The first is a joint from his as yet untitled forthcoming banger. This one is called I Never Really Learned to Ice Skate.

The next seems to be the next in the set and is a mash-up of Blue Duck’s dreamy Farewell to Floss and Floss is Full of Surprises from his record Six.

As an additional treat here is a couple of Blue Ducks remixes. Ducks turns his hand to a remix classic – Jay-Z’s 99 Problems. A remarkably soothing take on the song.

An a rather marvelous remix of Cool Kids’ brilliant oh eight hit What Up Man.

We are also pleased to announce the status of Les Étoiles latest record, which has songs created in collaboration with other members of the Records On Ribs roster – Talk Less, Say More and EL Heath as well as others. I had the privilege to listen to some premastered versions – they were really genuinely beautiful, a real sonic progression, but still hugely moving. Once again, Tim Wright at Neume Audio has done an incredible production job, even adding his own work as a collaborator on a number of tracks. Indeed as a special treat you can hear his remix  of one of the tracks, A Year. On the album version the work is done in collaboration with the Martenot of EL Heath, but here Tim explores the album as a whole in a tremendously sad electroacoustic reworking. Watch the Les Étoiles MySpace for other tracks soon.

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.

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

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 0 releases so far, here is to even more 2010.

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.

Adding A Release

We keep all our releases updated on Musicbrainz, as it is the best database and source of discographies around. Ribcage allows you to lookup information about an album from Musicbrainz and bring it into your site.

Ribcage then runs off to Musicbrainz and looks up the release, then asks you if these details are correct. If it isn’t on Musicbrainz, then you have to fill in all these details manually. We are planning to make it possible to suck release data from Discogs.com and Last.fm, though this is a future addition. The idea is eventually you will enter the data once, either on an online database, or in Ribcage, then the data will be propagated throughout.

Then you have to check if the track data is correct.

After this, Ribcage adds the release to the database, and it will appear when the release date set arrives. The debug information shows the level of data actually added in three very simple steps.

You can also add a review of your release once that release is completed. This is almost complete, but not quite.

Artist Management

Adding an artist is even more simple than adding a release. Just fill in the following form.

Managing artists brings up a classic WordPress management table that you can see in the Edit posts form and elsewhere on a standard WordPress install.

Editing an artist is extremely simple. Note that we have automatic fields for website, Facebook and MySpace. We plan to add Twitter accounts into the mix when some of our artists get them!

You can, of course, delete artists as well.

Until Ribcage is released, Bandcamp seems to provide an alternative, though centrally hosted and not open source way of releasing your music, one which we experimented with for the release of To Leave A Mark. ROR artist Spiral Jacobs is also on there. It is really rather good. You can give donations and this kind of stuff, as with Ribcage, and all manner kinds of fancy stuff like that and it is all done very cleanly. Great minds and all that…

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.

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