B Is For Blog

Good new year’s news from ace Cambridge micro-festival Palimpsest, who recently announced their return after a year off in 2008. (more…)

Time is tight, though, so you’d better get your creativity on. Now.

We’ve just gotten word Hollywood Foot Village started recording their new album ‘Anti-Magic’ on the 17th December, and their people assure us it’s going to be brain wranglingly terrific. Going on past form that would be an acoustic hardcore thunderous drum-n-shout type of brain wrangling, and you know how we like that.

Which is why we’re encouraging you to accede to their demands, and contribute to the album. The track they’re asking for help with is called ‘Chicken And Cheese’ and they describe it as ‘a celebration of requited love, a call to arms, an espionage and also an ever evolving loop about the world uniting through music.’ It has a brief lyric, one line, “We write love songs in a secret language that no one can resist”. The plan is for Foot Village to start the loop and then switch ‘every few measures’ to another interpretation. And when they say interpretation, they mean that in the broadest possible sense, asking people to ‘really go crazy, change it as much as you like, take it to places only you can reach.’

So what’re you waiting for? We’ve pasted a link to a practice space recording of the loop below. When you’ve finished send your version to dbombarc@gmail.com. The Deadline for inclusion is January 15th 2009.

http://falconfriday.com/fv/footvillage_endingloop.mp3

Capping off a year in which their latest album Third was received to nigh-on rapturous reviews – sealing itself a place in this month’s ‘Albums Of The Year’ spesh – Portishead will this week release the short film Magic Doors. It accompanies their latest single, also called ‘Magic Doors’, and will be screened at thirteen independent cinemas across the UK in December. (more…)

Admitting that you still listen to cassette tapes nine years into the 21st century is probably more or less akin to claiming you prefer to travel by steam power than that all that fancy petrol stuff, but this year I’ve been hauling the antique ghetto blaster out from under the bed with an increasing regularity. Most recently it’s been for Holy Roar’s new Happy Holy Roar Vol.2 compilation, a string of tracks by the likes of Tropics, Throats, Cutting Pink With Knives, and stuff taped off Radio 1’s Sunday Surgery, all packaged in a nice red case. Before that it was Kano’s surprisingly good 140 Grime Street, which got promo-ed on C90 for those old-skool mixtape vibes (or possibly because it’s hard to pirate and cheaper than a watermark). And before that it was a string of odd noise tapes from labels like Negation Is Freedom (and for evidence of the cassette tape’s continuing prominence in noise, look for the piece on Prurient and Hospital Productions, forthcoming in January’s Plan B).

So yeah, I quite dig tapes, and not simply for nostalgia reasons, I don’t think: of course, they’ve got their faults - all it takes is one tangle and your room’s covered in brown streamers - but a good tape ages like a fine wine: that analogue fuzz has a habit of making some music sound better, not worse. And then, of course, there’s the innocent joy of making a mixtape. I did think about making a stack of end of year tapes, but of course I didn’t have time. What I have done, though, is cheated and made an online mix of some of my favourite tracks of the year, using Mixwit. Operating, as sites like this do, on the margins of legality, it’ll only be up until December 27, when The Man steams in and crushes the whole enterprise underfoot, but until then you can give my effort a spin over here.