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

The single is out now through Island Records on etched twelve-inch vinyl, and in a digital bundle also including three tracks recorded live at this year’s Coachella Festival.

You can catch the Magic Doors film at: London Curzon Soho, Birmingham Electric, Southampton Harbour Lights, Sheffield Showroom, Cambridge Picturehouse, Manchester Cornerhouse, Bristol Watershed, Derby Quad, Nottingham Broadway, Hull Screen, Leicester Phoenix, Darlington Barn

Contact the cinema for screening times.

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.

Cobra Mist is a beautiful film, not least because of its sound design - the sound was recorded by Chris Watson and composed from those recordings by Benedict Drew, and is at once natural and full of foreboding and intent. The film’s subject matter is equally concerned with a relationship between landscape and technology, as it captures the former military site of Orford Ness - now deserted, and a nature reserve. Bird calls echo around industrial structures as Richardson’s camera circles the East Anglian moonscape, once used for atomic testing, where banks of shingle suck up to crumbling concrete. At first, it appears calm, meditative, with the “poignancy” rather quaintly described on the National Trust website but there’s a thrumming tension to the editing of both sound and vision, and disconcerting jerks of perspective as we suddenly, without warning, enter one of the abandoned buildings.

You can watch the film here, but London-based readers can also go see it tomorrow at Cafe Oto in Dalston, which is showing it with a live soundtrack performed by Watson and Drew.

it’s grown into something that feels practically encyclopaedic.

The venue is Assam Arts Space, 4 Assam Street (which is opposite the end of Brick Lane), nearest tube being Aldgate East. Entrance £5, doors 8pm.

Here it is on Streetmap: http://tiny.cc/q5eMa

Looking to get you firmly in the festive mood, the 20 jams featured on the comp come from the likes of Pulled Apart By Horses, Tropics, Calories, Throats and the magnificently christened Suffocate For Fuck Sake. Many of the contributions are previously unreleased, including one from Cutting Pink With Knives; there, presumably, in the hope that they’ll continue to lay low for a while before reforming sometime around Easter.

Only available direct from Holy Roar, there will be no digital release, but with the season in mind the tapes will come in red, green and white.

Christmas rips:

Side A
1. Pulled Apart By Horses – Universal Talk Box
2. Holy State – Solid State Messiah (vs. The Valve Viking)
3. Mirror! Mirror! – On Probation
4. Tropics – Dead Lips
5. Throats – Sometimes
6. Brontide – Crunk Anansie
7. Lone Wolves – Stonehill
8. the_Network – Coke Head Queen
9. Chronicles of Adam West – The Big Sleep
10. Three Trapped Tigers – 5

Side B
11. Algernon Cadwallader – Katie’s Conscience
12. Cutting Pink With Knives – Cite
13. Calories – Eat Rabbit
14. Maths – Culpa (Demo)
15. No Kilter – Fuck Me Tony
16.Caves – Numbers
17. Jailbait – On Reflection
18. Ergon Carousel – Hindsight Is A Wonderful Thing When You Don’t Mean It
19. Omes – Give Blood
20. Suffocate For Fuck Sake – I Got Worried I Was So Freaking Scared Of That Window, You Know

Audiences have been warned to expect “nothing less” than orgiastic satyrs, giant body-popping Buddhas and tiny, gold lamé pants though it is not yet known whether that rather bashful looking gray will rejoin with Kevin Barnes’ psych pop motley, who were over just last month and feature on the cover of November’s Plan B.

Of Montreal will make the following stops in the new year:

Brighton Digital (January 24), Glasgow Oran Mor (26), Belfast Kitten Tree (27), Dublin Button Factory (28), Manchester Club Academy (29)

Lady Lucy’s film is the result of her quest for women MCs, DJs, producers and performers involved in hip-hop, drum’n'bass, garage, reggae, dancehall, r&b, house and grime from Bristol and internationally, who also use the prefix ‘Lady’. Featured ladies are Diss Miss (Dutty Girl, Girl Wonder), Laydee Bird, Lady Free, Lady K & Lady Maximum, Lady Paradox, Lady Raz, and probably a few more. Lucy O’Brien, music critic and author of She-Bop, has contributed a specially commissioned essay to accompany the exhibition.

Events

Saturday 29 November 2008, 2pm
Lady Lucy in conversation with some of the ladies who participated in the film chaired by Bridget Crone, Director Media Art Bath. Admission Free.

8-12pm
A night of music from some of the ladies featured in the film: Lady Free - drum ‘n bass from Hackney, Lady K and Lady Maximum - the UK’s only mother and daughter DJ/MC duo, Laydee Bird and Dutty Girl DJ’s. Admission £5/£3 conc on the door.

For more information see Picture This.

Finished reading a preview copy of Bad Vibes: Britpop And My Part In Its Downfall, a memoir by Luke Haines of The Auteurs that, thankfully, is every bit as poisonous in its eviscerations of the Nineties music/media circus as you might hope.

Its arrival so close in proximity to German director Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex, a tale of the the rise and fall of the left-wing guerilla cell that terrorised Germany in the Seventies, prompted me to shell out for a used copy of Haines’ concept album Baader Meinhof, which I hadn’t heard in years. And what a weird record: tales of smuggling, kidnappings, and other clandestine operations delivered in Haines’ gaunt croon, set to bubbling tabla, squelchy keyboards and a stiff sort of funkiness, as if the songs were played at gunpoint.

Edel’s film has been accused of romanticising Baader-Meinhof. I haven’t seen it yet, but I can’t think of many similar movements that have been viewed through such rose-tinted glasses; in part, because these were left-wing Germans fighting a state that seemed to be sliding back towards authoritarianism, placing them somewhere indistinct on that sliding scale between freedom fighter and terrorist; but also, indisputably, because of its aesthetic presentation - think the photos of Astrid Proll, which depicted Baader-Meinhof as romantic figures - more rock stars than soldiers, or at least a blend of the two.

In Bad Vibes, Haines recalls the distaste that the record was met with on its release, which I dimly recall from the time, but which he details with some glee (Vox raises the possibility that he might be “a twat”). Much of the criticism, inevitably, hinges on the record’s morality (or lack of). Haines, for his part, insists that there is no moral to be found here, which is an interesting thought, music always being somewhat harder to disentangle from morality and intention than film, or literature. Maybe he’s being slightly disingenuous, I don’t know, but if you don’t mind listening to Baader Meinhof as documentary rather than, say, parable, then it stands up as something quite special…unique, even.

Bad Vibes, meanwhile, is out January and well worth a read.