I will have no part of the current trend for branding things ‘amaze-balls’ (or indeed it’s antithesis – ‘disappointi-balls’ at a guess), but if I did I would be amaze-balling all over THIS:

This is the work of writer and painter Cian O’Neill who is curating an evening of his work entitled simply ‘Music And Paintings’ next Thursday 19th April at Thursday 18th April, 6-10pm at Unit E, 199 Eade Road, N4 1DN Hackney

To shamelessly copy and paste from his very fine website, where you can admire a wealth of his other work: Cian O’Neill is an Irish painter, writer and graduate of Chelsea College of Arts School of Painting.  Previous to Chelsea College, he studied at Central Saint Martins.  He was selected for Futuremap,  the University of the Arts New Graduates Show and short-listed for the Catlin Arts prize. [His] work is influenced by, amongst others, Max Ernst, Rembrandt van Rijn, Willem van Aelst, Francisco Zurbarán, Francisco Goya, Diego Velázquez, Matthias Grünewald, Jean Ingres, Michelangelo da Caravaggio and Michelangelo Buonarroti.

That’s the paintings taken care of, then. The music will be supplied by no-doubt equally visceral live sets from the ever-excellent Brood MA, the redoubtable Yearning Kru, and the really rather splendid Joane Skyler, who’s recent ‘Orz Side 1’ for NTS Radio contained some of the dirtiest bass I’ve heard in a good while. And not forgetting Mark Barrett (though I can’t seem to find a decent hyperlink to regale you with!) and myself. I’m a huge fan of Cian’s work and Brood Ma and Yearning Kru are old friends, so it should be an amazing night.  For those of you who insist on such things, there’s also a Facebook events page. And it’s FREE!  What more could you insist on, for heaven’s sake?

See you there, then. At the moment I have absolutely no idea what I shall be playing, so I’m hoping to surprise us both. Possibly not Ant and Dec…

Good evening, citizens of Earth. Presenting the first episode of my new miniseries ‘Looking Good, Feeling Great’ for Resonance FM!

Join Robin The Fog as he digs up a plethora of inspirational, aspirational and instructional recordings of highly dubious vintage and embarks on a cut-and-paste odyssey that is by turns amusing, absurd and, on at least one occasion, almost unbearable. Essential listening for adolescent salespeople seeking holiness or anyone trying to give up smoking on the moon.

Episode 1 – What A Space Ovation! 

For this first adventure our hero Bob (and a girl called Betty) journey to the moon in the futuristic year of 1985, the first human being under the age of 21 (and the first woman – Betty, not Bobby) to ever travel so far without parental supervision. On their  way they eat some strange peaches, take a nap, dream of a horse from the West Country playing party games, listen to the hooting of space owls, learn about Hydrogen and, upon arrival, attend a lunar rave where they dance to a psychedelic version of ‘Greensleeves’. Worth a listen just to find out what happens when a crowd of scientists and technicians ‘go wild’…

Significant portions of this programme were culled from the 1965 Happy House LP shown above. Other excerpts were taken from ‘The Space Alphabet’ (with thanks to DJ Food for the tip-off), Vera Gray and Desmond Briscoe’s ‘Listen, Move And Dance No.4 – Moving Percussion And Electronic Sound Pictures’, something called ‘Ideas 2’ (which I can’t tell you anything about as I don’t have the sleeve in front of me), an US 7″ from the early 1960s that somehow manages to confuse space travel with home insurance and ‘Party Time With Alphonse’, although the less said about that, the better.

Close your faceplate and blast right off here:

[audio http://www.archive.org/download/LookingGoodFeelingGreatEpisodeOne-WhatASpaceOvation/LookingGoodFeelingGreatEp01-WhatASpaceOvation.mp3]

(Or follow this link for the download)

Now that the dust has settled somewhat and I’ve had a few days to get my affairs in order, I’m very excited to reveal some of the results of Camenzind Belgrade‘s first week. Working alongside a team of local architects, students, artists and journalists, my role as a ‘guest expert’ was to help the participants create various radio and sound works concerning the Savamala area of the city. In addition I gave a lecture on radiophonic music as part of Camenzind’s series of salon evenings and made guest appearances on local stations FMK Beograd and the mighty NO-FM, for whom I contributed a live DJ mix that was perhaps a little more energetic than I’d originally intended. Not that anyone complained….

As I think I’ve mentioned before, Camenzind is a Swiss magazine and research platform that deals with architecture from the perspective not only of architects but also musicians, artists, physicists, civil engineers, and any other kind of inhabitant or user of architecture. Or perhaps I forgot to mention this. Either way, you can read more about the magazine’s new Belgrade operation (invited at the behest of the Goethe Institute to take part in the city’s current ‘Urban Incubator‘ project) and have a listen to some of the impressive body of work the team created here. I must say I was consistently impressed by the talent and creativity displayed by my new Serbian friends, there’s some really dynamic and exciting work to be found on the website. And they’re only just getting started!

For my own part I’m currently creating a ‘sound portrait’ using recordings collected around Savamala (an early part of which I unveiled on this site last week) that will hopefully be finished in the coming weeks. But for the moment I’d like to present a couple of short audio-visual portraits made in collaboration with local photographer Milica Nikolić.

The images are culled from Milica’s beautiful shots of the riverside area, while the soundtrack uses percussive and reverberant sounds recorded inside ‘The Spanish House’, a ruined shell of a building perched on the riverbank with a flooded basement that provided one of the most delightfully evocative acoustics I’ve ever had the privilege of balancing precariously in. Perhaps surprisingly there are no electronic effects or artificial reverb used in these recordings, the atmosphere you hear is entirely natural. Milicia and I were assisted in our endeavours by Mirjana Utvić and Anita Knežić, architecture students, radio producers and amatuer percussionists who not only introduced me to this wondrous place, but also embraced our project with what I think we all agreed can be called ‘gusto’.

Here’s part one, recorded on a visit to the famous ‘ship’s graveyard’. I use inverted commas because although far from sea-worthy, at least one local has made a fairly cosy dwelling amongst these rusting hulks, while the others are used by fisherman as a casting point for their rods, despite the huge amount of rubbish and debris that has collected in this bend of the river. And they don’t just throw them back, either…

For part two we move to The Spanish House itself, situated on the banks of the river and with it’s brackish waters lapping in the basement. It was cold, wet and eerie and and also love at first sight:

As you can tell I’m a huge admirer of Milica’s work and hope that we’ll have an opportunity to collaborate again soon. I also hope that next time it won’t take four long hours just to upload two short minutes of video (dammit!). And of course I’m very grateful to Mirjana and Anita for allowing me into their special ‘Temple of Savamala’ and for providing voices and percussion. Here are a couple more photographs of us at work – taken by Milica of course.

Unfortunately this has all been rather a brief summing-up of what was an incredibly exciting and rewarding week, partly as I’m flying off to Berlin first thing in the morning and partly because these videos took far longer to finalise and upload than was strictly proper and necessary. But I do urge you to visit the Camenzind Belgrade site for further listening and hope to be bringing even more exciting new work to your attention in the coming months. Once you start flying to Eastern Europe, breaking into abandoned buildings and banging on the pipes it’s very difficult to stop, as I’m sure you can imagine…

You join me in Zurich airport as I await my flight to London. I’m homeward-bound home armed with several new Learning English records (a personal weakness), an oil painting of slightly dubious vintage planned for my kitchen (which, amazingly, is the first thing I’ve ever unwittingly smuggled through customs) and a hardrive full of new and curious sounds and images. I’ll be writing more  in the coming days (internet access here is limited, so I probably should have left out all of the above) but I just wanted to share with you the first fruits of my sound portrait of the Savamala area of Belgrade, produced in the flooded basement of the ruined ‘Spanish House’, balancing precariously on snowy concrete steps in an attempt to extract some Savamalian ghosts. All will be explained in due course, but for now I wish merely to say a huge thanks to all of the incredibly talented and passionate new friends I’ve made over the course of the week, and to urge you to visit the Camenzind Belgrade website to find out more about this amazing project. In the meantime, I’m going to start sifting through my folder marked ‘ship’s graveyard’ to see if I can find some audio treasure. And at a cost of roughly £4.70, this pot of Earl grey had better be the greatest ever brewed…

PS Would  you believe me if I told you that the acoustics on this recording are entirely natural and that no artificial echo or reverb was used in it’s creation? I almost didn’t believe it myself! Working with sound never fails to surprise me, even now…

I hereby present the latest release on my bedroom imprint The Fog Signals for your approval, a mixtape of softs produced in collaboration with Mr. Dave ‘Hills Have Riff’s’ Briggs and recorded in the same basement studio using the same tape machines as The Ghosts Of Bush. And yet  Earl Grey Whistle Test is not a sequel to that record, for Studio S6 is now well on it’s way to being turned back into a swimming pool and the tape machines have long since been either beaten senseless with a hammer and thrown into a skip (creditable rumour) or auctioned off for astronomical sums. There appears to have been very little leeway between these opposing fortunes, for which we can only assume the BBC is making good on it’s mooted attempts to dramatically reduce waste and recycle a much greater percentage of it’s material. Not that I’m bitter. Anyway, I’m drifting…

As l was saying, this album is actually something of a prequel. All of the music here was recorded in the few months before the Ghosts… sessions began, as Dave and I started to improvise and experiment with tape loops, whistles, mandolin and assorted objects we found lying around the studio, all while drinking copious amounts of the titular beverage. It was my first time experimenting with reel-to-reel machines and also the first time I’d gone anywhere near making music for several years. These late night sessions proved quite eventful –  feedback snarled out of unexpected places, tape spooled everywhere, loops were snapped, mistakes were made, lessons were learned, punches were thrown*. But after a few of these clandestine evenings we had amassed a collection of brief, improvised sketches, largely recorded in mono and in a single take. It was all tremendous fun and definitely paved the way for the ghostly tape loops that were soon to follow, but I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with them. It wasn’t until almost a year later when I was getting fidgety for what of something to tinker with over Christmas that I got the idea of extracting some of my favourite moments from the confusion of files marked ‘S6 Robin and Dave’ on my hard-drive and editing them together into a mixtape of sorts. So I did. And here it is.

It’s perhaps a little wonky in places, but I like to think ‘Earl Grey Whistle Test’ is the sound of two people on their way to a discovery, a sort of sketchbook where the tape manipulation techniques that would eventually go on to haunt the corridors upstairs gradually took shape. Plus there’s gorgeous original artwork by Dave and yet another classic photo from Hannah Brown. A physical cassette release was on the cards and may well still occur if enough people demand it, but I got a bit bored of waiting for the people at the cassette plant to get their s*** together and decided to put it out anyway. I hope you enjoy it and that, in the context of famous prequels, you’ll find it more Pre-Emptive Strike than Phantom Menace.

As for the official Ghosts… follow-up, that’s still some way off but with Chris Weaver on board and some freshly-repaired tape-machines at our disposal, work can now begin in earnest. Not that we haven’t been busy in the meantime. Noses have been firmly on the grindstone. I’ll explain more in a couple of weeks when I come back from Belgrade. Oh, yeah, I’m off to Belgrade next week to make some Serbian Radiophonics. Did I not mention that? Hoping to find some духови!

*This is a complete lie. Have you ever met Hills Have Riffs? I doubt he’s ever thrown a punch in his life. Kick-boxing is more his thing.

Do you know what a ‘Butt-fast Joy-Girl’ is? Or a ‘Hanky Panky Humper’? No? Well, pull up a sturdy pew and loosen some buttons.

You might remember a piece I made last year entitled ‘A Corner seat in a smoker facing the engine’ for the Radio 4 series Short Cuts. Presented by In The Dark founder Nina Garthwaite and produced by Eleanor McDowall for Falling Tree Productions, Short Cuts was a selection of brief encounters, true stories and found sound, ‘a showcase of delightful and adventurous short documentaries’. The response to ‘ACSIASFTE’, which went out as part of the first episode was fantastic, particularly the report I received from one anonymous listener who claimed to have ‘laughed until [he] wept and nearly crashed [his] car’. In fact, thanks to an excellent job by Nina and Eleanor the response to Short Cuts was so overwhelmingly positive that a second series was quickly planned and the call for fresh submissions sent out. Unfortunately by this point I was rather busy putting the finishing touches to ‘The Ghosts Of Bush’ and didn’t have much time to spare conjuring up new work. Luckily, inspiration soon popped up:

Yes, I’m afraid we’re back here again. Some of my more adventurous followers might remember the Mucky Mixxxtape I produced a couple of years ago, a dirty little voyage into some of the smuttier echelons of my record collection, featuring Blowers and Freaks aplenty. It  remains far-and-away my most popular mixtape and one of the things for which I am best known, which just goes to show it’s unwise to question your public. Or indeed approach them.

Anyway, one of the mooted episode titles for this new Short Cuts series was simply the word ‘cut’, and  my own genius idea was to apply this theme to my copy of the thoroughly odious 1971 American pornographic recording ‘Midnight Cowpoke’, a cheap and tawdry affair telling the story of a country bumpkin named Clyde visiting New York for the first time and somehow arriving at the front door of two women or ill-repute. A cloistered fellow, he has no idea of the ways of the flesh (indeed he assumes at first that they’re conversing about chickens and donkeys) and it’s left to our ‘butt-fast joy-girl’ duo Marge and Vicky to teach him a few decidedly unpleasant lessons. In short it’s three bad actors pretending to have sex over the course of  forty-two grubby, tiresome minutes, entirely fake and pretty much unlistenable. My plan was to approach the recording scientifically  like some kind of audio surgeon with too much time on his hands and seamlessly hack and snip away every last vestige of badly-acted eroticism, every last one of the record’s copious profanities, and every single moment of ‘there’s-no-way-you-could-actually-be-doing-that-while-providing-such-a-lucid-running-commentary’ incredulity in order to glimpse at the bare bones beneath. What, if anything, would be left?  And so I took up my tools and got down to business (if you’ll pardon the…, er,  well…)

Perhaps predictably, the results were pretty insubstantial. The original LP, as mentioned above, weighed in at forty-two minutes. After my comprehensive de-filthing campaign, the newly re-titled ‘All Cow, No Poke’ lasted less than two:

Synopsis: Clyde has come to The New York. He recently went to a big dance. His dad owned a farm but died from cancer.  He sold the farm but kept the lumber rights on the remaining five hundred acres. He’d like to purchase some furniture.

That’s it.

Why did I do it? What did I hope to achieve? Well, perhaps it was because this record constitutes another entry to my aforementioned list of things that I couldn’t quite believe existed. And also because I can’t help but find the sheer banality of these left-overs fascinatingly surreal. At what point  when making a pornographic recording does the producer decide that there needs to be some sort of sub-plot involving lumber-rights and the purchase of furniture and what does he hope this will add to the proceedings? Is it all in aid of giving bad actors a credible narrative to work with? The addition of dramatic realism?  And if so, what’s so exciting about lumber? They even manage to miss out the obvious joke about ‘having wood’ which surely would have been covered before lunchtime on day one at porn school. Why bother including such drab, everyday pointlessness in a recording which is otherwise a piece of ridiculous escapism? Are purchasers of this record going to feel let-down if there’s not a good story to accompany all the dinging and donging? Would the intended demographic pay the slightest attention to such details even if everything else was removed?

In hindsight, I should have realised that these weren’t quite the kind of questions that the kettle-boiling listeners of Radio 4 were particularly desperate to find answers for, and although I’m told it raised a giggle round the Falling Tree offices, they tactfully suggested it was perhaps just a little bit racey for a daytime nationwide radio programme. A bit rich if a rumour I heard regarding a recent episode of The Archers turns out to be true, but let it pass…

Anyway, the good news is that Short Cuts carried on without me and was of course every bit as brilliant as the first series. In The Dark have got some great listening events planned for 2013 and ‘All Cow, No Poke’ finally got it’s inaugural hearing last week on the Dexter Bently Hello Goodbye Show as part of Resonance FM‘s fundraising bonanzer. They proved to be far less worried about the impact it might have on the sensibilities of their lunchtime audience, but then Hello Goodbye has delighted in blasting it’s listeners with all kind of noisy filth for over a decade now. And while we’re on the subject,  thanks to everyone who tuned into the four-hour marathon OST show presented by myself and Hannh Brown of Modern Day Magpie. We were really chuffed with the results and I’m delighted to announce that the test pressing of ‘Ghosts Of Bush’ fetched a whopping £77! All proceeds, as mentioned before, go to keeping the greatest radio station in the world on air and advert free for another year. Well done to you all!

PS If this is your first visit to this site, please let me assure you that all this smut is very much the exception and that I’m hardly ever forced to censor my material using stuffed animals. Honestly, hardly ever…

Those of you of a squeamish disposition had best look away now:

In the same week that we were booked for a major gig later on this year, I’m happy to announce that Howlround have finally made some progress on the tape machine front, as Chris and I journeyed to deepest Sussex yesterday to visit the home of reel-to-reel repair expert Paul Baldwin. We took three dodgy tape machines under our arms/in the boot, plunderphonic overlord Lepke B rode shotgun and the two-hour  journey simply flew by thanks to one of Chris’s bizarre and confusing compilation CDs consisting entirely of Squarepusher, extreme metal and Ceefax music.

As you can see the machines looked pretty sorry for themselves as Paul pulled their guts apart, but the good news is that we finally found out what it was rattling around inside the PR-99 (not a bird’s nest it transpired) and it’s quite likely that the surgery hurt us more than it hurt them. Paul worked tirelessly throughout the day in his increasingly frigid workshop while his wife plied us (very thoughtfully) with tea and soup and his dogs presented us (equally thoughtfully) with endless squeaky toys for our entertainment.

The machines bore it all with tremendous stoicism and are now looking and sounding much better after their surgery. And in a happy coincidence we also discovered just how vastly improved MOR classic ‘Closest Thing to Crazy’ sounds when played very, VERY slowly. I expect Chris will soon add this to one of his CD compilations so you can all have a listen.

In other news, at the time of writing there’s still time to have a quick punt on the very rare test pressing of ‘Ghosts Of Bush’, in aid of Resonance FM. All proceeds from this week’s fundraising auction will be going to help keep the greatest station in the world on air for another year. The needle of the Ghosts Of Bush totaliser is currently nudging £42, but I reckon we can still better in aid of such a worthy cause. At the moment £42 barely covers the costs of building the totaliser in the first place…*

*I haven’t actually built a totaliser. I was just being silly. Sorry.

It’s that time of year once again where Resonance FM hopes everyone will do their duty and enter into it’s much needed annual fundraising drive with gusto. There’s plenty of ways to get involved, be it simply making a donation to help keep the station on air, by bidding for a series of highly covetable items in our forthcoming marathon auction or perhaps attending the official Resonance benefit gig in Stockwell this coming Friday (details below) or even buying airtime. And let me tell you, in these recession-blasted, debt-riddled times, the most amazing radio station on earth needs your help more than ever.  There was even talk recently of having to  take on advertising to make our increasingly expensive ends meet, which is a pretty harrowing thought given the low-rent patronising horses**t that seem to pass muster on UK commercial radio these days. Last week I was trapped in a station cafe for half an hour with Heart Radio blaring from the speakers, and by the time that advert about the new Renault Megane came round again I was ready to embark on a killing spree.  Thank God my train arrived before the Emma Bunton show did…

Anyway, I’m drifting. The main thing that I want to impart is that Resonance is a wondrous thing, a unique broadcasting experiment now more than a decade old and still making dazzling and amazing original radio of a depth and scope that you simply don’t hear anywhere else (plus Graham Penthouse – but you can’t  win ’em all) and it’s important we keep it that way, because the arrival of advertising or corporate sponsorship would surely be the beginning of the end and an interminable sink into commercial radio hell. On the other hand running and maintaining a radio station isn’t cheap and money doesn’t grow on trees. The solution is either to fund reasearch into ways of making it do so, or -much simpler – to help us raise some money. And here’s a few of the ways you can help us do just that.

Firstly, Dexter Bentley’s Hello Goodbye Show show are once again auctioning off their show at the rate of £10 per minute. In other words £10 will get you sixty seconds of prime Saturday-afternoon Resonance airtime on this jewel in the Resonance crown, which you can use however you please: promote your album, read from your memoirs or you could just count to sixty. Or for £20 you could count to a hundred and twenty. It’s up to you. A few minutes still remain, so send your donations and material by email to dexterbentley@hotmail.com

There’s also the aformentioned benefit concert hosted by legendary promoters and stalwart Resonance supporters Club Integral will take place this Friday 15th February at The Grosvenor, London SW9. Doors open at 20.30 and tickets are a mere £5 (or £3 concessions), with all proceeds going to help keep the station afloat for another twelve months. Top of the bill is be a live set by Resonance’s very own Hauntological Orchestra, ‘the UK’s foremost explorers of the art of audio hauntology – sparkier than a bri-nylon spacesuit, cooler than Jacques Derrida’s old fridge-freezer. By turns painfully hip and mind-bogglingly kitsch, the Orchestra exists at the point where the funky but fashionable faux pas gives way to a vintage electronic vibe to die for’. Have you got all that? It’s basically a loose collective of singers, musicians, electronic noodlers (plus the frankly incomparable Lepke B and his plunderphonic pop), that’s been known to swell to close to twenty members on occasion. On Friday they will be performing an extended showcase of haunted covers, originals and radiophonic improvisations, supported by DJ sets from Robin The Fog (that fellow again) and Jules Webbcore, with visuals by  Rucksack Cinema. Really a marvellous evening’s entertainment for a fiver even before you remember the good cause the proceeds are going to.

For my part, aside from spinning some tunes for Club Integral, I shall also be presenting a special fund-raising special edition of The OST Show, 16.30 on Saturday 16th February in regular host Jonny Trunk’s stead. Aalongside the usual programme of film and TV soundtracks, library recordings and moderate lapses of taste and judgement, we’ll be attempting to auction off as many desirable and delightful items as possible in the space of two hours. Full details of Resonance’s catalogue of biddable delights will be up very soon, but there’s a few items I can reveal here straightaway. Let’s begin with a contribution from my co-host Hannah Brown, Resonance stalwart and celebrated Lomographer who’s bringing in a very special camera to show off – a Diana Mini 35mm with flash normally worth at least a cool hundred quid. Thanks to our chums at lomographyuk.com  for this one  and if you’re unfamiliar with what it is that makes these cameras so special, check out Hannah’s photos on her Modern Day Magpie blog – then win the item and immediately start pretending you’re in Boards of Canada!

Next up, Play OST For Me, the chance to win your very, very own personal edition of the greatest soundtrack radio show of all time, presented by your good self and Jonny Trunk (if permitted) with all of your own hand-picked favourite soundtracks of all time, plus Jonny promising to be at his most servile, pander to your every whim and to generally treat you like a princess.  This was a big hit last year – you may remember it was won by the lovely Diane from Cape Canaveral in Florida, who flew all the way to London just to take the helm, which resulted in one of the finest OST shows in recent memory. You may also recall that she was accompanied by her mother, who clearly found the whole OST experience so delightful that she quite forgot about the arm she’d broken on the way to the studio and refused all suggestions of medical attention until after the show was over. If only all our listeners were as dedicated as this wonderful mother-daughter combo. Shame on the rest of you!

There’s the chance to win the ENTIRE Trunk Records Digital catalogue. This includes all Trunk releases on mp3, plus all the digital albums issued in the last two years – the catalogue runs to over 150 releases, including rare radiophonics, awesome exotica, superb spoken word, rare vocal jazz, rare jazz, rare all sort of things: singles, albums, oddities, and out-of-print gems by artists such as Eden Ahbez, Jim Fasset (a personal foggy favourite), Les Baxter, Ken Nordine, Bernard Herrmann, Yuri Gagarin and even those ‘Fornicating Female Freaks’ which you might remember from my Mucky Mixxxtape of some time ago  (I doubt you’ll need to listen to it twice). Countless others too – It’s a seriously huge amount of music and would cost you several hundred pounds to purchase individually and several thousand pounds to track down each original album. Salivate over some of the long, long list of titles here. And as if that wasn’t exciting enough, there’s a separate chance to win an original copy of recent Trunk favourite, outsider funk classic ‘It’s Broken!’ by Bob Chance. NOT the Trunk reissue – an original SEALED copy from 1980. Seriously rare and seriously odd. And speaking of seriously rare, there’s also a copy or two of the pink vinyl edition of Jeff Keen’s ‘Noise Art’, a frightening limited recent Trunk issue already fetching large sums online. Gosh, I might need a lie down…

Moving on, our next lot is an original, bespoke painting by legendary Monsterist Pete Fowler!

For those of you unfamiliar with the man’s impossibly groovy oeuvre, Pete’s art roams in the fields of music, illustration, toy design, print making, painting and more recently cross stitch embroidery. Some of his most recognisable images have been for the Super Furry Animals’ albums, videos, merchandise and giant inflatable bears. His various Monsterism creations have spanned toy figures, apparel,  and two very fine CD compilations of appropriately oddball music, which we’ll certainly be dipping into on the show), stationary and more, gaining a world wide fan base. As well as digital artwork he exhibits his original artwork in various galleries and recent projects have included designing 2 one off synthesisers for XL records, a Christmas campaign for O2 and a toy figure with the legendary British comic 2000AD. Aside from his artwork Pete is one half go the cosmic smooth rock/deckshoe gaze music duo Seahawks, releasing music prolifically since 2010 and continuing to plot a similar course in 2013 with various remixes, records and CDs alongside DJing. Amazing he had time to make a painting just for us, but he has and  ‘Hirsuit Synther’, shown below, is acrylic on canvas and measures 30cm x 21cm, signed, titled and dated on the reverse. This jpg arrived in my inbox earlier and I’ve been grinning ever since. Resonance salutes you, Sir Fowler!

the chance to have your portrait painted by Team Beswick and Pye. A perennial favourite this is the third year running that the wonderful Harry Pye and the equally super Gordon Beswick have agreed to combine once again to paint the highest bidder’s image in their own style which is the very definition of ‘inimitable’. A hugely generous offer from them, a shot in the arm for Resonance and a piece of outstanding original artwork for some lucky bidder. Sensational!

And finally for the moment, a very rare and very exclusive ‘Ghosts Of Bush’ Test-Pressing. You remember, that album I was banging on about quite a bit last year.  Got a **** review in Record Collector (that’s FOUR STARS, not a swear word), the first (black) pressing sold out in about five minutes, and for a time were fetching silly money on the internet. Well, these ‘testies’ (I do so love suggestive industry jargon!) are even rarer.  There are five of these in existence. I think we can all agree that’s quite limited edition.  At the moment nobody else has one and after this auction nobody else will either. Oh, apart from me and Hannah. But I think she might have lost hers…

Well, that’s enough to get started with for now. Of course if you have something special that you’d like to donate to the cause yourself and help us raise some much-needed cash, do please get in touch, either by emailing robinthefog@gmail.com or info@resonancefm.com. Some of the most successful items in the past have included rare records, out-of-print books, dinner in exclusive restaurants, a tour of Brockwell Park Sewers and (my personal favourite) an orignal ‘quad’ poster for that cinematic classic ‘The Sex Adventures Of The Three Musketeers’ with it’s memorable tagline ‘Free for all and all for free!’. It currently hangs in my kitchen except when I have sensitive relatives over to visit. In the meantime, details of how to place a bid along with an exhaustive list of everything else up for grabs will be posted on the Resonance site in the next few days.

As a little reminder of just where your generous donations are going, here’s a behind-the-scenes piece I made a while back for Monocle Radio that attempts to explain just what makes this station so special. Or you could just visit the Resonance website right now and click ‘listen’. Or tune to 104.4FM if you’re in London. Either way, enjoy!

Regular listeners to Resonance FM will surely be already aware of Sine Of The Times, presented by DJ and One-Woman-Army Rita Maia. The show describes itself as ‘a varied and in depth exploration of the past, present and future of London’s underground dance music scene, with a focus on the sound system culture [..] and it’s influence & development across the world‘, but I prefer to just say that it goes out at 9pm Saturday for ninety solid minutes of all the latest cutting-edge tracks from that all-encompassing dance music genre everyone seems to call ‘Bass Culture’ (although in the tradition of ‘dubstep’, ‘trip hop’ or indeed ‘purple’, purists tend to look at you askance if you use the term in mixed company – plus have you ever seen a purple purist?). I should also add that Rita gets all the latest ‘dubs’ miles before anyone else and has a pretty hefty book of contacts from which she picks weekly special guests as well as live sessions from artists and producers before they blow up (and indeed after). For my older readers, to ‘blow up’ in youthful parlance means to suddenly become very popular and successful, rather than the horrific accident you might well now be envisioning. But I’m drifting…

Anyway, as well as running the show and her own label Badmood Recordings, she also DJs all over the place and a recent mix for FACT magazine is something of legend if you can track it down (which you can’t). With all this activity and so much exclusive material passing through her hands, it’s a wonder Sine Of The Times Radio is only just now getting around to releasing it’s first compilation of material by guest artists, DJ and contributors to the show over the past three years. Nevertheless, it’s been worth the wait. ‘Rita Maia presents Sine Of The Times‘ is out this week and its really, really good. Here’s a taster:

Cards on the table: I did make a small contribution in the form of a short ‘Intro’, as Rita asked me to make something ‘radiophonic’ in the most literal sense to promote the show behind the album. As someone who has sat in on many of her sessions over the years I was happy to oblige and set about conjuring up show’s broadcasting heritage using some processed shortwave recordings and other assorted bursts of radio static. It’s gigantic leaps of the imagination such as this that have helped me reach the very pinnacle of my game, but you could argue (and why must we always argue?) that I have a vested interest. But as you’ll hear and as the title ‘Intro’ implies, my contribution is really just an entree and pretty meagre in comparison to brand spanking new material from the excellent My Panda Shall Fly, dFranklin, Modo Fractal, BD1982  and a particularly fine track from NKC of Awkward Movements fame, plus more. Will Ward‘s gorgeous, Detroit-inspired ‘Brighter’ is the pick of the bunch for me, though with Rita’s firm grip on the controls there isn’t even a suspicion of filler. And it’s mostly exclusive too. Read the very complimentary review from the good folk of the aforementioned Awkward Movements here and then immediately go and buy it from Rough Trade here (it’s made their top 20 this week!) or indeed from Juno Records here.

In other exciting news, there’s a party to celebrate the release of the album THIS FRIDAY (8th Feb) at the Notting Hill Arts Club, with LV from Hyperdub leading the charge and a live set from My Panda Shall Fly. I shall always be fond of NHAC as it remains the location of my shortest ever DJ set (somewhere in the region of sixteen minutes) and indeed I was originally supposed to be spinning some tunes at the launch party myself. Unfortunately, however, due to my rather frantic current schedule and a succession of encroaching project deadlines, I had no choice but to force myself to deliberately not even notice the email until it was too late (Sorry about that, Rita!) Probably just as well, the line-up is a stonker and I’d only have ended up embarrassing myself by using expressions such as ‘bass culture’ in front of everyone.  Best just to let them get on with it.

Why are you still here? Go and buy the album! Now!

Hello there and a Happy New Year to you. I was beginning to wonder if it might not be a bit too late for such sentiments, but I overheard someone using just those words on the bus today, and as they seemed tastefully attired and of reasonably sound mind, I figured it was probably alright. So a Happy New Year it is. Let us toast one another.

It’s been a busy start to the year, alright, with a couple of hefty commissions already on the books for the next couple of months, not to mention a mammoth production of ‘Hamlet’ in my day job (apparently tomorrow I get to demonstrate my swordplay, so there is a very slight chance this could be my last post ever), all of which is keeping me stimulated. I’ve also engaged in my first soundclash of the year, with my old sparring partner DJ Halfdutch, an almighty tussle at a venue on Caledonian Road which I’ve since forgotten the name of. The one thing I do remember is that downstairs there was a group of people dressed as that Tombraider woman dancing to house music so nondescript it’s a wonder it could be bothered to show up at all. The poor, sexily-clad fools should have joined us upstairs, where a pitched battle was being fought on the turntables, our weapons a downright tasty stew of Dekker, Bongo, Fatty, Hopeton, Tony, Betty and of course some Winstons (of ‘The’ fame):

We chose a strict 45s-only ruling to both add a little frisson to the occasion and also because I’m getting to the stage where lugging a spine-cracking bag of 12″s through central London on a sucession of night buses is at long last beginning to prove irksome. But who was the winner? Why, the audience, of course! We’ve since divided up the spoils and posted them on our respective Mixcloud pages, so those of you aggrieved to have missed the whole thing can play catch up. Here’s part two:

Onto more serious matters, here are some of my resolutions for 2013:

• There IS going to be a second Howlround album. Quite a lot of people have been asking me about a follow-up to ‘The Ghosts of Bush’ and I can confirm one is in the pipeline. But it’s a VERY long pipeline that is currently a bit congested and keeps refusing to ‘pipe’ properly, so I won’t be able to make much progress until I’ve had my equipment thoroughly worked-over by a ‘pipe expert’ (I realise this is beginning to sound dangerously euphemistic, so I’ll leave it there). Some have asked what the theme of the record will be, but I can’t disclose this yet partly because it’s a surprise and partly because it involves a series of recordings that require some rather fiddly copyright clearance. Just like the last album, and indeed pretty much anything I do, I haven’t got the slightest idea what it will sound like or what the end result will actually be, but let’s just say I wasn’t hanging out in the basement of the British Library just to admire the intricacies of their conveyer-belt book transit system (although it is impressive). The Howlround line-up has expanded to include Mr. Chris Weaver of Resonance FM and Oscillatorial Binnage-fame and together I’m hoping we’ll concoct something rather special, once we’ve knocked our collection of broken tape machines into some semblance of functionality. Oh, for the days when I could just walk into a studio, spool up and get cracking!

• A couple of new, limited-edition releases are pending on my low-rent vanity label The Fog Signals, plus hopefully a second full-length album with Guy J. Jackson, if there’s time. His stories get ever darker and weirder! As it happens, both releases feature one Hills Have Riffs, who plays guitar, mandolin, whistle and, as you can see below, a selection of pens. Another talented fellow.

• A brand new mini-series for Resonance FM, ‘Looking Good, Feeling Great’: How to I describe it? Well, it’s a sort of history of aspirational, instructional and educational vinyl compiled into a series of mixtapes by being ruthlessly cut up and thrown about in a most ignoble manner. The results are by turns fascinating, hilarious, nostalgic, deeply weird and – perhaps inevitably – a touch sleazy. Tx dates coming very soon, naturally I’ll be bringing them to your attention…

Not a bad start. Other, lesser resolutions include:

• Reminding myself that I really don’t need any more records that attempt to teach me the bongos while hypnotised.

• Crafting better analogies (that pipe-related paragraph above went completely off the rails. Sorry about that.)

• Finally getting rid of those people who brandish I-pods at me while I’m DJing by throwing the bastarding thing out the nearest window. And then throwing them out after it.

• Developing my upper-body strength in order to facilitate the throwing of i-Pod-owners out of windows.

• Coming up with a DJ name as classic as ‘Martika’s Bitchin’!’ 

• To stop collecting things just because I can’t quite believe they exist. For example:

Seriously, what kind of world are we living in where this kind of publication is given the green light? Although in a curiously topical twist, the first joke that jumped off the page at me (well, it sat up and begged at least) was How does JR rate Jimmy Saville?  The highly dubious likelihood of Larry Hagman actually fostering an opinion of the erstwhile host of Jim’ll Fix It or indeed regularly dropping everything to score some cheap scouts-on-roller-coaster jollies is casually passed over, and the punchline far, far too dismal to render here. But sitting in a Maida Vale studio this week hearing Hamlet’s stirring speech regarding there being ‘more things more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy’, I found myself imagining that in these words the great Bard was surely anticipating a distant future where the fortunes of two completely unrelated fellows, one an American with shoulder-pads and the other a pervert in a shell-suit could be needlessly and incomprehensibly slammed together. In a joke book. It’s no wonder Ophelia went bananas.

A final few resolutions:

• To coin a new phrase or expression to describe that thing where one presents a photograph on a digital camera to elderly relative, only for them to exclaim ‘Aww, isn’t that lovely – Oh, wait, where’s it’s gone?’

• To stop updating my website in the small hours of the morning when my ability to construct a coherent sentence goes completely belly-up, and I find myself going off on lengthly tangents about pointless and emphemeral pop-cultural backwaters. (As you can see, that one’s off to a flying start.)

• And lastly, to hunt down and punish every single person involved in the making of THIS:

Yes, friends, if you can think of a better demonstration of just how irredeemably screwy our world has become than the spectacle of Michael Ball challenging Brian Connelly to an obstacle-course race on prime-time afternoon television with the help of a mobility scooter formation display team; before the latter embarks on a carefully choreographed ‘spontaneous’ freak-out, let’s hear it. Seriously, get in touch. And you, Jim Sneardon are a disgrace to the uniform!

Only obscurist, limited edition pieces of sound art can save us now. Which, handily, is exactly what I’ve got planned for the coming months.

Best foot forward, then…