lo and behold! here’s what’s occupying our stereo this month – so far.
enjoy …
on the blankTON stereo – january
this silent time of the year
here’s a little something to get you into this cozy x-mas-mood. or maybe not.
anyway, it’s free to download, if you care. enjoy.
News from the Goldton Gang
finally, some new material by The Kung Fu Divas – just one track, but we find it rocks! Of course we do …
the track is a quite simple, but ehrm effective dancefloorbasher and the short vocal snippets should actually be some kind of homage to some all time heroes like LFO and The KLF. The video came into existence quite spontaneously when fellow surf-cracks Hubert Mühlbacher and Philipp Schwarz showed the divas some footage they’ve been recording with a tiny camera mounted to their boards while doing some wipeouts in spain, portugal and croatia. Cutting-Master Boris Steiner provided the final visual mix to the music and bang, it was done. Myself always being an admirer of spontaneously produced art is quite fond of the final mix – especially as both the track and the clip had been done within just a few hours of work. Anyone who produces music knows that it’s mostly those quick tracks that are the dearest – if you twiddle and brood for weeks and months it’s seldom that someting appealing comes out of it.
find the soundcloud (and itunes) link here.
a whole bag of remixes for “Who is the KFD” is in the making, and we’re pretty much looking forward to that.
So, what else is new on Goldton Records?
A new 3-track-ep by yours truly, Mikka Blank, will be out end of the year. “Back To Mali” will be the successor of the first single “Dogon Dip Tank” (hence the name …) and will feature 2 new tracks as well as a live version of DDT, recorded at the WRCKD-club hosted at vienna’s Badeschiff in summer 2007. More tracks are in the making but nothing that’s really ready to leave the bedroom …
Also, The Kung Fu Divas have been quite busy doing remixes for some highly acclaimed austrian artists. And we assure, those tracks reeeeaally got something to it – diverse, subtle and elegant so to say and a clear step away from the rough cut’n'paste-aesthetics used in the past.
And finally, Goldton welcomes a brand new artist – Petronella van der Alser! Her first contribution will be a remix for “Who is the KFD” – a quite dubby but groovy thingy, soaked in aural weirdness, clicks and glitches. Some definitely compelling tracks are in the making and we hope to convince her soon to at least create a facebook-page or something … public presentation of herself isn’t really her thing – as you can guess from the first draft for her presspic that she sent us – see on the left.
More soon!
yours sincerely,
mikka
on the blankTON stereo – october
more remarkable tunes from whenever, currently airing in the unholy halls of blankTON
enjoy …
new Mikka Blank mix for Liquid Radio on RADIO FM4
another mix for the witching hour …
to be broadcast this sunday, oct 9 00-01h
the tracklist:
Biosphere – The Third Planet
Boards Of Canda – Music Is Math
Sensorama – Zone 320 (Plaid Remix)
Dub Tractor – Scary HH Loop
Higher Intelligence Agency – Fleagle
Pablo Bolivar – Cerca De Mi Cicatriz
SCSI 9 – Too Many Gates
Cosmic Metal Mother – I Think
Kritical Audio – Krupp (Minilogue Remix)
The Kung Fu Divas – Toothbrush
Balanescu Quartet – The Model
if you can’t listen to this on the airwaves, tune in to FM4 on the web site for a live-stream.
About LIQUID RADIO, taken from the FM4 website
The time: Sunday night, the witching hour.
The place: The murky, misty nether regions of slow-curdling swirls and galvanic grooves.
These are the temporal and local coordinates of FM4′s sonic space-age extravaganza Liquid Radio.
While unrefined ears might have once lumped this distinct musical galaxy in with rudimentary terms like “ambient” or “chill-out”, by now Liquid Radio has established itself as an extraordinary aural experience in its own right. In keeping with the fragmentation and universalisation of electronic music the programme today forms a sanctuary for every possible species of sound beyond one’s superficial levels of consciousness. From psychedelic dub grooves to delicate minimal electronica, from dissolved hip hop beats to far-out avant-garde noise, everything that’s diametrically opposed to the common understanding of the day-to-day has its place here.
Exceptional collaborative one-offs such as the Cosmic Special starring DJ Loda, TBC & Baldelli and Joele dating from the summer of 2005 lend a refreshing variety to the programme. Apart from a cross section of exciting new releases, Liquid Radio has been showcasing DJ mixes adopting a modus ritardandi corteousy of acclaimed celebrity guests like Pressure Drop, Kid Loco, Rockers Hi-Fi and Alex Patterson of The Orb.
The idea behind the programme was developed by Makossa & Demon Flowers. Ever since Radio FM4′s inception in 1995 Liquid Radio has been a regular fixture on the station.
Enjoy!
P.S. oct 10th – and finally here’s to link to listen to this mix whenever you like
on the blankTON stereo – september
just some random tunes that occupy our systems these days.
posted for your pleasure – hopefully.
UKO – The Sista Sadie Life Show
Some people may know UKO already, most probably from their “Cafe Del Mar-Hit” Sunbeams almost 10 years ago – which led most people into believing that UKO would be just one more bland chill-out-outfit, but oh contraire – as soon as their self-titled first full-length album UKO came out, heads and minds where turned – in a good way. The release of those ten tracks ranging from heavy groovers over pop-y songs to experimental breakbeat-tracks, accompanied by a series of ambitious live gigs, showcased the musical versatility of the producers in charge, the brothers Martin and Jürgen Nußbaum.
Anyway, listen to some of the tracks from the new album here:
And just for a small demonstration of UKOs multifaceted approach to music, here’s a small outtake from a live-improvisation, recorded at the Casino Baumgarten, Vienna.
more about UKO can be found here:
Richard H. Kirk – Disposable Half Truths, Virtual States and Yorkshire Ham
For the people who know me, it comes as no surprise that at least one posting here is about Richard H. Kirk , one of my all-time-heroes. To give a short explanation, i accidentaly came across the Cabaret Voltaire-album Microphonies (which i now find to be deleted and not even available as a download?! what’s going on?) only a few years after it’s release in 1985 and it instantly became one of my personal all-time-favourite albums ever, i still listen to this every now and then and find it hasn’t aged even a bit.
What Kirk, together with Stephen Mallinder did on this album was to bring something very new to the electronic pop i already loved back in the days – the whole structure has been more fluid as with other bands, CV almost completely neglected the idea of a hit-and-run-popsong by letting all the parts of a track more or less go it’s on way – more or less together in a harmonized piece – but not in the way you’d expect an electronic pop-band to be. Sometimes such things as a chorus were completely left out, the vocals were supposed to have “the same right as the other elements”. Coming out of a very artsy background and producing groundbreaking experimental albums like “Mix-Up”, “Red Mecca” and “The Voice Of America” in the late 70ies and early 80ies, it’s been quite obvious that CV wouldn’t queue up with the Depeche Modes of their time with their take on pop music. Sometimes it sounded like the band had found a hidden and deeply secret subterranean flow that would run under each and every city, picking up sounds and moods, somehow compressing the soul of the city and the band would chop out blocks of this stream and release them as songs. It always has been a lot about aesthetics, the way some noises would sound together and just let them go and see what happens. This approach to music has been something completely different as everything i had heard before – the band themself stated on various occasions that they wouldn’t consider themselves as musicians, but more like sound-collageurs which i find quite accurate indeed. However, the band could not escape some other underlying mechanics, especially those of the music industry in the 1980ies – with constantly gaining more popularity the pressure to do a really well-selling pop-record and as the fans of the bands early work could at least go along with the funky-poppy-older-brothers-of-depeche-mode-weirdness of their 1987-album “Code”, the candy-striped club-anthems of the follow up “Groovy, Laidback & Nasty” had been too much (or maybe too less?) for their taste and a wider audience couldn’t be reached. So, inevitably, the group disbanded.
Richard H. Kirk ca. 2002
But not completely – Richard H. Kirk had always also released music under his own name and from 1993 on, he increased his output enormously. Using a vast number of different aliases and working with different record labels, he again created different and characteristic sound aestethics with every release – and the rise of the so called Intelligent Dance Music gained additional momentum when it came to attracting attention. But of course, superstardom hasn’t been at hand – his works were still held in high regard, but only to a quite small audience, spread out across the globe. In the late 00ies, the amount of his output thinned out and on the other hand also became increasingly unaccessible. However, on special request by Radio FM4, i did a two-part-mix consisting of work Kirk has done in the years 1993 – 2003 some time ago and i recommend you give it a listen.
hosted by PLAY.FM
for an overview of available releases of Richard H. Kirk pls go to http://www.richardhkirk.com/
p.s. amazon germany seems to have some copies of the Micro-Phonies-CD left, just click the cover below.
p.p.s. nov11 -
the virgin/emi-portion of the CV-backcatalogue seems to get a re-issue via Mute Records
- see also http://thequietus.com/articles/07308-cabaret-voltaire-to-reissue-back-catalogue
App for Symbian
btw – this blog is now also accessible via App.
so far for Symbian only, but hopefully soon for Android. maybe iOS, too.
download the App for free from here:
