Kicking off today We Are Collective are hosting a three day event in Andover. Tomorrow from 1-6pm I have a stall selling Dirty Demos and Amps Against Trend junk, and Dead Wood / Phantom Heron Seas will making practice amp noises at 2pm. Click on the flyer for more details.
I made this a month or two ago. It was used (with typewriter text on it) for the insert of the Witch Cult floppy disk box set I released recently on my new label Amps Against Trend.
Dead Wood / Phantom Heron Seas - Exempt Through Distance cassette is out now on the awesome Hairdryer Excommunication label. Kevin did us proud with this release, big thanks for all the effort involved. Chuffed to bits I am. C20 cassette with hand stamped labels, in oversized cases and beautiful letterpress covers by The Print Project. The cassette comprises of two 10 minute collaboration tracks of practice amp drone and spangles. A review of the release can be read here, thanks to Steve for writing nice words about it. Edition of 30 copies, available from Hairdryer Excommunication, £4 plus postage.
A few pictures of the Dead Wood / Phantom Heron Seas set at Lushfest last month. The festival was amazing. A very well organized affair, and I thought the sound was really decent for our set. Big up Matthew Shaw for inviting us, and for taking the photos above.
A few weekends ago I went to stay with my good friends Martin Thompson and Lucia Chung in London. We had a fun time catching up, eating, drinking and watching Irish gypsies bare knuckle fight in the street outside their studio.
For the whole of this year Martin is making a sound piece every day using his Nord Modular and uploading to his site Monolog. This really is inspiring and hugely dedicated work. Late on the Saturday night Martin asked if I was into making a collaboration piece for his upload of that day. We sat down and played with
ideas of specific frequencies, textures, while sipping on some single malt. The outcome can heard here.
This Saturday, 7th July, Phantom Heron Seas and myself will be performing a collaboration set at Lushfest 2012, a festival curated by Lush, the lovely fresh handmade cosmetics peoples. The weekend looks to be a marvel of music, comedy, talks, demonstrations and vegan food. It sounds ideal to me, plus this will also be the least amount of traveling I've ever had to play a gig, as the festival takes place less than 4 miles from my front door. Music includes The Blue Trees, Richard Youngs, The Black Twig Pickers, Plastic Crimewave, Peter Delaney, Urthona and a whole bunch of others. Dead Wood / Phantom Heron Seas play at 1pm in the Anything But Ordinary tent.
Most of my spare time over the past few months has been spent putting a new label together. The focus of Amps Against Trend is loud music, expect noise/pv/grind. I'm having fun with all this right now and have decided to make 3.5" floppy disk the main format for the time being. In this short space of time things have moved quickly and there's already 4 releases out including a Witch Cult 10 disk floppy disk box set! This is a re release of their 10 track 1 sided 12", now spread over 10 floppy disks. Yes, this is ridiculous, I know this only too well. There's 50 copies, so that was 500 disks to copy and spray paint! Thankfully the band came round and we all did the spray painting together.
Other releases include a floppy disk by my friends Ladstorm, titled xSHITFACEDx. 40 copies, 6 songs, 90 seconds, powerviolence. Thanks to Georgia for making the awesome inverted cross England cases. And thanks to Dom and Loz for being lovely gentlemens.
This release is a noise collaboration I did with Matthew Shaw. This is 2 90 second cuts from a show we played together at The Winchester pub in Bournemouth. Matthew wrote a nice write up about how this all came about which can be read here. There's 30 copies of these which come in handmade wooden cases which I made, and individually painted. These too a long, long time to make!
And the first release on the label was a 90 second drone excursion by Petals titled Machynlleth for over an hour. This came out on the 7th May, 15 copies and is now sold out. Thanks to Kelly for helping me sew/make the cases.
