Monday 26 February 2007

I can Phil it coming in the air tonight


Some people like to pretend theyre really down with things which other people regard as stupid. Because in thier minds the only thing cooler than being into something really hot, is being into something really NOT. This is what
Nathan Barley is all about in case you've never watched it.

Well I can geuinely hand-on-heart say ive been a Genesis fan since my dad bought me A Trick of the Tail for christmas seven or eight years ago. You might place that record somewhere between Brain Salad Surgery by ELP and Larks tongues in Aspic by King Crimson or perhaps even near A night at the opera by Queen. Yes its self indulgent and Yes there are extended instremental passages. But what Phil Collins is owed most credit for is his Bean-Flickingly wet Drum sound.

A much-impersonated formula of huge toms, gated reverb and serious EQing. Basically if you want to sample some drums , good old Phil's done half the work for you by wacking them so fucking high up in the mix that you dont even need to worry about getting hold of the seperate files. Besides theyre probably slowly rotting away behind lock and key in a volt in switzerland somewhere.

Well to celebrate Genesis' forthcoming world tour reunion in july I thought it would be appropriate to pay Phil some respect by wacking up one or two of the less cheesy remixes floating about in hyperspace.

Phil collins - Shes' Hearing in the air tonight (lobsterdash mash up)

Phil collins - Easy lover (divided remix)

Phil collins- sussudio (alpha conspiracy mix)

BATTLE OF THE DRUM SOUNDS: NELLY V PHIL in "Manlover"


Feedback appreciated as always. For me personally, nothing beats the
original easy lover video. Flying about in Helicopters, wearing cut off jumpers and baggy suits, syrncronised chicken dances, combovers.
Now Thats proper rock star get up.
X Blame

Friday 23 February 2007

Tip if you hate...




Hello everyone, the last week has been a very varied one for each of us, blaine's been romancing in a cornwell hideout (its called castle camelot, and its literally like a medieval castle on a cliff top... its haunted corridors are riddled with eerie sounds and approaching footsteps, and its run by a bunch of polish waiters who hover above the carpetted floors and take your order with crooked smiles), kai's been djing in stevenage, playing all his favourite early 90's smashes while watching a bunch of young kids who call themselves the guildean gang play.Kaps has been orbiting in a different sphere, the land of bangra beats, intensive drum practices and evening sessions at the wembley football club, Henry has been whiling away sweet time hunched over his newly purchased baby grand piano (its white and is identical to the one john lennon plays in the Imagine video), he's also been composing some very beautiful piano pieces, he says they are sounding a hybrid between arcade fire and radiohead's pyramid song, and as for me, i've been to see a whole bunch of gigs, amy whinehouse, Love is all, regina spektor, jack penate, the noisettes..and generally been losing sleep over a song i'm working on.Its a mixture between flamenco guitar picking, a bossa nova drum rhythm (from an old german drum box that resembles one of those beautiful 1950's stereos), some synths and lots of ehoing vocals....the lyrics were originally called Ivy Tower, but i reckon i might just shorten it to Ivy, i like the idea of this creeping plant that slithers up trees and strangles the life out of them over a period of decades, someone told me that ivy can pull down brick walls too mmmm......probably total rubbish, but interesting rubbish none the less. The last couple of days, (friday and saturday) i've been over at kai's, fulfilling our shared dream of timbaland rhythms and fleetwood mac guitar, pushing all sorts of strange sounds into his laptop and mixing them up into structures and bpm's...its been a bit like remixing ourselves at the same time as writing, and i'm really really pleased with how it sounds.One of the pieces (which is without lyrics at the moment, but we've decided to call "missing limb") is like our version of Nelly Furtado's "No Hay Igual", or perhaps a continuation of one fo our quite recent songs Crosswords. The other piece, which has a working title of Hide Away, sounds like a cross-dressing of New Order's "Blue Monday" and Daft Punk's Aerodynamic ....the lyrics have this really creepy feel to them, they're about an under cover lover, sneaking around someones house and looking through their possessions (interesting to see whats been on blaine's mind).Its quite strange for us that these songs have turned out this way, it feels like we are another band almost, like we are morphing into something new, maybe we should start looking different too, do some costume changes during the set......?








Anyway, i've been listening to this song, i think its absolutely incredible....really beautiful lyrics,and a strong arrangement.I shouldn't really be sharing it as its a song from a very highly anticapated album that hasn't come out yet, but have a listen and see if you can guess who its by......click here ???

I saw this in Garlic n' Shots in soho, had to use a lighter in order to shed some light on it....made me laugh, everyone should go and drop their lose change into it....


Take care, hope your well, let me know if you can work out who the mystery (???) song is by...
William,X

Tuesday 20 February 2007

The lost art of keeping a secret




More info on this here
xB

RED AND BLACK


Zootime is the name of our US-only album soon to be released on Dim Mak, Steve Aoki's hollywood based label, past and present home to the likes of Battles, Bloc Party, The Rakes, Gossip, Von Blondies and Scanners. I believe the record is due for release in april but for a more accurate estimation check the Dim Mak site in the up and coming weeks.
If you look at the track listing below, you will notice that a few numbers off 'Making Dens' have been subsituted for newer recordings. In a sense 'Zootime' is a compilation of some of our favorite recordings of the past 18 months, regardless of where abouts each one might have origiinally surfaced. We figured that people are always going to be able to get hold of 'Making Dens' on import or off the web anyway (in much the same way as the american EP is available over here), so why not put together something completely new with some pretty old school looking graphics on there too?
Heres how it will sound:

Diamonds in the Dark.
Inside Four Walls
Scarecrows in the rain
The Boy who ran away
Soluble in air
Horsedrawn Cart
Zootime
You Can't fool me Dennis
Puprle prose of Cairo
Little Bag of Hair
Umbrellahead
Crosswords

At christmas we put up a free download of umbrellahead (Erol Alkan's version) on our website. Well, incase you missed out on it, here is the link again:
Umbrellahead MP3
Hold CTRL when you click on the link and choose "download linked file"
Check out Steve Aoki's own kickass blog here
over and out
xBlaine

Friday 16 February 2007

A recent history of the Jets.


Hello hello...the picture above is a list of the ten songs that we've been working on for the last month or so.All of them are at slightly different stages, some are fragmentary ideas that might leap to life in the studio with the right synths and sounds around them, others are alot more complete, sounding very close to the versions that you'll eventually hear.All of these however, have a kind of lyrical tightness, they all seem to be saying something, slightly different from eachother, but cohesively, like they all belong to a large extended family....Elizabeth is definately the old grandma of this family, being the first song of the new wave that we wrote (in an airport in spain.....after a very heated discussion about what are songs needed to start saying...) it also sets a kind of theme for all the other 10 songs, each of them about people in some form or other (people we know, we knew, we wished we'd known.) The black sheep of this family has to be "metal soul", its the closest we've ever come to writing a glam-rock song, in the style of Marc Bolan, or aladdin sane era Bowie.Its covered in hand claps, and sharp falsetto backing vocals, its also very hard to really know what this ones about, what do you make of "six of us on the heath, wearing nothing underneath, he likes her and she likes me..."? someone suggested it might ellude to the nudist parties that occur on hampstead heath, i wouldn't know.Anyway, it all seems to be going to plan, the last week we made 4 songs in five days (a mystery jet record, seeing as zootime and on my feet took about 6months to make), and we are exactly a third of our way towards the musical dream thats been recurring in our heads for so long....having 30 songs written.Why such a tall task?? well we want to make the best album possible, and also have loads to spare, so we can wittle together some limited edition EP's, with songs that noone would have heard.Another private ambition is for us to be able to play new songs every time we play live, keep it exciting for everyone, and bring in an element of the unexpected to our gigs. I've put up a very raw demo of elizabeth on our myspace page, its close to how we play it live, but there's some different synth parts in it, and some rather chaotic guitar, i think the main thing we wanted to capture with this is just a really good feel....also, please please please listen to it with headphones, i just heard it through my computer and i felt very embarrassed.turn it up loud too...

Here are some photos of us rehearsing,(very poor quality i'm afraid) in our new gaff,well it isn't really ours but it does feel very homely thanks to the friendly family of eastenders who run the place, they also have a huge bull dog that looks like it eats a baby everyday, and you can tell when its been sniffing round your rehearsal room as it leaves a trial of slobber every where it goes.




































I thought i'd give you all a download of a song i've been obsessing over recently, its a song called No Hay Igual (don't know what the title means...its spanish though) and its on nelly furtado's new record.The rythms and the vocals are incredible.Its really well put together too, all the components fit like a puzzle and everything seems to be treated equally in it, like the drums are as important as the vocals...which i think is a really interesting approach to making music.so many songs seem to be about one thing,i.e. the words, or the strength of the melody, but in this song, nelly takes a back seat and uses her voice as a part, a mere puzzle piece with which to make up the song.enjoy.Get the rest of her album too (Loose) it is brilliant, i know its very easy to overlook it as a mass marketed piece of corporate pop, made in Los Angeles with a 100grand a track producers, but that doesn't stop it being amazing...i think its the best thing i've heard for a about 3months( not including late of the pier) and has definately influenced a handfull of the 10strong batch of new songs. Does this mean we are going to make a hip hop record, replace guitars with mcp beats, and hire in timbaland.....YES.(well...no, i'd never put down a guitar, and i know erol's got enough ridim in his blood to out beat any LA producers)

I hope this finds you all well, let us know what you're thinking about nelly and "elizabeth",
lots of love,
william.X

Thursday 15 February 2007

First Kerblam! remix


As we've been slowly getting to grips with the world of DJing and learning the tricks of the trade, we decided at the end of last year to try and do a remix of our own, which will hopefully be the first of many!
I found a Chic best of in a really cool second hand cd shop in Glasgow and decided to learn a bit from the disco giants.
I took 'Dance Dance Dance' and messed around with Blaine's 303 drum machine and here's the result. It's not exactly how i expected it to turn out, but think it's a reasonable start. It was a load of fun to make, and please give any feedback!!!

The link is: www.myspace.com/kerblamuk

You may be wondering what Kerblam! is... its basically a dj name we came up with after playing one night... i think it was inspired by the batman and robin tv series, and should be pronounced in cartoon form like Pow! and Whaam! etc... drunken creativity eh...
let us know what you think...
till the next,
love kai

NATURISTS PICNIC


Some of you will remember Leslie Feist's mushaboom as "That song of that advert"...Which indeed it was. But when the postal service got thier hands on it, This happened.
Thier version is still pretty soft on the ear, but those of you who are into people like vashti bunyan and joanna newsome and animal collective will agree that theres nothing wrong with making music which makes you want to invite your neighbours round for a naturists picnic.
mushaboom (postal service naked lunch scrub)


TALKING OF ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, can you believe they had the cheek to actually do what umpteens of trendy New York bands would rather perish without food and water than be caught doing? Believe it of not they took two bites out of the 10 million copy-selling Nervermind and fed it back out though thier noise encancing generators and signal warping harmonic defrangmentors at a radio session not too long ago.
Animal Collective - polly mp3
Animal Collective - On a plain mp3
I like these but then i am a hideously subjecive animal collective groupie. I once asked Panda bear (AC drummer/madcap) to write the first thing that came into his mind into my diary after a solo show, and ive still got it. My plan is to ask Robert Wyatt to sing the words onto a dictophone which i will then send to jeremy Barnes (hawk and a hacksaw) to play drums on and then pass onto jeff mangum who could put some guitar down and then post it on to Beirut's Zach condon for brass and backing voices. When i eventually get the tape back i will douse it in petroleum, and fire it into the night sky, where with a little bit of luck an old and greying joe meek will have his hands stretched out to catch it, and put it all together.
Watch this space.
B

What a good year for the roses

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting

Well Seeing as this week is the most loved-up week of the year, i thought it would be appropriate to post something of a heart warming nature. Watching the Arcade fire at Reading festival a couple of years back was definitely pretty high up there in terms of coming close to a religious musical experience. I was therefore most pissed off when i found out about The Arcade fire playing in st Johns Church about 5 days too late. My friend went and said the only downer was that the sound was kind of washy inside the room.Well i think he was probably just saying that to make me feel a bit better about missing out on
THIS:




Now this next nugget is hardly hot off the press. But i fell upon it by accident on my ipod the other day, which reminded me how pretty it is. Julian Casablancas playing "Ill try anything once" (an early demo of you only live once) all on his own, sat at a fender rhodes.
Induldge here
XB

Tuesday 13 February 2007

NEXT GENERATION AUDIOFIED BLOG


SHITS AND GIGGLES.
So here's what you should do.
1.Highlight the entire content of this page and copy'n'paste it into your TEXT EDIT software (if you are mac user).
2.Now Highlight everyting again within TEXT EDIT and click on the content whilst holding down CTRL.
3.When the drop down menu appears, click on SPEECH, then START SPEAKING.
4.Enjoy all the bullshit out of our mouths fed back out through the mouth of an 8-bit monotone female android Bitch.
5.Welcome to the next generation audio blog.

The best things in life. Aways discovered by accident.
XB

Monday 12 February 2007

AN AUDIO VISUAL BLOG BY THE COMPUTER ILLITERATE


DISAPPEARANCE ACT
So what have mystery jets been doing all this time? Well, it really depends on since when.
We took a quick relief out of the writing of our 2nd record to play the opening night at our friend Caius' new club Chalk at the scala a few weeks back. We performed as a four piece as an experiment, though rumours quickly circulated round the auditorium that Henry had left the band. He hasnt. The past four months have been spent in studios, bedsits and rehersal rooms all around town and i can assure you that the new material is every bit as much the creation of 5 people as the first one was. Performance and recording have always been two very different things to us, and seeing as we have chosen to book no gigs as yet for 2007 i cant even speculate on how the new record will be recreated on stage.It hasnt been written yet.
However we will of course keep you posted.


MEANWHILE...

All of us have been getting exited by different things happening around town recently.

Primary1
I first heard of primary one when he did his mental mystery party rerub of diamonds a few months back. But weve been bumping into each other quite alot recently and his stuff is pretty out there. He's only done a couple of remixes(ours and one for a sugarbabe) but his own stuff is BIG. check out his myspace to hear his funky town glitch core future pop.

Late of the pier
Young, good looking and too talented for thier own good: Late of the pier are from near nottingham i am to believe but everyone thinks they live in london due to how much they play here. I didnt think i'd like the sound of 2 unlimited keyboards kicking the shit out of the kind of stuff youd hear on patrick wolf's lycanthropy, but crushed between the shoulders of sweaty underage london clubkids, the effect is somewhat indeniable. Bathroom gurgle was the one which seemed to get even the bouncers attention.
Bathroom gurgle
late of the pier on myspace


encyclopedia pictura videos.
A seemingly new video production company from nyc (i cant be sure though) who apparently have only made two full length music videos.But judging by the fucked-upness of these two badboys, i cant image it will take them too long to fill up thier curriculum vitae.
Grizzly Bear "knife"


Seventeen evergreen "havnt been yourself"


Who needs to brave rainy richmond park during mushroom season when these guys are doing it for you?
xBlaine