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smile, breathe and go slowly

You may well enjoy the Café Kaput Podcast number 6...

which you can download for free here and is well worth a listen!

Unconscious England: An Evening of Music and Film Celebrating Weird Britain

Find out more here.

Belbury Poly's "Farmer's Angle" (Revised edition) available for pre-order now

The new 'Revised edition' of Belbury Poly's pioneering Farmer's Angle EP is released on 10 September 2010 and is available to pre-order now in the Ghost Box shop on 10" vinyl and CD.

The original Farmer's Angle was the first ever release on Ghost Box records and was released as a 3" CD on 10 January 2005. The release really set the tone for Ghost Box's output and laid the foundations of the 'Hauntology" genre.

The revised edition includes 3 of the 4 tracks from the original release together with three new tracks, one of which, Warm Air, is a collaboration with The Advisory Circle. A full track listing, together with previews of all the tunes is available here.   

See Birds EP by Balam Acab

I bought this 5-track EP released today on Tri Angle Records. It's very good.


Read full review of See Birds Ep - Balam Acab on Boomkat.com ©

Available on 12" vinyl, MP3 and FLAC download from Boomkat or from the iTunes Store.

Balam Acab's Myspace page is here.

New Charles Manson album 'Air' out now!

Air is the first release in a four-part seasonal album series Air, Trees, Water and Animals by Charles Manson and was released on Magic Bullet Records on 10 August 2010.

"Each individual album features previously-unheard, authorized, and exclusive songs with a sharp focus on the non-sustainable environmental conditions mankind has wrought for itself. "

It's currently available on CD and iTunes download, and a vinyl LP pressing is due in September.  An Air poster (image above) is also available from the Magic Bullet Records webstore.


Arcana V: music, magic and mysticism

This looks like a good read.  Edited by John Zorn and featuring most of the usual suspects...

"For centuries musicians have tapped into mysticism, magic and alchemy, embracing ritual, spell, incantation and prayer, and experimenting with esoteric approaches to harmony, pitch and vibration. In recent decades, avant-garde musicians have rediscovered these overlaps, as occultism has reinvented itself--through Buddhist and other Asian influences, Thelema and Chaos Magic--to accommodate cultural strains from psychedelica through Punk and Industrial music. This special edition of John Zorn's much acclaimed Arcana series focuses on the magical aspects of the act of making music. Neither historical overview nor musicological study, it illuminates the sympathies between music and the esoteric tradition with the help of today's finest experimental musicians and occultists. Among these are William Breeze, Gavin Bryars, Alvin Curran, Fred Frith, Sharon Gannon, Larkin Grimm, William Kiesel, Yusef Lateef, Frank London, Meredith Monk, Mark Nauseef, Pauline Oliveros, Genesis P-Orridge, Terry Riley, David Toop, Greg Wall, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Z'ev."

Available direct from the publisher as well as at Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and the creation of hip-hop

There's a great article in an old Sound on Sound magazine on how Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" mixed Kraftwerk with rap and changed popular music.

New album "Liberation Through Hearing" by Demdike Stare

And very good it is too! Have a listen to some of the tracks here, and then go and buy it here.

Hong Kong in the 60s interview on BBC China

There's a good article on Hong Kong in the 60s by Zoë Baxter on BBC China here, or for those of you who, like me, are not fluent in Chinese, you can find the translation here.  Great news to hear that the album should be out by the end of the year!