Robin The Fog

What’s that? It’s midway through January and this website, that chronicler of my Foggy affairs and calling-card to the world is still wishing everyone a Happy Christmas? Oh, dear, better get it sorted out…

Firstly, happy ‘Almost-February’, everyone. I trust your Festive season was well-spent and you are now looking to the year ahead with ears to the wind and noses to the porthole. Despite working before, throughout and after Christmas and New Year, I managed to attain a moderate degree of caroused-ness, much of it cheese-related (eg. sticking handfuls of the stuff in my ears as Gran has to have the  telly really loud in order to complain about how Midsomer Murders isn’t as good as it was when that other chap was in it). Plus, without dropping a single hint to anyone, my gifts included some Radiophonic vinyl, a copy of the newly-released English translation of key text In Search Of a Concrete Music by Pierre Schaeffer, and these little beauties:

How lucky I am to have family and friends who appreciate how much I love these things. And who also appreciate how desperately I could use just one smart shirt…

Now, you could argue that my writing about what I got for Christmas does not a particularly interesting post make. And I’d be inclined to agree with you. But the fact is, dear reader, that the past couple of weeks have been decidedly unproductive, and while I was hoping the new year would see me bouncing up and down and pummelling you with details of exciting and imminent projects, the spirit has been willing but the flesh particularly weak. The fact is, that after such a hectic few months and a busy Christmas, I succumbed to what everyone appears to be calling ‘Man-flu’ and have spent much of the last week in bed. Feel free to send me a message of sympathy at this point if you feel moved to do so.  You’d be the first.

So, I’m still a little groggy, a little snotty and a little unkempt (hence the title of this posting). But I’m back on my feet and looking forward to another busy year. For starters, there’s Howlround’s set on 31st January at the Full Of Noises event at Cafe Oto (details here). There’s plans for a new LP and a couple of other releases on The Fog Signals label, although we’re currently negotiating a proper distribution deal, so there’s paperwork to contend with before anything else. And, as of yesterday, I’ve started tinkering with a rather exciting new commission, working with a collection of sounds from the other side of the world, which are proving most stimulating!

But for now, please enjoy once again this demo from our performance at Kings Place last December (still only just over a month ago) that I thought was worth another posting. Hopefully it will whet a few appetites for the 31st!

Yours, in anticipation of a veritable mountain of Get-well correspondence,

RTF

PS Just realised I could have made a joke about wearing my influences on my sleeve. I must be sicker than I thought…

Nearing the end of 2013, perhaps the most manic twelve months of my life so far, my thoughts naturally turn to winding down my affairs, bidding the old year adieu and settling into my happy hearth for the usual Rover Biscuit Assortment and familial arguments regarding how ridiculously out-of-date the questions in our ancestral copy of Trivial Pursuits are (thus giving our elders distinct advantage). Unfortunately, however, RADIO DOES NOT SLEEP, so I shall basically be at the coal face right the way through into January; and any suggestions of egg nog, tasteless knitwear and chesnuts roasting on an open hostess trolley must be dismissed as mere romantic untruths. In fact, such is the intensity of my current work-rate that I probably won’t even have to scrape any frost off the grindstone before returning to it, as there will have been precious little time for any grind-frost to have accumulated.

But I’m not complaining. Well, obviously I am complaining a little bit, but I wouldn’t want you to think that this has in any way affected my natural sense of festival.  In fact, I’d like to share one last little treat with you before we all find ourselves staring into the cold, harsh dawn of 2014. To whit, I finally got around to uploading my recent DJ set in support of the mighty Public Service Broadcasting and their triumphant courduroy-and-balloon-splattered sold-out homecoming extravaganza at The Forum in Kentish Town last month. It’s been hanging around the Foggy archives for a few weeks now, but what with more pressing matters such as the preparation of a technically demanding and logistically ambitious performance at major arts venue (complete with malfunctioning tape machines) to be dealt with first, it rather got swept under the rug. Well, that rug has now been firmly shaken down. Don’t get me wrong, those affable PSB fellows Willgoose and Wrigglesworth did as magnificent a job as ever, but I think most reasonable people would agree that it was the warm-up DJ that everyone had really come to see and the results of that momentous night can now become my Christmas gift to the world:

Such humility.

And it’s not just me getting into the festive spirit either. The greatest band on earth, shouty London funksters Chips For The Poor have just released a Christmas single entitled Rinsell The Tin-Cell, which is available completely for free here. Obviously I don’t have to tell you it’s up to their usual completely awesome standard. Get downloading!

That’s probably enough festivity to be getting on with. All fake-humility aside, it really has been the most incredible year, crammed full of weird and wonderful highlights. I’m aware that tradition dictates I should attempt some 2013 retrospective, but frankly we’d be here all night. Let’s just say that whether crouched in a flooded basement in Belgradea or on top of a cliff in Northumbria listening to foghorns; or at the bottom of the ocean trying to create the realistic howling of a shoal of imprisoned fish (thanks Radio4!), it’s been a year of fascinating sounds aplenty. My thanks goes out as it always does to my amazing collection of friends, colleagues, comrades, fellow diggers, odd-balls and obsessives for the support and encouragement you’ve shown along the way. I consider myself very lucky to know so many dedicated and passionate individuals and I’d like to wish each and every one of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I can’t wait to show you some of the exciting things I’ve got planned for 2014!

In the meantime, does anyone know what colour running shoes somebody called Zola Budd apparently wears? It’s for a yellow wedgie, if you’ll pardon the expression…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Now that we’ve had a full week to let the dust settle, Howlround would like to say a huge thank you to all of our friends who came down to Kings Place on Sunday 8th December to watch us quite literally play the building. It was great to finally bring to fruition a project several months in the making, and the feedback and support we received have been hugely encouraging.  Particular thanks must go to our official photographer Lisa Hack, who took all of these amazing pictures and asked for nothing more than a pint of shandy and a pat on the back. She received both.

Highlights of the performance itself will doubtless appear on these pages once we’ve had a chance to go through it all properly and pull out our favourite moments. In the meantime, here’s an extract from one of our demos we put together beforehand in preparation, this one made entirely from a single recording of a Kings Place door handle. Altered rather drastically during the final performance, it’s presented here for your delectation, in it’s original unmolested form; along with a significantly accelerated version of our specially prepared stage visuals:

There’s plenty more where that came from, I can assure you. Our thanks once again to promoter, Esther Ainsworth, lovely sound engineer Carina and my own dear Father, Mr. The Fog Snr,  who was severely  reprimanded by the ushers for his attempts to smuggle bottles of sparkling water onto the stage. Let this be a lesson to us all.

With our ushers, sparkling water and radiophonic old-world charm, Howlround is fast becoming a decidedly classy and distinctive affair. By the time of our next performance at Cafe Oto in January we’re even hoping to have acquired a butler. Fingers crossed…

It’s official: Howlround will be at Kings Place on Sunday 8th December, unveiling a brand-new and unique performance of secret sounds recorded in the bowels of this gleaming and futuristic structure, situated on the banks of the Canal in the recently modernised Kings Cross area of Central London.  Tickets and event details here. There’s also a Facebook Event Page for those social-networkingly-inclined amongst you.

The press release: Howlround will be unveiling a semi-improvised composition/performance played on reel-to-reel tape machines using the ‘hidden’ sounds of the building itself and the analogue tape manipulation techniques of musique concrete to create an alternative portrait of the space, exposing hidden and mysterious depths. With all artificial effects and additional reverb strictly forbidden, the raw sounds will be allowed to tell their own story, often becoming impossibly strange and otherworldly within a few passes of a tape loop across a play-head, creating a spatial exploration at times akin to an aural séance. 

It should also be quite a spectacle as we desperately try to get our increasingly temperamental vintage Revox tape machines to do our bidding live on an actual stage in front of a seated audience without imploding spectacularly. It’s our most ambitious work yet and will NOT be repeated, as well as potentially being the final outing for our increasingly fragile dinosaur collection, so make sure you catch it.

For anyone unfamiliar with Kings Place, it’s a multi-purpose labyrinth of a place consisting of performance spaces, galleries, a rather classy restaurant and lots of office space belonging to The Guardian and The Observer (which are newspapers). Armed with nothing but a hand-held recorder and a contact mic, Howlround were granted access all areas and recorded everything from pianos being moved, harpsichords being tuned, sculptures creaking, wine glasses, metal poles, mic stands, squeaky doors, a leather sofa and a sandwich toaster from the cafe. We shall be playing these sounds and nothing else inside Hall Two friom 4pm. At the time of writing everything is in its early stages but is sounding most beguiling. There will also be an interactive session after the main performance, where we’ll be playing with sounds donated by you, THE FANS. Can you think of a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon in December? Nope, me neither.

Rather a hurried post this evening as I have been given strict instructions to ensure tonight’s Cottage Pie doesn’t burn and it’s rather tricky to write and watch for signs of imminent crust-browning simultaneously. So I’ll keep it mercifully brief and begin by drawing your attention to a decidedly postive review of our recent performance at The Kirkcaldy Testing Museum (along with Oscillatorial Binnage) in this month’s issue of The Wire:

A great big thank you to Louise Gray for her support and encouraging words. Hopefully this bodes well for our performance at Kings Place on Sunday December 8th, where we’ll be unveiling a brand new and exclusive one-time-only live performance, featuring 100% previously unheard material. A full HOUR’s worth, providing our machines (and our audience!) can take it. There’s a Facebook Event Page here for those of you so inclined.

In other news I’m very pleased to have made a small contribution to the first issue of a new digital zine entitled Wyrd Daze, the brainchild of writer, musician and blogger Leigh Wright, often known as The Ephemeral Man. An Englishman abroad with a finger firmly on the pulse, Wyrd Daze Issue 1 is literally crammed to bursting with brand new and exclusive content, including writing, music, artwork and film, all available in one hefty-yet-managable download.

For my own contribution I’ve put together a 40-odd minute Wyrdmix which is included amongst many other delights in the download. It’s perhaps a departure from the nature of my usual mixtapes, but does consist largely of current tracks that I’m very excited about, with an extra smattering of older tracks that I haven’t stopped being very excited about yet. Other than that there’s video, short films, photography, comics, illustration, stories a 5-track EP of exclusive tracks from Wyrd-Daze approved artists and  lots more besides. It’s basically an embarrassment of riches for a paltry sum, and who honestly wouldn’t like a little more of the former and a little less of the latter in these straightened times?

As Leigh himself puts it ‘There’s a great community of independent artists creating extraordinary things, and Wyrd Daze is a way to bring some of this work together as a communal celebration of this creativity. The zine is available via a subscription of 5 Canadian dollars, which is about £3, which is a very small amount considering the wealth of content in the Wyrd Daze download, and the aim is to raise a revenue with subscriptions with which to pay artists for original work for the zine – a worthy cause, I feel’.

I agree as I’m sure you will. For those of you hungry to learn more, Leigh has put together an online Sampler of Issue 1 and the accompanying Podcast. He’s also very keen to source all kinds of material for future issues, be it writing, drawing, artwork, music, video, and is encouraging submissions via the Wyrd Daze website. As of yet all proceeds from subscriptions are to be ploughed back into the magazine, but Leigh is confident that as word spreads he will be able to generate enough revenue from subscriptions to properly remunerate his contributors.  In the meantime some considerable exposure in some talented company is hardly something to be sniffed at.

Speaking of sniffing at things, I think I’m going to have to sign off and go put that Cottage Pie out. Mumsie will not be pleased…

(I was going to entitle this post ‘A Doc-Who-Mentary’ before a sense of pun-related shame got the better of me.)

I’m sure it won’t have escaped your attention that there is currently an awful lot of excitement being generated about the imminent half-century of a well-known televisual doctor. Therefore it’s most right and fitting that ABC Radio in Australia should unveil a brand new  documentary on the work of the organisation that gave the programme it’s world famous theme tune. Which is just as well because that’s exactly what they’ve done:

Produced by Iain Wilson of FOTW Audio Productions and presented by Robbie Buck, That Dr Who Sound! is a brand new documentary produced for ABC Radio’s ‘Into The Music’ programme that explores the impact of the Workshop on modern electronic music, as well as mainstream pop and rock sounds.

Generations of kids – not only in the United Kingdom, but abroad – seated in front of that perennial babysitter, television, would hear these strange Radiophonic sounds, the impact of which would take years to unfold, and in the most interesting ways! That Dr Who Sound! explores these interesting relationships, as well as hearing stories of the legendary women of the Workshop; the mystery of Pink Floyd’s disappearing Doctor Who theme; the talking walls of Bush House; and how Genesis of the Daleks inadvertently helped with the birth of techno.

Featuring the music of Pink Floyd, Belbury Poly, Pet Shop Boys, Howlround, Other Places, Peter Howell, Dalek I, Ray Cathode, the Delia Darlings, and Model 500, as well as original interviews with workshop members, music writers, and the “descendants” themselves – musicians creating music in the spirit of the workshop.

As a “descendant” of sorts myself, or at least someone who works for the BBC while wearing his radiophonic colours with pride, I was interviewed for the programme via satellite and, thanks to the time difference, at some ungodly hour in  the morning. We talked rather sleepily about the genesis of the Ghosts Of Bush project and ruminated on the effect that hearing strange and futuristic sounds at tea-time on Saturdays had on generations of children the world over. (Then I bombarded him with youtube links of classic Public Information Films for two days solid, but that’s another matter).

‘I knew of the Radiophonic Workshop because I had loved Doctor Who as a kid’, writes Iain in the programme notes, ‘and had bought the Doctor Who theme on cassette when I was twelve. On the B-Side was an upbeat remix that a friend and I would do robot dances to!  I soon realised that this would make a great radio documentary, because of all of the music that was involved, and so I started contacting people for interviews – and then all of a sudden, earlier this year, the anniversary of Doctor Who rolled around, and that was it: I had a deadline!’

Created with all the enthusiasm that the above paragraph suggests, That Dr Who Sound! has been made to coincide with the Timelord’s 50th Anniversary and will be broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Into the Music program on Saturday the 9th November at 4pm and then repeated on Monday the 11th at 9pm Australian time. Iain has also very kindly worked out the local broadcast times for other parts of the world so that you and I don’t have to:

Australian times:
Saturday 9th November – 4 pm
repeating Monday night 11th November – 9 pm

United Kingdom times:
Saturday 9th November – 5 am (missed it already!)
repeating Monday 11th – 10 am

United States – West Coast:
Friday 8th November – 9 pm
repeating Monday 11th – 2 am

United States – East Coast
Friday 8th – 12 midnight
repeating Monday 11th – 2 am

Or failing that just cut straight to the chase and stream or download it here. There’s an events page on Facebook for those of you down with that sort of thing.

Congratulations and three cheers to Iain Wilson and Robbie Buck as well as Executive Producer Cathy Peters and Sound Engineer Mark Don for a most enjoyable hour. For more of Iain’s work visit his website here and follow him on Soundcloud. Apart from producing a fine body of material, he’s living proof as to just how far youthful robot dancing can take you!

On a similar note, Radiophonic aficionados are warmly invited to check out The Lighter Side Of Concrete, the new album by Bristolian producer Jez Butler.  Inspired by the distinctive work of Workshop legend John Baker, it’s an album of instrumentals composed entirely using domestic objects such as bottles, glasses, electrical appliances, the human body and a single guitar string.

While wearing its influences quite clearly, it’s a long way from mere pastiche, though it is quite remarkable how closely Jez has captured the Baker sound, particularly his patented ‘croaky frog’ bass notes. The album rounds off with three electronic demos which are so close to the sound of the BBC Schools Programming interlude music of the 1980s that I keep expecting  Sheelagh Gilbey to turn up and start lecturing me on the Bayeux Tapestry or something (this is a good thing – she was my first schoolboy crush). Why not visit Jez’s website and get yourself a copy? It will certainly appeal to fans of the likes of Ghost Box’s Belbury Poly, and indeed features on their latest Radio Belbury podcast. Surely no more convincing is necessary?

Oh, Doctor, Oh, Sheelagh, where did my childhood go?

A few week’s ago I was approached by Cardiff’s Sŵn Festival Radio who asked if I would be interested in curating a programme for the ‘Experimental hour’, part of their week-long transmissions on 87.7FM (and online) for this year’s Sŵn Festival.  I didn’t need to be asked twice, particularly as fellow curators included Messers Robin Rimbaud and Connor Walsh aka ‘Scanner‘ and ‘that In The Dark chap’. The Festival may now be over but the archive of transmissions has now been put up on Mixcloud to be enjoyed and savoured FOREVER AND EVER, so I thought you’d appreciate a link.

As with life in general, the hour can be divided roughly in two, the first half bouncy and upbeat and the second rather more sinister. For all the amusing clippped voices speaking to you from the antique past, the moment Ken Nordine apparently phones himself up you just know that you’re in for a decidedly spooky time. There’s some misappropriated instructional recordings left over from my recent ‘Looking Good, Feeling Great‘ series for Resonance FM, an extract by Oscillatorial Binnage of an amplified Baptist Church and the hour ends with an exclusive 15-minute work entitled ‘The Foggy Transmitter’. It’s my salute to the secretive world of Numbers Stations documented so beautifully by Irdial’s Conet Project recordings, to Guglielmo Marconi‘s pioneering radio experiments at nearby Lavernock Point in 1897; and finally to the very modern development of online speech synthesisers and language translation engines, perhaps the latest ripple created by that enormous splash the great Italian inventor made on these shores 116 years ago (if you’ll forgive a clumsy metaphor – and a very long sentence). I was originally going to try and pass the whole thing off as a fake recording of a Welsh Numbers Station, but quickly realised nobody would be fooled for a second.

On a sombre note I’d like to dedicate this hour to fellow doyen of the mixing desk and expert speaker of Welsh, Mr. David March who provided me with some pointers when looking for Welsh language recordings and then suddenly and tragically died in Snowdonia on the week it was transmitted.  The World Service has lost a warm smile and a firm arm on the tiller. We will miss him greatly.

Another recent development I completely forgot to mention – new Howlround album Secret Songs Of Savamala featured as part of Monocle’s Culture Programme  a couple of weeks ago. You can hear the interview here, alongside a full hour of other stimulating stuff including Mark Kermode, Laura Cantrell and Massive Attack. What distinguished company I keep these days, albeit in ‘pre-recorded playlist’ form.  And then that affable fellow Strictly Kev of DJ Food fame went and reviewed it on his blog as well!

Lovely new record by @RobinTheFog – beautiful, haunting soundscapes recorded in a basement in Belgrade http://t.co/nRqyQQFdY3 v. ltd vinyl

— DJ Food (@djfood) October 24, 2013

I haven’t been this excited since I was “book-ended” by Cliff Richard and that Jar Of Hearts woman, the name of whom I can’t be bothered to Google. I did have to Google Marconi’s first name, however, and use an online translation engine to work out how to pronounce it: ‘Goolie-Elmo’, apparently. Sounds horrific…

As a child of the 1980s and an apparent member of what some are still calling the ‘Hauntology’ movement, it would hardly come as a surprise if I were to ruminate on the part played by Public Information Films in my cultural awakening. Indeed if you grew up in Britain at any point during the past forty years, there’s a chance that a number of these classic commercial-length dramas would have made a lasting impression on your psyche as well.

For those who are reading these words from afar or those who actually spent their childhoods engaged in wholesome outdoor pursuits in spite of the dangers, a classic PIF scenario would generally involve some young upstart in drainpipe trousers spotting an abandoned football in an electricity substation and advising his young upstart friends of his intentions to retrieve it and return a couple of uneventful minutes hence to instigate a kick-around. The only difficulty is that to get to said substation he has to cross a railway line, a busy intersection, a frozen pond and a sinister looking man brandishing sweets and puppies. Got the idea?

Aimed largely though not exclusively at children and screened during commercial breaks of the 1970s and 80s, they broadcast dire warnings about the manifold dangers of ever leaving the sofa (though in hindsight a few well-placed warnings about the implications of our increasingly sedentary lifestyles on our health might have proved more useful). Suffice to say that several generations of British children grew up just a little bit afraid of everything. For my part, the sight of a pylon still conjures up the sound of a sinisterly warbling modular synthesizer, while my fear of escalators persisted for years into my childhood after watching this as a toddler:

Anyway, the cultural legacy of these short films and their influence on artists such as Broadcast and labels such as Ghost Box (‘Nuclear Substation PIF’ from Mind How You Go by The Advisory Circle is a particularly fine example) has been documented many times before by people better qualified than me to do so. Why, then, am I mentioning all this now? It’s because last week I made a thrilling discovery. Public Information Films are BACK! And thanks to the involvement of some key players from the UK’s grime scene, they’ve been given a streetwise new twist!

Thank heavens that train wasn’t carrying a knife.

Previous generations might have had Alvin Stardust and John Pertwee escorting children to-and-from the Ice Cream van, but our modern yout-dem (if I may be so bold as to use the term) require a little more bang for their buck. Hence we find ourselves confronted with an expensive-looking sound system in a dimly-lit aircraft hangar, some synthesized heartbeats, an edgy voiceover with lots of glottal stops and a smattering of firm handshakes. Not a single kite to be found. This is how we roll in the 21st century.

While I’m very pleased to see the genre return, it’s hard to imagine just what kind of tragedy this film is intended to anticipate. Call me unsympathetic, but if you’re hare-brained enough to stand in the exact centre of eight inter-connecting railway lines then you deserve everything you’re going to get. More to the point, is this track design based on an actual, existing part of our railway infrastructure? If so, I think we should be worrying less about the safety of one law-breaking deliquent and more about the hundreds of innocent lives that will be lost in the event of a monumentally horrendous-though-admittedly spectacular eight-train pile-up catastrophe.

But returning to the matter in hand, both Wretch 32 and George The Poet fail entirely predictably and are killed to bits, though as the narrator thoughtfully reminds us, this was a controlled test, and therefore not quite as fatal as the real thing. To borrow another Hip Hop metaphor, they are slain virtually, like when MCs battle-rap.  ‘I thought this was going to be easy’ offers Wretch, who had clearly been operating thus-far under the misconception that Network Rail was making this film to promote  some kind of extreme form of trainspotting.  [I’m] not bragging or anything’, he confides, ‘but […] they told me I got 97% hearing which is like… the hearing of a brand new species‘.

No need to worry about bragging, Wretch, that’s a perfectly fair statement and only underlines your modesty and humility in defeat. You are, as your appropriately-titled hit single ‘Unorthodox’ reminds us, a new kind of restlessly creative genius fearlessly taking Hip Hop to epic new heights by sampling the catchy hook of an already very popular song by The Stone Roses and layering your pop-rap visions over the top. Using other people’s already very popular tracks to make your own hits is the kind of staggeringly original, game-changing idea that hardly anyone else in rap has EVER DONE, and the term ‘brand new species’ barely even scratches the surface.

Seriously, if a minor celebrity with a major label deal and THE HEARING OF A GOD can’t play safely on the railways, what hope do the rest of us have?  It’s a sobering lesson, though I must say I would have liked to have seen a third round of this test, where both rappers were asked to identify where the train was coming from and then forced to wait twenty bloody minutes for it to show up. Or perhaps we could programme some sort of  ‘First Capital Connect Couldn’t Run A Sodding Tap’ feature and cancel the whole thing at the last moment. I fear that such a scenario would be a much more accurate simulation of the state of our nation’s railways in the twenty-first century.

Minor criticisms such as these aside, this is an interesting new direction for the Public Information Films and a worthy addition to the canon.  And in the spirit of progress I’ve helpfully taken the liberty of coming up with some fresh new takes on classic public information films,  re-designed to appeal to the modern urban youth of today.  Any production companies interesting in discussing these ideas further are advised to send a cash-stuffed envelope to the usual address:

• Lethal Bizzle neglects to don gloves while handling a sparkler (that’s a firework, not street-slang for jewellery)
• Chipmunk leaves his Chip-pan unattended while polishing his floor and then puts a rug on it.
• Example neglects to stand still on an escalator and makes an Example of himself. (very clever, that one)
• Wiley, attempting to return to his ‘Eski-Boy’ roots, acts irresponsibly on a frozen pond
• Dappy from N-Dubz attempts to rescue a frisbee from a substation (with surprisingly graphic-yet-cheering results).
• Tinchy Strider goes kite flying near a pylon, while an elderly Bernard Cribbins looks on from the tree-tops, concerned..

Despite all this talk of new directions, it’s worth noting that incorporating Hip Hop into public safety announcements is not quite as recent a development as one might assume.  Marvel at this classic 1980s PIF in which Grandmaster Flash & The Sugarhill Gang’s grim ode to the violence, poverty and lawlessness of 1980s New York is re-appropriated to soundtrack little Jonny’s close encounter with a Vauxhall Astra.

It’s like a jungle sometimes.

Sadly the movement then took a wrong turn by investing in the briefly hip New Jack Swing sounds of the early 90s and serving up this turgid little stinker, an ode to the education system’s obligation to keep it’s charges fed that even at the time (and as part of the campaign’s intended demographic) I considered one of the most poorly-judged attempts at getting down with the kids ever.  Even Kurtis Blow would turn his nose up at this:

Clearly nobody involved in this nationwide campaign had ever been to Belah Primary, a school whose canteen was so bad that they were forced to bulldoze the entire place. Even incorporating a Kool & The Gang drum break while wearing a baseball cap sideways – usually the ultimate youth password – fails to convince. Did you notice the kid in the Hawaiian shirt who, unlike his table-mates, fails to meet your eye in the freeze-frame at the end? It’s because he knows that he has just implicated himself and all his friends in the DEATH OF HIP HOP.

‘Ghetto pass revoked’ as Blackalicious might have put it.  No wonder it’s taken them over twenty years to have another go.

In closing I thought I’d share this highly amusing escalator safety video I found on youtube. It’s not quite a public information film but it is interesting to watch how our stateside cousins handle similar subject matter and to speculate as to how anxious the video editor was to try out the new vision mixer he got for Christmas.  Groovy soundtrack too.

An illuminating video, but nobody seems to have thought of covering the dangers of mounting an escalator backwards in order to film the person behind you, or indeed allowing out-going scenes to float out of the window, where they could pose a danger to pedestrians.  While watching, I am struck by two thoughts. The first is that if I had only had access to this video as a toddler directly after being so horrified at the crushing of that wellington boot in the UK PIF mentioned earlier, I might have been spared years of nightmares  The second is the realisation that perhaps America’s rap community should make their own railway safety video? Partly because of Hip Hop culture’s long record of trespassing on the lines in order to ‘bomb whole cars’ with their graffiti tags, but mostly because having recently read a rather unpleasant interview with angry narcissist Chris Brown, I reckon putting eight trains on top of him would improve the gaiety of the nation no-end.

Well, that about does it for now. If anybody wants me I’ll be at the shunting yard. It’s a stupid name for a pub but they have a good jukebox…

Presented for your approval, some sounds and images from last week’s top secret Howlround performance at Southwark’s Kirkcaldy Testing Museum. Top secret in the sense that I hadn’t actually been informed we were playing until the night before, which gave me little time to whip up my usual promotional storm.  Short notice, perhaps, but the chance to play alongside the behemoth machines housed inside this most fascinating Victorian testing site was irresistible. And that’s before we even mention our supporting of event hosts Oscillatorial Binnage as they prepared a very special site-specific performance.

As you can perhaps hear from this short extract, it proved to be one of our more ‘eventful’ sets, largely due to the mic stands we use to keep the loops taught proving less than stable on the uneven floorboards and the fourth Revox that serves as an echo unit proving inexplicably silent despite all our efforts at sound-checking. However, when you’re performing live improvised tape-collages using forty year-old reel-to-reel machines and an increasingly battered selection of loops, them’s the breaks; and the response from the surprisingly numerous crowd was most positive.  Among them was music critic Louise Gray who has written some very complimentary things about us as well as uploading some photos of the event on her blog, ahead of a reported review in next month’s Wire magazine:

…[C]an I also plug Robin The Fog and Chris Weaver’s Howlround’s two site-specific albums, Ghosts of Bush and, released last month, The Secret Sounds of Savamala, in all their strange and wonderful glory. They are the sonic equivalent of Rachel Whiteread’s casts of empty spaces.  

Anyway, before our heads get too big after such an accolade,  please enjoy some video highlights courtesy of cameraman Tommo and his Three Trousers blog. I particularly enjoyed the slow-motion bit at the end where our performance appears to have left the audience glassy-eyed and shell-shocked:

After we’d finished and bundled our sorry-looking loops back into the various Rover Biscuit Assortment tins they’d arrived in, it was time for the main act. Oscillatorial Binnage is/are Dan Wilson, Toby Clarkson, Fari Bradley and  of course my Howlround counter-part Chris Weaver (though I still can’t quite work out which one of us he’s moon-lighting). For this one-off performance, the group presented a series of sonic works exploring and utilising The Kirkaldy Testing Museum machines as electro-acoustic instruments. Piano strings were stretched, wood blocks crushed, metal grilles vibrated and everyday materials placed under extreme stresses to draw out their unusual musical properties. The highlight of the performance was the amplified action of the 450-tonne Kirkaldy machine itself going to work on a plank of wood while a well-placed contact mic captured the sound of it’s demise. It was loud, abrasive and really quite thrilling. It’s probably easier just to show you, so we turn once again to the documentary skills of Tommo:

I certainly can’t remember the last time a room full of people got this excited about wood. Thanks very much to the Merge Festival for helping to organise such an unusual event,  Joe for these rather groovy photographs, and to the good folk of the Kirkcaldy Testing Museum for having us. They’re a registered charity run by volunteers and surviving entirely on donations, so do please dig deep and help preserve this fascinating piece of our industrial heritage. Then perhaps we can come back and play again next year!  We could even find out what would happen if we subjected our quater-inch tape to such tensioning experiments?!  A very short performance and a lots of angry demands for refunds, I’ll wager…

It’s hard to believe that after months of planning, cutting, splicing, and editing, swearing at photoshop, agonising over test pressings and pestering friends and trusted advisors for assurances that this whole project wasn’t a gigantic mistake; the vinyl LP Secret Songs Of Savamala is finally out today.

Well, it was actually yesterday if we’re going to be picky, as I’ve only just got back from my inaugural visit to the  Post Office.  No time to rest on those laurels, the album has incredibly sold more than half of it’s stock on pre-order alone and today has been spent shipping freshly minted vinyl all over the world, from London to Dundee, The USA,  Portugal, Norway, Germany, Poland and even a house on Eureka Terrace, which sounds like a truly fantastic place to live.  Unfortunately I failed to take into account that it was  pension day and so performed these tasks to a backdrop of continuous tutting from a queue of griping oldsters  that had transformed into a sort of depressing conga line by the time I’d got my first consignment safely through the hatch. Negotiations are currently well underway to arrange some proper distribution and let the old folk alone, but for the time being it’s just me and my trolley. So if your record doesn’t turn up immediately, please exercise patience. I’ll be sending the download edition to all my customers in the next few days, so that should give you something to listen to during your impatient vigil by the letterbox.

If your vigil happens to be occurring close to the internet, I’d also like to draw your attention to the above video. You’ll have noticed it contains highlights from Howlround’s performance at the FON Festival back in July which was sent to us by festival organisers The Octopus Collective last week. See how earnest we look and marvel at the skill with which we handle those clunky great reels – though thankfully the bit where I somehow get tangled has been edited out.  They’ve asked us to promote the video through our ususal channels and wagered us that we can’t beat ‘reigning FON Vimeo Champion’ Hildur Gudnadottir. I HAVE to win that bet. There’s no money, I just really want to be a champion at something. Please watch it ten times. We also have an audio clip from the same performance for added value:

Oh, and did we mention Howlround are currently looking for venues and promoters who would be interested in booking us throughout 2014? Our turn last week at the London Analogue Festival got us hungry for more! Email your list of demands  to robinthefog at gmail dot com and perhaps follow the UK’s only improvised tape-loop quartet on Twitter while you’re at it.

Right, back to the Post Office first thing. Best turn in…