I am arisen
Sorry for the silence.
Le Sphinx
Kees van Dongen, 1925
Musée d'Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris
The look of nonchalant disdain this 1920s beauty is giving to a mysterious bearer of Chrysanthemums is wonderful. Read more...
Human
Human was the musical partnership of Lee Grainge and Hazel Bligh. As far as I know they only released these 2 EPs, The Island Life in 1997 and Confused Moods in 1998. I was acquainted with Lee as he worked in the wonderful Fat Cat records in Covent Garden, where I spent all my money while I was at art school nearby (what was the Hip Hop place they shared the basement with called?). As for Hazel Bligh, I know nothing...
Anyway, the music is beautifully lush and timeless melodic techno.
Discogs
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Barcelona to Paris
Listening to Pan Sonic whilst flying is an powerful experience. The sheer force of sound seems to be the only thing keeping you so unnaturally off the ground.
Press play.
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All went to plan
This is taken from my balcony in Paris, where I am currently sitting and typing this very sentence, between sips of rosé. It's rather pleasant. Click for bigger version.
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Chez moi
Au revoir / bienvenue
I am going to work in Paris for a couple of months, hence the new masthead. Hopefully I will be posting some more gallic influenced whitterings — photos of snails, Françoise Hardy songs, pictures of me chilling with Olivier Zahm and Uffie, you know, all that shit.
Read more...Berlin 10/06/10
UPDATE. Bollocks, I'm going to miss this. Work commitments mean I'll get there the day after. Das ist Scheiße! Read more...
Raw rhythmic techno — Tip!
Bickley getting busy on the Multistorey LowTechno machine. See www.theartofconversation.org for more information. The show runs until the 24th of May in London, and from the 12th of June to the 3rd of July in Berlin.
Megamix
A selection of very good tracks that I have mixed together in a somewhat amateurish fashion. Portland to Stockholm to Leipzig to Manchester to Detroit and Paris to Berlin to Hamburg to London via Berlin.
Some more info on a few of the artists: The Miracles Club is the house project of Jackie O Motherfucker's Honey Owens; Oni Ayhun is the male half of The Knife and putting out some fucking great and diverse tracks, as well as a very good podcast for the always fascinating MNML SSGS. Cassy I've written about before; Hauntologists is the pairing of Jay Ahern (also here as Cheap & Deep) and Stefan Schneider of To Rococo Rot.
The Miracles Club — Chango (White Rainbow mix)
Oni Ayhun — OAR003/B
Kassem Mosse — Workshop 08/A1
Claro Intelecto — Momento
Carl Craig & Laurent Garnier — Demented Drums (Version)
Cheap & Deep — Tight
Frozen Border — FB04/A1
Cassy — Soul Saviour
Hauntologists — EP1/A1
Sascha Funke — Mango Cookie (DJ Koze remix)
Mount Kimbie — William (Tama Sumo & Prosumer remix)
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Penrith to London
I've been listening to The Walkmen a lot in the last week, since introducing a friend to their music, and today's 3 hour train journey home felt like a perfect opportunity to disappear again into their very particular world — where it's always 5am, and your senses are filtered through the dawn's alcoholic fug, as you stagger on to someone's house after a raucous night of shouting and dancing, with ears ringing and your still excited mind unwilling to give in to your body's pleas for rest.
Then eventually back at the after party, whiskey clutched in hand, huddled in a corner with an old friend — someone who knows you better than you even know yourself — you have a passionate but slurred conversation about your lives lived and loves lost, the party doggedly carrying on all around you, lurching in and out of rhythm and your consciousness. That's what their songs mean to me, always world-weary but filled with a huge amount of love and generosity for the people who make us what we are, and the experiences we share with them.
I've always loved them, but the song embedded below, New Country, from their latest album You & Me feels particularly poignant to me at the moment, its initial message of optimistic exhilaration for the weightless possibilities of the new, cut through with both trepidation and a sadness for things past.
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Xx, Cumbria
I've just been on a trip to the Lake District to see my friend Dan. The weather was pretty shit on Sunday so we decided to visit the Cumbrian coast, him for the first time in years, me ever. There's not much of interest there, excepting of course Sellafield nuclear power station, but what we did chance upon was a place called — according to my iPhone, that is — Xx. Here's a screenshot of Google maps showing us in Xx, and a photograph of the locale from across the bay. Read more...
Edward Green
I never really got Helmut Newton's work when I was younger, I think in my twenties I just didn't have the experience to understand all the sex as power stuff and the allure of danger. But now the older I get, the more it makes sense to me — I think I'm getting dirtier with the years.
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A beautiful drawing, such personality conveyed with a real graphic economy of line and proportion. Scanned from one of my favourite books, the Longman English Larousse, 1968. A combined dictionary and encyclopedia, it was my pre-internet reference for any information or fact needed, I can't ever remember not having this book within arms length from the sofa or bed at any point of my life. There's some really good imagery, it seems like the editors randomly chose which entries were deemed necessary to be illustrated. The lovely maps of oceans that I've been using with my mixes are from the same source, but strangely, there isn't one of the pacific... Read more...
Luchino Visconti's childhood
From Paradis magazine, issue 5. That upbringing sounds incredible, like an Italian aristocratic fantasy from the mind of Wes Anderson. Who would play the role of tutor? Bill "Groundhog Day Ghostbustin' Ass" Murray? Read more...
Tattoo on titty saying B.I.G.
Another cherished old mix tape, dug out and digitised. This one is from Alex Baby, one time member of 23 Skidoo and then of Ronin Records, a London hip hop label. He DJed a lot in the 90s, with a residency at Rotation, but I can't find any information on what he's up to now. I think this tape was something to do with either the International Stüssy Tribe or the High Power parties that Michael Koppelman and Fraser Cooke used to put on intermittently, but I can't fucking remember, it was ages ago. Sound quality is pretty bad, as mine is a second generation copy that I taped off Ben's original. This would get many repeat listens on the 2nd year studio tape player, the one with all the Ralph pony stencils sprayed on it.
This is a wonderful hour and a half, from the mid 90s golden era of Sean "Puffy" Combes, DJ Premier, the first wave of Wu Tang albums, The Nod Factor and Mary J. There's plenty of R'n'B to get the girls on the dance floor, but tempered with loads of good hip hop to keep the boys that don't dance happy. To ice the cake, it includes the Bad Boy mix of Mariah Carey's Sweet Fantasy, which is one of the most sublime pieces of music ever recorded.
Download LINK FIXED
Update 24/07/12 I just googled Alex Baby and found him modelling for Stüssy... Read more...
Music for spring
A new mix of mine. Starts with some Scout, slowly moves into raw jacking territory, before descending into grindy and sleazy cross-dancefloor sexual come-ons.
Scout Niblett — Dare!
Prosumer & Murat Tepeli — Devotion
Digitaline — Altra
DJ Minx — A Walk In The Park (Villalobos 'Till Thursday' Rmx)
Hauntologists — EP 2 B1
Horizontal Ground — All The Way Back
Cassy — Somelightuntothenight
EQD — Equalized 001/B
A Made Up Sound — On And On
Basic Channel — Phylyps Trak II/II
Mike Dunn — Let It be House
Horizontal Ground — 001/B
STL — Do The Undo
Aaron Carl — Down
!!! — Shitscheissemerde (Part 2)
Romy Schneider
Les Innocents Aux Main Sales / Angels With Dirty Hands
Claude Chabrol 1975
An extremely beautiful 37 year old Romy Schneider dressed throughout by Yves Saint Laurent — except the opening scene, as she's sunbathing in the nude...
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Shoes & Techno
Last week I had the immense pleasure of going up to Northampton, visiting one of the world's finest shoemakers and being given the full factory tour. With their different last styles having the same numbering system (x-zero-x) of Roland's drum machines of the 1980s I was intrigued to see a convergence of two of my favourite subjects. Apparently they used to produce a 303 last, but a very long time ago, so unfortunately I didn't get a picture of my holy grail — the acid shoe.
On idleness
I've recenly been exploring some more Thomas Mann — this time a somewhat lighter read, concerning a narcissistic young charmer who oozes and flirts his way into European high society. I particularly enjoyed his exposition on the educational value of doing nothing. I shall take it to heart.
R.I.P. Eric Rohmer 1920 – 2010
It's always worth watching the interviews with Rohmer that are normally extras on the DVDs, as it's incredible to learn just how meticulously planned and scripted his films were, down to the colours of objects in the characters' rooms, and the pictures they have on their walls. There is a real magic at work, where films that on first appearance can seem so slight can wield such power and stay with you for a lifetime.
When I was a kid my dad went to Paris for work, and he bought back the same Pauline a la Plage poster as shown here, as a present for my mum, whose name is also Pauline. It was incredibly creased, as if it had been crunched up into a ball. He must have had to steal it off a wall or pull it through a tiny hole in a broken frame. We managed to flatten it out somewhat and it was drawing-pinned to my bedroom wall for a while, next to the bunkbed I shared with my sister. Read more...
Winter Music
Here's a mix I put together today — not exactly a technical masterpiece or dancefloor killer, just some pitched down glacial pulsations to celebrate the cold weather and new year.
Tracklist:
Radiance — II (edit)
Nike.Bordom — Ahacid
Tin Man — ? (edited from the Wasteland mix)
Marcel Dettman — Helix
Jetone — Phaedra
Circlesquare — Seven Minutes
Seefeel — Plainsong (Sine Bubble Embossed Dub)
Donato Dozzy — Fullonica De Stephanus
Disco Nihilist — B1
Prosumer — Solid Mind
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Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be
I was hit with a huge wave of nostalgia recently, after hearing the first track of a mix posted on mnmlssgs. The ticking of a clock instantly transported me back 17 years to a bedroom in Peckham, recording Coldcut's Solid Steel show off Kiss FM, back before they and their label Ninja Tune became obsessed by shit trip-hop for stoned students from the home counties. With this as my motivation I dug out and digitised this cherished tape of a show guest presented by Dave Cawley of Fat Cat Records, at that time not yet a label, just a lovely little record shop selling electronic music in a Covent Garden basement, where I'd go and spend all my money whilst not finishing projects at art college round the corner. Dave worked in the shop along with Alex Knight and Lee Grainge (who collaborated with Hazel Bligh under the name Human, releasing 2 EPs, my favourite track of which is the beautiful Skating On Thin Ice — embedded below).
The journey starts in Detroit with Juan Atkins and ends with Jim Morrison in LA, spanning continents and decades between.
Cybotron — Clear — 1983
John Carpenter — Christine — 1984
Kraftwerk — Autobahn — 1974
Ryuichi Sakamoto — Riot In Lagos — 1980
Reload — Le Soliel Et La Mer — 1993
Aphex Twin — Delphium — 1992
Sandoz — Digital Lifeforms — 1993
The Black Dog — Cost II — 1993
Mystic Institute — Ob-Selon Mi-Nos (Global Communication Remix) — 1993
Peter Gabriel — The Feeling Begins — 1989
Killing Joke — Change (Youth remix) — 1992
Beaumont Hannant — Tastes And Textures Volume 2 — 1993
Nicky Skopelitis — Tarab — 1993
The Doors — The End — 1967
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