Resonance 104.4FM – Robin The Fog

Carry On Up The Jungle

DJ Defcore

On this week’s Near Mint show on Resonance FM, Hannah Brown and I continue our search for treasure in the ridiculously overpriced Jungle. On last week’s show, as you will recall, we played a mere handful of oldskool hardcore and jungle tracks and ran up a staggering bill of £2097. On this week’s part two you’ll be excited to learn we be push back the boundaries of plausibility even further! Can you guess our grand total without peeking? Would you pay this much for a stack of rare white labels? Would you play them on the radio at tea time on a Tuesday? Would anybody? I was really hoping they would re-schedule this week’s show to run just after Calling All Pensioners, but my appeals fell on freshly deaf ears.

Another dose of Neat Mint next week. For now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to re-mortgage my flat. It’s rented, but I doubt the landlady will notice…

Near Mint: Clap Your Tentacles For DJ Tom Central!

An absolutely classic Near Mint show on Resonance 104.4FM this week, featuring a trip through the record box of voracious digger Tom Central. Resident DJ of long-running club night Soundcrash, one half of the Shapes Of Rhythm duo and the man behind the rather super Keep Up! label, his collection is literally groaning with killer library, Bollywood and psychedelic jams from years spent scouring record shops across the globe for the rarest and strangest vinyl – that is now threatening to take over his house. We’re very happy he let us have a rummage – but also extremely jealous. Have a listen and you will be too!

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Near Mint: Jennifer Lucy Allan Special

Please enjoy the latest edition of the Near Mint show on Resonance 104.4FM, featuring a field trip to sunny Southend to visit this week’s special guest Jennifer Lucy Allan. Writer, journalist, former staffer at The Wire magazine, co-runner of the rather super Arc Light Editions label, qualified carpenter and the first person ever to undertake a PHD on Foghorns, it should be immediately obvious why we asked if we could have a rummage through her collection. And what a rummage it was…

It’s a pretty heady brew she’s served up for us, featuring everything from a Japanese record on the subject of earthquakes, super-rare Finnish jazz, 60s Bollywood, Pierre Henry’s magic space pop and even some forthcoming Arc Light Editions treats from the legendary Joan La Barabara. Huge thanks to Jen for a great show and you can find this show as well as all previous episodes in the Near Mint series on my Mixcloud page. I rather think that future guests are going to have to work jolly hard to keep up the standard we’ve maintained on the series so far!

And finally, thanks to Ben Soundhog for digging out this stimulating visual accompaniment to the show’s opening track:

Near Mint And OST: Olfactory Excellence vs. Baking Bad

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A double-bill of Resonance radio treasures for you today. First off is the latest episode of the adventures in compulsive record-collecting series Near Mint, presented by myself and fellow obsessive hoarder Hannah Brown. This week Hannah take the controls to bring you a Synaesthesia special – to whit, a mix of ‘delightful smelling’ tracks – that is, it’s the music itself that smells nice rather than the vinyl it’s pressed on. Synaesthesia is a neurological condition where, in some cases, music can evoke ‘phantom smells’ for the listener, and Hannah, being something of an expert on the subject, has carefully curated a playlist of the highest olfactory excellence. It’s probably not a coincidence they sound pretty good too. Good work, Hannah Brown. Going to be very poor tracking down my own copies of these gems:

The Pastels – One Wild Moment (Stereolab Mix) (Up Records)
Happy Meals – Altered Images (Night School)
Brooks & O’Hagan – Calibair (Ghost Box)
Jonti – Nightshift in Blue (Stones Throw)
Jane Weaver – It’s Not Over Yet (Bird)
Vermont – Übersprung (Kompakt)

Secondly, I should also thank Alan Gubby of Buried Treasure for joining me on last Saturday’s OST Show in Jonny Trunk’s absence and for bringing in such a fine selection of music, to all the listeners who rang in for the competition with their appallingly bad puns and to Ghost Box for letting us give the Hintermass album it’s ‘world exclusive first play’ (allegedly). The full three hours are available here in two parts, warts and all, exactly as they went out, which is quite a sacrifice for me – I usually don’t let anything out the gate until I’ve buffed it to a high sheen. You’ll hear an unreleased “John Baker” cue (we’re 99& certain!). lots of falling about laughing occasionally leading to coughing fits, a couple of slices of dead air you could drive a bus through, and the unfortunate use of the term ‘eclectic’; but also some truly extraordinary and sublime music. Kettle and earphones on…

On a similar note, Jon Brooks of the above Brooks & O’Hagan and Hintermass, but also of The Advisory Circle too has very kindly donating a signed test pressing of his solo LP Shapwick to the Resonance FM fundraising auction. An LP that was released in a very limited edition back in 2013, sold out within minutes and then a repress sold even faster. At the time of writing you have five days left to enter this auction or face paying £65 on Discogs for a copy. Once again, all proceeds go towards keeping the greatest radio station on Earth transmitting for another year. Worthy cause, great LP. Get with it:

Portland, Delaware, Portland

Hello. Firstly, for those of you who missed this week’s jolly marvellous Resonance FM takeover of In The Dark at The Social in London’s Little Portland Street, you will be gratified to know that you can at least enjoy some of the very fine discs that I took the liberty of spinning. Library funk rubs up alongside musique concréte and west coast psychedelia and even a couple of cuts from our Delaware Road friends. Have a listen here:

Speaking of the Delaware Road, very excited to announce that after months of preparation, the launch party for this most splendid album finally takes place in Reading this Saturday. Tickets are available here and you can enjoy live performances from Howlround, The Twelve Hour Foundation (whose track ‘Sun and Air‘ features on the above mixtape and remains a thing of wonder – as does their recent ‘Macaroni Cheese‘ 7″), the excellent Revbjelde (wonder what that name’s worth in Scrabble?) amongst others, alongside DJ sets from that affable scoundrel Jonny Trunk and Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne and The Séance. Your ticket (still available here) also gets you a free download of this magnificent 19-track compilation on Buried Treasure Recordings (although it’s a mere £6 on CD anyway, which seems ridiculously good value) and a free poster. Oh, and my Dad will be there. Can’t argue with any of that, really, can you? Anyway, don’t just take my word for it, here’s your host for the evening Dolly Dolly adding some further intrigue:

Following that, if any of my US friends happen to be in Portland, OR on Monday 16th, I would very much like you to join me at The Lovecraft, alongside the excellent Gray Columns and Offret. Further details here, and let’s hope the machines survive the journey…

Gray Columns have just uploaded a new track and we’ve been listening to it an awful lot here at Fog Mansions while waiting for our gear to warm up. Have a listen yourself, it’s really quite awesome:

There’s also talk of Howlround and Gray Columns shows in San Francisco, but I’m still crossing the ‘t’s and dotting the lower-case ‘j’s on that one. Fingers crossed…

In The Dark Meets Resonance FM – Monday 9th At The Social

Very pleased to announce that two of my favourite organisations Resonance FM and In The Dark Radio are coming together once again to present a special evening at The Social in Little Portland Street this coming Monday.

The Resonance team will be presenting a hand-picked selection of curiosities from it’s vast (and conspicuously well-maintained!!) archive and The Resonance Radio Orchestra will be performing a new work written by the station’s commander-in-chief Ed Baxter. And I’ll be providing a DJ set of Radiophonic pop, BBC Sound Effects and outer space songs in-between. It’s promises to be quite an affair. Tickets available here. Come on down – what else is going to be as good on a Monday night in November, quite frankly?

‘Robin is the creator of one of ITD’s all-time favourite shorts “Train-Tracker” and long-time engineer for Jonny Trunk’s OST Show on Resonance FM and one half of the reel-to-reel tape loop duo Howlround’, advises the event’s web-page. More recently, I also gave a talk on Radiophonics a year or two ago at their marvellous Invisible Picture Palace, a listening centre that was installed temporarily in a greenhouse in the grounds of the old Power Station at Wapping, a marvellous gallery and art-space that has since been forced to join the ranks of similar London cultural spaces in making way for yet more luxury apartments. Oh, London, can you no longer even toss the arts community a greenhouse?

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to hanging out with my In The Dark and Resonance friends once again. And while I’m not one to rake over past glories (not yet, anyway), I thought I’d dig that piece out one last time. I figured, what the hell, there’s probably intelligent life on a distant planet that I haven’t played it to yet!

Come Splice With Me / Come OST: Special Prizes For 2015 Resonance FM Fundraiser

It’s #FundRaisingWeek once again at Resonance FM, which means another seven days of special broadcasts, one-off events and lots and lots of highly desirable items up for grabs in this year’s Ebay auction, with all money raised helping to keep the greatest radio station in the world on air for yet another year. And in these straitened times they need your help more than ever. So, what’s up for grabs in 2015? Here’s my own contribution:

‘A Howl-To Guide’: A Day Of Tape-Loop Creation With Robin The Fog

“A glorious morning spent searching for extraordinary noises in ordinary places in the company of sound artist and composer Robin The Fog, followed by an instructive afternoon dubbing those sounds onto magnetic tape and creating and editing wondrous tape loop compositions, with the results to be broadcast on Resonance FM at a later date. Recording and editing equipment, including tape machines and razor blades, will be provided and the lucky winner(s) will be sent home with a tape spool of their handiwork”.

Speaking personally, a day spent doing this sort of thing is my idea of heaven, and I’m hoping lots of you will agree at least enough to make a decent bid. Further details (including an important disclaimer against razor-related loss of thumbs or other injuries) plus innumerable other delightful items available at the Special Resonance FM Fundraising website here. But the vast majority of you who require no more persuading to support this worthiest of causes can simply whizz straight over to the item’s Ebay page and BID NOW!

Can there a more fun way to help @ResonanceFM #FundRaisingWeek than spending the day making tape loops with me? Nope! http://t.co/OYvqrvPgk3

— Robin The Fog (@RobinTheFog) February 9, 2015

Please make the bids nice and high, because 100% of the money raised goes straight to Resonance, and of course because playing with tape is tremendous fun and I’m reliably informed that I’m reasonably affable company. If this workshop ends up being even half as profitable as last year’s ‘Howlround Haunts Your Home’ project, the lucky winner is in for a very enjoyable experience indeed:

Another item currently up for grabs is an old favourite – ‘Play OST For Me‘, in which the highest bidder wins the chance to present their very own bespoke edition of The OST Show, with all their favourite soundtracks and every whim indulged by that redoubtable broadcaster, smutty raconteur and general man of letters Jonny Trunk, who has promised to be on his very best behaviour for the occasion. This item always proves surprisingly popular, so GET BIDDING QUICKLY! I shall be popping up on this Saturday’s show to promote both this and the aforementioned tape editing workshop, plus we’re also expecting a visit from the brilliant Pete ‘Monsterism’ Fowler; who has very kindly donated this completely awesome original work to the cause:

My sources tell me there may also be a four-year-old guest on the show, but he is purely there for entertainment value and most certainly NOT up for auction. More details on all of this as we get them and I might even be able to shoe-horn in some new tape music by Howlround that’s currently in production. Unless Jonny pulls that face again. You know the one: