Posted by rayui on May 30, 2011
Over the weekend I was rummaging around in my drawers looking for The Ali G remixes when I came across a disc that I though had been lost to the mists of time. It was an album I recorded in my halls of residence bedroom during my second year at university, in the year 2000.
When I started writing electronic music, I had set myself a challenge to get on the Peel show. This was my third attempt at getting on the air, the previous two being an album length cassette and a CD single which sampled various items of domestic equipment. I addressed a parcel containing the record to John’s daughter, Flossie, at the BBC and enclosed a letter moaning to her about the fact that her Dad never played my stuff. If she listened to it and liked it, would she pass it on to him for me? Well, it seemed to work and subsequently a couple of tracks from “Electrovoyeurism” appeared on the Peel show later that year, joyously sandwiched between end-of-night death metal and drill and bass standards. The first, “I’m Sorry About What You Said Before” was played on 14th November and the second, “What Did You Want Me to Say” was played on 7th December.
Writing this album and getting on Peel seemed like much more achievable goals than a degree I did not really want to do very much at that time. Indeed, that proved to be the case!
You can listen to the record and the excerpt from Peel’s 7th December 2000 BBC Radio One show on Soundcloud.
Resources:
John Peel Torrent Collection 9 of 17 1994-2001
THE JOHN PEEL SHOW Tuesday 14 November 2000
THE JOHN PEEL SHOW Tuesday 5 December 2000
Note that the dates in the recording ad the tracklisting conflict. I’ve not yet been able to find the definitive running orders of the shows in the BBC’s online archives.
Posted by rayui on March 24, 2011
I’ve found some more old recordings, this time from 2002/2003 when Clean Cut were hosting concerts around Bristol and other bits of the UK. Some of these tracks were released by hiding them in racks in Bristol record shops on Park Street. I’d previously considered following two lost in the mists of moving house some years back.
Delta (3) – rescore of Tomas Danko’s “Delta” for C64. Not to be confused with the Rob Hubbard track of the same name, I probably rewrote this using Vaz Modular.
Rotar (live) – this was a live performance of a track I wrote in a session with Boris of rock band Chikinki Asteroth of Float Records. It was probably recorded on line-out from a front of stage desk to a mindisc.
Posted by rayui on March 15, 2011
Dabke, for those not in the know, is a form of Middle Eastern folk-pop music, usually played on samplers and synthesizers using traditional scales and time signatures. Dabke first came to my attention via the medium of the Sublime Frequencies artist, Omar Souleyman and his album, Highway to Hassake.
Last October and November I made a three week trip to Syria and Lebanon. During my time there I collected about 15 CDs of dabke music, most of which was terrible, but there were a few gems amongst the dross (including a selection of DVDs of mobile phone footage of belly-dancing in somewhat unrepresentative packaging. Promises, promises…! I watched it, anyway). I include in this post the absolute best of what I found, a grand total of seventeen tracks of the highest grade Lebanese and Syrian Dabke. The compilation is a collection of zipped .ogg files, which should play on any open source music player, such as VLC.
Posted by rayui on March 1, 2011
Here’s some recordings I made as The User Interface in 2005 that I found at my parents’ house last weekend. It’s drone and noise, including a re-mixed live improv session with Irina Artamonova as Staff Panic Only Wall Unit. Hope you enjoy, dear world…
The album is provided as a zipped collection of .flac files for optimum audio quality.