Tim Wright, producer of both of Les Étoiles two albums has just launched the website for his company Neume Audio. Suffice to say, Tim has been a friend of Records On Ribs since its inception and has been hugely supportive of our work. His production and attention to detail needs no introduction to those who have heard the albums he has worked on: it is precise, intense and not to forget, beautiful. If you’ve got something to record and fancy not bothering with a studio, he is your man.
We are proud to announce the imminent release of the self-titled record from Ga’an. With Seth Sher of the clattering no-wave outfit Coughs and the blackened ambience of Oakeater on the drums, Ga’an are a combination of swirls of antique progressive rock synths in the lineage of Popol Vuh, taut muscular beats, krautrock invocations and shamanic, glistening vocals.
As with all our releases, it will be available for free download, but will be released alongside the original tape version, limited to sixty copies. This tape has been selling like those proverbial hot cakes in Ga’an’s native Chicago, even though it was unavailable outside their shows and the occasional boutique record shop. It is, of course, hand made and very very weird, and containing unexpected trinkets and secrets of various kinds.
Pre-order will be up in a couple of days and it will be released on the 18th of March. We are also glad that prog historian Ed Knock, who blogs over at the The Crystal World, will be providing sleeve notes and the online version will feature brand new, never before seen artwork.
Servant Eye
I of Infinite Forms
Hello everyone, welcome back to the new Records On Ribs website! Quite a few things have changed around here, not simply the look and feel have changed, but also substantially the back end operation of the site. We hope it is easier to use, easier to share music with others and generally better, with more information about our artists and their activities. The site itself should be snappy to navigate. We should be rolling out even more features over the next few weeks, as well as releasing Ribcage to the general public. If you find any problems, don’t hesitate to e-mail me.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making a number of new and exciting releases, including those by Ga’an and Spiral Jacobs. Take a moment to check out our wonderful designer and tireless Bryan’s post on how he put this together. All in all, we’ve served 106,465 releases so far, here is to even more 2010.
In the next couple of days this very website will be going down and will replaced by the long promised but never implemented new site. We’ve been working with an abosolutely wonderful designer on this, Bryan Klausmeyer, who has produced something very special indeed, a complete refresh that is more beautiful and more usable than this site. Working closely with Bryan has forced us to also improve the underlying Ribcage code and sand off some rough edges both inside and outside. One boring example, which will ensure the survival of Ribcage as an active open source project, is the careful documentation of every file and function and the auditing of each element of code. We aim to have Ribcage ready for public consumption, at long last, by March.
In other news, thanks a great deal to those who came down to the Nottingham return of Felix, supported by our own EL Heath and Les Étoiles. All in all it was a stunning night.
We occasionally get e-mails asking as to the progress of Ribcage, the Wordpress plugin that runs the back end elements of this site. Progress has been slow, as we have been satisfied using raw MySQL backends to add releases. Yet I can finally show you some screenshots of the beta version of the software I am currently running on my home machine. Hopefully it will show you how easy this software is to use, as well getting some interest from other people who may want to use it in the future. It will, of course, be released under the GPL, open sourced. The intention is that using Wordpress, which takes five minutes to install, then grabbing the plugin from the Wordpress plugin repository (which anyone can now do within Wordpress itself), you could have a working Creative Commons record label up within half an hour. This, we hope, will increase the ease to set up and therefore the numbers of Creative Commons labels across the internet.
Ribcage should be out in the new year to coincide with our two year anniversary, an event that will also be celebrated in a number of other interesting ways! We have a whole load of treats up our sleeves for you.
Photo courtesy of Feathered Tar at flickr.
The marvellous grandeur of Blessings by All The Empires of The World is now out. Enjoy! Another wonderful record, entirely for free.
We are also pleased to announce another addition to our roster – Blue Ducks. Blue Ducks is the project of one Justin Colley, ex-of our marvelous gabba-pop artists Gay Death Probe who are now on “permanent hiatus”. Blue Ducks make electronic hip-hop with inflections of aqua-crunk and wonky, “music for people too cool to dance”, well within the lines of the post-Dilla, Stones Throw Records swagger. The EP ‘Six’ will be with us shortly.
Here is a the opening track for your delight – Floss Suffers From Gamma Radiation.
And heck, for contrast, here is the quite special closer…Farewell To Floss.
We’ve had a mailing list for a while, but no easy way of getting your e-mail on it.
You can now sign up to it via the form on the right hand side of this and any page. Expect monthlyish updates on what we are up to straight to your inbox. Grand.
You wait a year for a new release by Talk Less, Say More and like the proverbial bus, two come along at once. I Don’t Know Where I Am, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing is out today, the companion piece to last year’s Go Lucky, but a great record in its own right, the finest in pop music.
As some might have already noticed, we have a presence at SoundCloud. You can submit demos and that sort of thing via our DropBox. It is very well designed website indeed. Here is a track from the above for your delight.
Talk Less, Say More – You Were Right About Me by Records On Ribs
‘It’s About Time’ is now out and you are able to download it. Please do. It’s a really clever record, filled with inventive beats and smart rhymes and is certainly more than worth some of your, ahem, time.
Dominic Fox is the author of the frankly brilliant Cold World that is forthcoming from the marvelous Zero Books. Via Hopkins and Coleridge as well as Ulrike Meinhof, it is a work that considers the positive political aspects of sadness, seeing dejection as a force capable of unhooking someone from the world in order to think a better one.
In celebration of the book’s release we are pleased to be putting out a record by Spiral Jacobs, one of Dominic’s music projects, entitled Prolegomenon, which will serve, indeed, as a musical prolegomenon to the work. The following video gives a hint of what to expect when it arrives in late September: spiralling blackened ambience drifting through withered forests, investigating ‘unholy minimalism’, an attempt to use the techniques of minimalist composers like Arvo Pärt but with disharmony and in the spirit of Burzum and Xasthur. Fascinatingly bleak and utterly unlike anything we have put out before.
Don’t forget, ‘It’s About Time’ by Talk Less, Say More comes out tomorrow.
Alex Andrews
