About The Blog

So I'm not too sure that I want to continue this blog, but I don't want to commit fully to abandoning it.
I will from now on most probably be posting on my other blog, in which there will not be posting of full albums but of mp3s and various other things.
I don't want to come across like a moaning old man but it's seriously hard to be excited about running a blog that posts albums when there's a deficit of albums to be excited about, that is albums of new music, basically its seems that a certain passion for the music you are uploading is needed in order to do so, you need to be evangelical about it otherwise why bother? And currently there isn't much that I am excited about (Interms of albums that is).
Please do visit my other blog, and feel free to message me etc. I hope this doesn't seem overly bitter, today is just one of those days when I am just totally unable to articulate the way I'm feeling.

New Music

Please people send me your music, I haven't listened to anything new in ages and it just feels wrong.
E-mail me here Champagnechampagne@hotmail.co.uk

Thanks - Ashley

Pete Shelley - Homosapien

Wattup? I've been away trying to make music, I stress the trying.

Homosapien by Pete Shelley is one of the great forgotten synthpop albums, produced by Martin Rushent (who did Dare) with gives you an idea of it's sound; somewhere between The Buzzcocks and Human League, the album is totally brilliant, catchy and abrim with Shelley's great wordplay (Homosapien, a hymn to bisexuality is I think the best of all Shelley's songs.)

Get It HERE

Technical Space Composer's Crew (Holger Czukay & Rolf Dammers) - Canaxis 5

Stockhausen inspired ethno-music sampling musique concrete pieces from the heart of Can; Holger Czukay and painter Rolf Dammers. Amazing and ahead of its time.
A curious bit of proto-ambient sample manipulation.
Nuff Said Again.

Get It HERE

Larry Levan - Live At The Paradise Garage

Nuff said.

Get It Part 1 HERE Part 2 HERE
Buy It HERE

More remixes of Zomby's Spliff Dub! Starkey's is a particular favourite because it turns it into a haunted rnb slow jam before spazzing out with rubberry nintendo sounds, just as you start to chill they launch for your jugular.

Get them HERE

Stalk HERE

Family Time: Messthetic Pop

Does messthetics even apply here? Probably not as the 90's lofi movement is probably more of an inspiration than cassette weilding post-punkers, I just wanted to use the term because after a few months of cold turkey I've started listening to Scritti Politti again (how amazing was White Bread?).
Anyway here are some seriously catchy guitar pop (in the same vein as TNV & Wavves) albums released on the cool southern californian label Family Time.

All of these upped with the label's consent for once. I wanted to write reviews etc but I'm feeling tired.

Buy Them All HERE Or HERE (where available)


Ancient Crux (repped on GVB) - Interracial Coupling
Get It HERE
Stalk Dem HERE

No Paws (No Lions)- Don't Be Afraid Of Where You Live
Get It HERE
Stalk HERE

No Paws (No Lions)- Live At The Shamel CD-R
Get It HERE

Twin Lion - Awesome Power
Get It HERE
Stalk Dem HERE

Seriously what is wrong with this page? I think I'm gonna have to try changing the layout.

This Heat - Live 1980/81

I wish that the recording quality of this was better, it could and probably should sound totally ferocious but instead it sounds at times meek and impotent or rather too lofi to convey the full pallette of sounds Hayward and the gang had to offer, still it's a recording of a truly great band performing live at the height of their powers.

I don't know whether this is from one continuous show or if its a compilation of live cuts, to say it's worth a listen would be an understatement, simpler punkier versions of This Heat classics, of which the deceit tracks work best.

Get It HERE

Sis - Trompeta/Clarinete, Nesrib Ep

Trompeta and Clarinete are two minimal tracks that sample ethnic horns to great effect, which is something everyone has been doing since Samim's Heater, even though I'm sure Villalobos did it first and did it better, but thats being said after a whole year of hearing Heater ad nauseam. Its easy to look at these tracks cynically, just a band wagon hopping world sample a cheap way to try and escape minimal's ghetto, but it does do exactly that and grandly too, put simply Trompeta's horns don't let up for 9 grooving mins, and I can't get enough of it.



Sis - Trompeta/Clarinete
Get It HERE
Buy It HERE



Nesrib features a great oldskool diva/soul sample that bursts through the track light sunlight, thats all you need to know 'bout it.

Sis - Nesrib Ep
Get It HERE

I only heard this track after reading Diplo's Pitchfork Guestlist, check it out.


Also I upped this ages ago for the STL post but I must have forgotten to put it on there, so I may as well post it here, its simular to the othe STL tracks, with the pastoral organ sounds but it grooves like an early hip hop record:



STL - Lost In Brown Eyes
Get It HERE

Wonky

Recently many questions have been raised (see HERE & subsequent links) about the cultural significance and power of wonky (or the lack therein), whether a style based in the scrambling together of genres can ever forge something new in the way of a unique cultural phenomenon.

I think this discourse is warranted and there's certainly room for theory in modern music (although maybe not the same theories used to explain the music of a few years back, which is maybe not applicable to our a-historical maybe post-geogaphic internet landscape- I totally believe this exists to some extent), but it can sometimes serve to cast aside the power of what is being discussed, and wonky is both powerful and highly listenable. So here's some great wonky tracks (Zomby's Aquafresh is definitely the best track to emerge from the genre so far, so get the Zomby Ep):

Ikonika - Please/Simulacrum

Get It HERE

Buy It HERE

Joker - Top Of The Game

Get It HERE

Buy It HERE

Rustie - Jagz The Smack

Get It HERE

Buy It HERE

Zomby - Mush/Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)

Get It HERE

Buy It HERE

Salem - Water EP

All the songs on this ep sound like disjointled submerged versions of Paper Planes, inwhich M.I.A.'s vocals are lost to the heavy hum of bass smoke and reduced to that of a school girl doing karaoke versions of 4AD classics.
Salem's music is like a neon glistening almost a-rhymic dubstep drowning in both sonic mist and self-authored mysticism, this is the sound of a flood (I seem to remember this being the concept of Burial's debut all those blog years ago), a flood in a cartoonish pulp reality rather than the gritty bleak textures of Burial's (overrated imo) soundscapes.
It's also just rare that a band name and EP title are so befitting of the music and imagery it provokes, or maybe that imagery is provoked because of the band name, either way I like this.

Get It HERE

Buy It HERE

Shit, now it seems like I steal all my links from Ill-Formed, well I wus planning on posting this before I saw it on there and I definetly posted the Zomby album before they did. It seriously looks like I'm doing my bit to homogenise the internet.

New Years Resolution

Mine this year was to listen to more dance music because this last year I seemed to have ignored a lot of it. This isn't exactly gonna become a dance music blog but my uploads are inevitably gonna reflect my listening habits, and so with that in mind here are two artists who astectic wise can be seen as existing on totally different ends of the dance spectrum from each over, but who's music contains the repetitive euphoria that I think is the heart of great dance music.

STL - Invisibility EP
The organ melody of the first track (Birdart) is pastoral and Robert Wyatt like which strangely feels at home over the simple and organic sounding house beats (albeit in a wonky way). Its strange how music fundamentally mechanic (this sentence is may come across a horribly rockist thing to say) works so well in cultivating a pastoral idyll, which is I think how your attention is held for the entirity of the track.
It's minimal in that it seems like the music is built around only a few components but it still has the engulfing feel of a great house track rather than the coffee table background music that most minimal has become.
This is a futurist train ride through the farmlands and bird santuaries of the future. Released on perhaps the most vaguely named label in history - SOMETHING...

Get It HERE
Buy It HERE

Zomby - Where Were U In 92?
I don't think this needs a description after you read the album title. Strictly Ardcore.

Get It HERE
Buy It HERE


Bonus:
Zomby - Zomby EP Wonderfully bleepy synthed dubstep this time around.

Get It HERE
Buy It HERE

Minuteflag

30 years ago SST (America's greatest and most important indie label) put out its first release, Black Flag's Nervous Breakdown EP. So its kinda like a jubilee thing, I thought to commemorate I'd upload an EP by two of it's staple bands, performing as a supergroup.
This sounds very jam band like which should make me recoil but the two bands are so great that it works.

Get It HERE

This'll be the first post of this year for me, but there will be a lot more to follow, I'm planning on increasing my blog activity substanstially this year because my output was pretty measily in comparision to lots of other great blogs out there.

Telepathe

Telepathe (pr. Telepathy) are good; experimental tinged electronic pop on The Social Registry.
Devil's Trident is a current favourite of mine.


Farewell Forest EP
Get It HERE
Buy It HERE


Sinister Militia EP
Get It HERE
Buy It HERE


Dance Mother
Get It HERE
Buy It HERE


Live In Texas
Get It HERE

Stalk Them HERE