love music. Thanks Ali Turner from Newcastle! When you think in the mirror you think me!

Read On...

"The premise here (or at least where I am coming from), is that MUSIC IS NOT ART … that there is such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ music with the defining criterion ranging from song structure, timbre quality, symbiosis between music and lyrics, timing etc, whereas with art, it seems that it is completely viable to say, smear a canvas with shite and argue that it is a masterpiece – a form of expression beyond the reach of criteria that may (and in my opinion, should) deem it to be crap (pun intended). Or is it simply about opinion … people might argue that ‘good music’ is exactly that, if you deem it to be so – or simply dig it, even though it may easily fail to meet the aforementioned criteria.

I guess as I musician and music teacher, I have a major chip on my shoulder! The main focus of my frustration is so-called ‘Indie’ music! I can accept (put up with the fact) that there are trends and ‘fads’ that people feel obliged to follow, the ‘cool’ and ‘un-cool’, the ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’ etc … I can accept that the music industry panders to this demand and what we have is a bunch of ‘artists’ (much sarcasm) who invariably sound the same – a cycle of mediocrity that is in rotation as long as the fad or trend in question. So what am I getting at? Quite simple really – all that is good and well, however I refuse unequivocally to accept that the utter dross, the sheer arse-gravy that we have to put up with in the charts, particularly Indie music, qualifies as ‘good music’ (and in most cases, ‘music’ at all)! I’m sorry, but just because you learn three chords on a guitar, grow your hair over your ears, don your drainpipe jeans, cultivate the old bum-fluff for a few weeks and insisting on wearing a fucking white tie to round off this nauseating, bull-crap, generic look … just because you stand on a stage and shout “Ruby, Ruby, Ruby” or “shoot, shoot the runner” in some contrived/overly emphasised bull-crap Northern drawl (I’m from Durham by the way so I know a pseudo-northerner when I see one) – all this does NOT give you the right to call yourself a musician!!!"

Maybe he does have a point somewhere toward the end, but by then I'm disagreeing with him on principle.

Read this instead. Now.

And watch this. "I don't know Johnny Rotten, but I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. What sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise is in fact the brilliant music of a genuis."

16 April

2008-03-25T17:51:00.001Z

No rest, no distraction. Facta Non Verba.

28 MARCH

2008-03-05T17:19:00.000Z

Be there square!

Medical records rock

2008-02-19T15:24:00.012Z

'Owing to the lack of recordings of Western music available in the USSR, people had to rely on records coming through Eastern Europe, where controls on records were less strict, or on the tiny influx of records from beyond the iron curtain. Such restrictions meant the number of recordings would remain small and precious. But enterprising young people with technical skills learned to duplicate records with a converted phonograph that would "press" a record using a very unusual material for the purpose; discarded x-ray plates.

This material was both plentiful and cheap, and millions of duplications of Western and Soviet groups were made and distributed by an underground roentgenizdat, or x-ray press. According to rock historian Troitsky, the one-sided x-ray disks costed about one to one and a half rubles each on the black market, and lasted only a few months, as opposed to around five rubles for a two-sided vinyl disk. By the late 50's, the officials knew about the roentgenizdat, and made it illegal in 1958. Officials took action to break up the largest ring in 1959, sending the leaders to prison, beginning an orginization by the Komsomol of "music patrols" that later undertook to curtail illegal music activity all over the country.'

More here...

Enormous Twelve Inches... #1

2008-02-18T19:33:00.013Z

In this quasi-regular feature, Enormous Members Club guide us around their favourite twelve inchers. Here they begin their magic musical quest with Pet Shop Boys and their late 80s classic 'It's Alright' (The DJ International Remixes).

Read On...

Pet Shop Boys - It's Alright (The DJ International Remixes) Label: Parlophone
Catalog#: 12RX 6220
Format: Vinyl, 12"
Country: UK
Released: 26 Jun 1989
Genre: Electronic
Style: House, Acid House
Credits: Artwork By [Sleeve Designed By] - Mark Farrow At 3a
Engineer - Pete Schwier
Producer, Arranged By - Trevor Horn
Programmed By [Keyboard Programming Assistant] - Steve Fitzmaurice
Programmed By [Keyboard Programming] - George De Angelis
Vocals [Additional Vocals] - Sally Bradshaw , Tessa Niles
Written-By - Sterling Void
Notes: Remixed for DJ International.

I found this record on Deptford market, and shelled out the requisite cash because I liked the cover. To this day it remains the best 50p I've ever spent. The song itself is a Pet Shop Boys cover of a Sterling Void song and is remixed by Void himself on one side. On the flip the remixing duties fall to hip-house pioneer Tyree Cooper (the super-dooper producer, in his own words) and this is the better of the two mixes.

Over a primitive house stomp, all hissing hi-hats and faux-disco handclaps, the original synth bass line pads and stalks along simultaneous to a writhing, squelching acid squiggle, constantly shape-shifting and morphing out of all recognition. The stacatto piano vamps and diva vocals combine to soak the track in MDMA fuelled euphoria without straying into overt cheesyness. Each of the components of the track drift in and out of the mix, and builds towards a huge hands-in-the-air breakdown and drop. This is the sound of Chicago party starters meeting English arty-farters with blissful results. In the words of Tyree, "Pet Shop Boys get busy one time".

Big love EMC. Why not pop round theres.
Tell 'em we sent ya.