Five Weeks Left...

There's a five week countdown. A personal milestone will be reached. There will be a celebration. A secret will be revealed. A story will be told. There are five weeks to go.

Exotic Pylon - Quiet Village/De Wolfe/Mordant Music

Pretty awesome Exotic Pylon Halloween special radio broadcast featuring Quiet Village discussing and playing library classics from the De Wolfe stable, followed in the second half by a session from Castles In Space favourites, Mordant Music, is now available here.

Only 128 Kbps, but still totally worth it.

Audible Visions

I promised you some more cosmic space disco, so here we fucking go.

Audible Visions is a collaboration between Alexis Le-Tan (Space Oddities, les edits du Golem) and the design collective Ill-Studio: a spaced-out musical ceremony in which sounds from the past meet ideas from the future. This mixtape from another dimension blends electro, new beat, space disco, minimal-synth, afro and new-wave grooves in a concoction which after one listen, is bound to give you sonic hallucinations.



Beautifully packaged in a hand numbered Warhol Factory silver pillow with beautiful poster. There are but a few of these of these still available here.

Go and get one. This download will only be available for a few days.

320 Kbps.

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Sylvain Chauveau - The Black Book Of Capitalism

French composer Sylvain Chauveau has released several records of minimal compositions for piano, strings, wind instruments and electronics, "with silence as an important musical element". Two of his tracks were chosen this year for Kompakt's annual "Pop Ambient" compilation.

This debut album is ageless and timeless. Full of otherness, like smoke billowing around the corners of a darkened room. Music like this doesn't age. It's lovely, inventive stuff. Rooted in European soundtrack work, but with enough dark twists to keep the interest levels super-high. Gallic voices appear and then fade to black. There are pianos, guitars, brass, bells, crackle, sweet female voices and strings. It's a bit Badalamenti/Lynch and it's a little bit Yann Tiersen, but both lighter and darker than either.

His later work is equally beautiful, but perhaps less edgy, sometimes drifting into a string drenched, drone-y minimalism. Check out the website for more details. It all comes with a massive recommendation. There's even a fantastic album of chamber music versions of Depeche Mode songs.

For research purposes, and because I'm a totally hopeless case, I've tested this music both at home and outside, as a soundtrack to the London commute. It's perfect at home, especially for very late at night (I'm listening to it now) but it works terrifically well on the iPod, where it has the effect of adding a stillness and welcome back step from the in-your-face rigours of London tube journeys. I'm playing myself in a film about my life, basically. But that might just be me.

You'll like it, I promise.

320 Kbps.

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Transvolta - Disco Computer 12"

Rare electronic cosmic disco from 1979 produced by one third of Telex. Transvolta's Disco Computer features a funny and very cool combination of synthesized bass and high-concept vocoder vocals.

This is a recent bootleg facsimile re-release. The original is currently changing hands for around £50.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.

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Visage - The Anvil

As promised, here's the original full length second album from Visage, circa 1982. This is the original vinyl edition with textured cover and poster, photographs of which have been included in the archive.

From Wikipedia:

This album sparked a brief controversy at the time of its release for being named after New York's infamous gay club.

The only musician of the first album line-up that didn't participate in this album's recording was John McGeoch. McGeoch commented in an interview: "One time I was in Spain [touring with Siouxsie and the Banshees] at the same time as Visage were recording the second album in London. Rusty wanted me to put a guitar solo on something or other but I only had one day off and there was no way that I could fly home on my one day off. Rusty is not a man to be put off by such things and he was actually trying to put together a satellite linkup from Madrid to London for this one guitar part. Not surprisingly it didn't come off but I was sorry not to have been as involved on The Anvil as I had been on the first album".

The Anvil was also the last Visage project to feature Ultravox frontman Midge Ure who left the band after its release.

The original vinyl release of The Anvil came in an embossed/textured sleeve (considered as deluxe packaging for the time), and a limited number of copies came with a free poster of Steve Strange posing in front of a hotel with a number of models (the same models can be seen on the cover of the single The Damned Don't Cry).

The album saw a re-release on the CD format in 1997 with bonus tracks, though they are tracks from the 1980/1 Visage era and not that of The Anvil. For a long time, this was the only official CD version and was extremely rare.

'The Anvil' was re-released on CD again on 17 March 2008, containing more bonus tracks and detailed liner notes.

I'ts a bit patchy, but there are some great tracks on here. "The Horseman", in particular is sounding great to this pair of ears, although it's a more guitar-y sound than that which was their signature. Midge's presence can be felt heavily on that one. Can it really be time to reappraise "Vienna" as well?

A couple of tracks are sequenced together on side one, so I haven't split them in the edit. As (super)nature intended.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.

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Nelson - I Say You Can't Stop/Dammerung 7"

Excellent double A side 7" from 2008 from French art rockers, Nelson, who claim to sound like a mixture of Joy Division, The Rapture, and Animal Collective. Dunno about that, but there's a couple of great songs right here.

The tracks featured on the AA sided single are "I Say You Can't Stop" and "Dammerung", the latter of which was inspired by a German love poem written in the Battlefield trenches of the First World War.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.

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