PInk Skull - Drugs Will Keep Us Together 12"

"Drugs Will Keep Us Together" is a guaranteed killer, with Philadelphia's Pink Skull offering up this funky off-kilter tech-house banger. Alongside the original version on the A side, there is a monged out electrohouse dub mix from NYC's 33Hz. The flip is owned by a brilliant Trevor Loveys extended mix.

It's a very musical and melodic trip with disco guitars, a supersaw synth, stuttering basslines, a tweaky broken beat and a twitching, throbbing vibe which works brilliantly.

Huh! Get on Up!

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.

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Various Artists Sampler

Wonderful sampler CD featuring tracks taken from the vinyl only Disposable Music Library Subscription Discs series from the ever-brilliant Finders Keepers Records founded and run by Andy Votel. The Subscription disc series was a set of five highly limited vinyl pressings featuring library music both new and old. It's a beautiful set with distinctive artwork and high production values. I think a few of them might still be available.

There's a divers range of styles on this sampler disc, but it hangs together really well as an album in it's own right.

The Finders Keepers website is a joy and they issue/reissue lost treasures at a spectacular rate both on vinyl and CD.

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Extension 10"

Discodeine are a parisian duo comprised of Pilooski (Dirty Sound system) and Pentile.

"Synchronize" is a perfect disco-pop song featuring Jarvis Cocker, who provided the lyrics and a perfect vocal performance that turns this song into an instant classic. This was a limited edition of 500 copies pressed up on blue vinyl.

Pilooski mailed me a few years ago after I'd posted the highly limited DIRTY SOUNDSYSTEM CD's up on here. He said I was "not cool" for posting the albums, which I though was a bit fucking rich as the albums are re-edits of other people's material. You'd better grab this quick in case he gets back in touch.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.

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The Discodeine album is great btw.

Full Pupp Presents The Greatest Tits Vol 1.

Prins Thomas' "Full Pupp" label's first CD release was this excellent double disck pakage dating from 2008. Tha album is a compilation of tracks released to that point by the label and includes all the greats from the Nordic scene including Todd Terje, Mental Overdrive, Diskjokke and a whole host of less widely known (and for that matter, less pronuncable) talents.

On the first disc, the album is ably mixed by the Prins Thomas himself. The second disc contains a selection of unmixed material.

That's the soundtrack for your Easter disco sorted out, then.

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Sub Loam - 2

Released early last year in a hand-stamped, hand-numbered limited edition of 110 copies, Sub Loam (aka Thomas Shrubsole) offers up two long pieces of what he terms "landscape meditation and exploratory ambience".

The 15-minute opening first track plunges your ears into a hauntological realm populated by suggestive sound cues and vintage sonic constructions to trick the memory. Throughout there's a continuous stream of tape hiss, with warbling, organ-like tones and plenty of booming, shadowy bass echoing around the stereo field in such a way as to present the illusion that there's something creepy and peculiar going on directly behind you, or just out of your field of vision.

Following on from this, 'Grass And Soil, Rutted Track, A Mound Of Earth' proves even better, presenting a disfigured environmental soundscape that seems as if it's been committed to tape using the world's most unreliable and decrepit dictaphone. Fluctuations and rumbles in the consistency of the recordings add plenty of character, although the muddy, waterlogged sonorities still manage to come through, becoming less and less stable as we draw towards the end - something which results in overloaded, distorted noise and almost raygun-like pulsations.

A darkly analogue ambient release which gives us a glimpse into a compellingly mulchy and nocturnal universe.

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Seefeel - Quique Redux Edition

Too Pure finally brought this album back into print after far too long with this double-disc "Redux Edition", and listening now, you'll hear the beginnings of a still-thriving genre that remains slippery and unnamed, purely electronic music with a strange, tangy rock aftertaste.

It's just the barest tinkling of percussion, a rising and falling bass line to provide a barely audible pulse guiding the track, and the laziest melody Kevin Shields or Robin Guthrie never wrote. Not afraid to name a song "Spangle", that most overused of adjectives when it comes to post-Cocteau Twins' guitar atmospherics, Seefeel's canvas on Quique was the azure 8-bit horizon of a computer game where the band blew pixilated clouds that spritzed digital mist and crafted minimal hooks from just hypnotic smears of faraway feedback and Sarah Peacock's nape-of-your-neck intimate whispers.

Needless to say, if Seefeel's pace gets to, say, mid-tempo, the band's pretty damn worked up. The songs stretch out like groggy limbs after a mid-day nap, and the band is often at its best when it's at its most languid, as on the impossibly sensual and nearly static "Filter Dub".

In the band's attempt escape rock's orbit, the second disc of nine unreleased tracks and rare cuts melts any remaining physicality away until all that's left is, as the band titles the last track, a "Silent Pool", even removing most of the "techno" from "ambient techno." The "avant garde" mix of "Charlotte's Mouth" mutes the original's percussion until it's the spectral, washed-out blur of an underdeveloped Polaroid, and the eerie "My Super 20" blows barren winds as cold the bleakest tracks on AFX's Selected Ambient Works II or the arctic static of Thomas Koner.

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The Rock Steady Crew - (Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew 7"

From the dawn of hip hop culture, this fantastic single rings out down the years. Co-written and produced by the indomitable Stephen Hague. There's an album as well, which I have somewhere. This seemed very, very new and exciting on it's release in 1983.

The instrumental version on the flip might just edge it, but the vocal version is a solid gold classic. Make a break, make a move.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps

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E.M.A.K. - Tanz In Den Himmel 12"

Guys and Gals, apologies for lack of posts over the last few weeks. My employers and family keep asking me to, like, do stuff. The bunch of leeching, grabbing, annoying bastards. I'll try and rectify the dearth of tunage over the coming few days.

Let's kick off with this recent and highly limited 12" from the wonderful E.M.A.K. (Electronische Musik Aus Koln) collective as recently compiled on the ever brilliant Soul Jazz album, "A Synthetic History Of E.M.A.K. 1982-88".

The tracks on this 12" weren't featured on the album, however.

Very brief but very wonderful. The lead track "Tanz In Den Himmel" is especially brilliant.

Only up for a few days.

Vinyl rip at 320 Kbps.

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Hardcore Synth Abuse - Part Two

Those of you who enjoyed this should also find something to get excited about for Zombi's "Spirit Animal". The linking factor is Steve Moore, although in the Zombi incarnation, this music is much closer to authentic, actual prog rock. It's done with élan and care and somehow, againt a lot of the odds (if not all of them) it somehow works.

Thought that the synthesizer-happy instrumental duo Zombi couldn't possibly get more celestial than their Goblin-esque last album, Surface to Air (2006)? Wrong again boyo -- it's a good thing I never take your advice anyway. On the five-track Spirit Animal, the Pittsburgh twosome continues to rescue the sounds of 70s keyboard prog from the viscous grip of cheese, concentrating this time around on warmer textures and ever more cosmic soundscapes. Is there an element of the tongue in cheek? Put it this way: The cover of Spirit Animal features an elephant bounding through the cosmos.

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