‘it’s time to reclaim pop. Let “England Without Rain” be your first step’– Contact Music

On 26th February we’ll be releasing England Without Rain, our sixth full length release from Talk Less, Say More and his strongest work yet (yes, we know labels always say that – but trust us on this one). We struggled for hours to write the press release for this because we’re so hyped about it, and we think you’ll be hooked on just one listen too. Quite simply, it’s a brilliant pop record which should appeal to anyone who likes Hot Chip, Kompakt Records, 808s and Heartbreaks era Kanye or 80s Fleetwood Mac; or, for that matter, anyone who has ears.  If you can’t wait until released date, you can stream the whole thing already, and we certainly advise that you do:

It’s been a busy time at RoR Cybertowers, for largely non-RoR related reasons. But with PhDs out of the way, house moves completed and much more besides we’re delighted to announce an exciting run of releases for you over the next few months.

This will begin on Wednesday 9th November with the much-anticipated release of Return, the third (and final) release from All The Empires of the World. It’s a monstrous record that amplifies the Jodorowsky desert vibes of Blessings with Godflesh menace and their most extreme sonic explorations yet.

All The Empires of the World's Return, out on Nov 9th

Following that we’ll be releasing England Without Rain by Talk Less, Say More. This is Jell’s poppiest album to date, and perhaps also his most experimental: the restrictive form of the pop song giving rise to all sorts of playful brilliance which will appeal to fans of Hot Chip, Junior Boys and WhoMadeWho, as well as his earlier work for us.

In the more distant future we’ve got releases from a fantastic slew of new ‘signings’. Expect insurrectionary no-wave pop from L.H.O.O.Q., haunted noise from Ghostly Porters, dissonantly beautiful modern composition from Syuzhet and broken kraut from The Exploits of Elaine. We also hope to release a recording of Surfacing‘s commission for Nottingham Contemporary art gallery. Entitled What Is This That Stands Before Me it’s a piece exploring dissonance and hope and is inspired by Klaus Weber’s sculpture Large Dark Windchime (Arab Tritone). You can book to see it performed (for free) here– there will also be a talk on dissonance, political organisation and hope (full abstract on the link).

We also hope to be able to announce a new release from EL Heath soon, but in the meantime we advise you to purchase his excellent new album on Wayside and Woodland- Haunted Woodland Vol. 2, which you can (and should) buy from Norman Records. It’s the second in a series of limited edition albums in which Wayside and Woodland artists explore the darkness and decay of the Staffordshire and Shropshire woodland and is inspired by Longnor woods in Shropshire (not to mention The White Lady of Longnor): it’s quite the ghostly treat and will appeal to fans of Ghost Box and Miasmah Records, as well as Eric’s releases for us. But be quick, there are only 50 and they won’t last long!

You might also like to check out a set from EL Heath recorded for IKON gallery’s Slow Boat Festival back in September, which is streaming here. This was recorded on a narrow boat as it trundled around Birmingham’s canals and finds Heath backed by members of epic45 and Rob Dunsford.

Records On Ribs are proud to announce the details of Little Measurements, the latest release from Les Étoiles. We think it is utterly wonderful – quite possibly the best thing he has ever done.

For the first time in the history of ROR, the release features collaboration between Les Étoiles and EL Heath and Talk Less, Say More. With Tim Wright of Neume Audio once again at the helm, the production is subtle but incredible.

Like all our music, it will be available for free download (as MP3, Flac and Lossless) both from our site and on torrents. It will also be a reasonably priced CD with full colour gloss artwork.

Little Measurements will be released on the 5th of April 2011. If you’d like to review it in advance, then drop us a line.

Here are a couple of tracks for you, to be frank they blew me away. First, the opening track, A Year. Beautiful ondes martenot by EL Heath.

Your Answer is next. Beautifully sad – we are so happy to be putting this out there. Clarinet by Tim Wright.

After many hours of uploading the whole Records On Ribs back catalogue is now available on SoundCloud. Slowly but surely, we will be replacing the old Flash player with a SoundCloud player.

Not only does this provide yet another way to enjoy the music we put out, but it makes it far easier for you to share our music with others. By clicking on the share link over at SoundCloud you can easily add whole albums to your WordPress.com or Blogger site, find the HTML to paste, or share it on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere.

Results in (we’ve even tweaked this one a bit more):

The same goes for individual tracks.

Results in:

Soon hopefully these by track and by album embedding features will be available throughout the site. We’d love to see people just plain taking our music and putting it on their sites.

This also means that you’ll be able to listen to any of our tracks through the SoundCloud iPhone app if you so desire.

This isn’t the extent of Records On Ribs on SoundCloud. Les Étoiles has uploaded some of his pre-ROR releases onto there, including offcuts and alternative versions from Never To Alight, entitled Left Luggage and some cuts from his 2004 records From A Closed Room, that I’ve embedded below.

Seasoned Dave watchers might be aware of his previous outing with the band Roquentin. Their existentialist pop record Portraits of Homes and Pictures of Ghosts can be listened to on the site.

EL Heath is also a fairly prolific SoundCloud user, rattling out tracks, some of which might come from future releases over here at a rate of knots. Check this out – hauntological.

Many thanks to the SoundCloud team who have been really supportive of Records On Ribs and provided a whole load of help, in particular Dave Haynes. This included kicking off a command-line uploader for SoundCloud for us to enable the shifting of all our releases onto the site with ease. They wrote the basis of it, we added to it and the program will soon be publicly released. It works as a Ruby script through their excellent API. SoundCloud just makes moving huge volumes of music effortless, a really cool site.

We’ve snuck out another couple of releases since our last update, and mighty fine they are too. And there’s much more to come…

Kettle Blacksmith‘s Well, We Get These Rashes is supremely silly, and we really don’t blame you if you hate it. But in the right mood, it’s absolutely wonderful. It’s the brainchild of Patrick Farmer (who’s played with- among others- Chora, The Family Elan, Dom Lash, Matt Milton,  Fuzzy Lights, Last of the Real Hardmen, Birmingham Improvisers’ Orchestra and The Exploits of Elaine, and who runs the mighty Compost and Height netlabel) and Ben Houlihan, who played with Patrick in Welshpool’s Beefheartian loons Call it a Clunes.  Patch made me promise I wouldn’t mention Chris Corsano, so I won’t- but think of your other favourite improv drummer and imagine him having a fight with a tramp and you’ll be halfway there.

Altogether more sober is Talk Less, Say More‘s Proof Rock. Not only does this have quite possibly the best bad pun for an album title since Mercury Rev’s Yerself Is Steam, it’s a mighty combination of dubstep wobble, metal guitars and heartbreakingly gorgeous pop melody. Oh yeah, and it’s a concept album built around Jennings’ relationship with the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the City of London (as well as Eliot’s representation of London). It’s quite sumptuous stuff.

In the not too distant future we have releases from…

Earth Defence Force – Earth Defence Force

This’ll be our heaviest album yet. Another mighty Shropshire export, EDF take influence from all your favourite loud and fast bands. Check ’em out on MurdochSpace. ‘Who Did It’ is particularly highly recommended.

The Exploits of Elaine – Plateau Suite.

A joint release with the mighty Gravid Hands (who’ll be putting out a lovely CD-R). Plateau Suite is a rollicking, clattering and rocking work of improv mayhem for those who like urban gamelan, balls out kraut grooves, ghostly melodies and morass like textures. Hear a couple of tracks (or ‘intensities’) here.

Les Etoiles – Little Measurements

More heart-breaking melancholy from Cardiff’s most brutal songwriter. Features contributions from EL Heath (among others), and higher production values than previous releases.

Spiral Jacobs – Prolegomenon

International Socialist Black Metal from the author of the mighty Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Despair. Cold, soaking blackened ambience somewhere between Aphex Twin and Burzum (but with far better politics).

Keep checking back. And follow us on twitter for updates and unsurpassed aphoristic wisdom.

Ga’an self-titled debut album is now available for free download as well as a limited edition tape (70 copies). People have been rightly very excited about this release and we are very pleased that it is finally out there – we apologise for the huge delay, we have been snowed under here with other tasks. This is the first time we have distributed an album using Amazon CloudFront, which should make for a faster more enjoyable downloading experience.

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.

EL Heath’s new album Snailbeach Mines Trust (on Wayside & Woodland records) is now available to buy from Norman Records and is currently at #6 in their ‘This Week’s Hottest Shit’ section- above Ikonika, Disappears and Ambarchi, O’Rourke and Haino  (among others). Naturally, we can’t recommend it highly enough: it’s a stunning evocation of place and memory. Dank, desolate and utterly transcendent. And all profits go to the wonderful people at the Shropshire Mines Trust.

Here’s what Norman Records have to say about the release:

This record left our Phil feeling ecstatic.

Over the years we’ve sold about a million Epic 45 records. You guys… you love ’em! Well here’s another one for you of sorts. It’s by EL Heath which is Eric from Epic 45 and it’s released on their Wayside And Woodland label. The album is named after Snailbeach lead Mine which was the largest lead mine in the UK back in the olden days when things were harder than they are now. He used to visit there as a child and it obviously had an effect on him as he’s returned as an adult after saving up for recording equipment 🙂 and recorded some of the sounds of the rusted up machinery and built up an album around those sounds. Listening to it though you wouldn’t know that. It’s gorgeous and there’s not an industrial clank in site :)…… The Music is very much like latter Stars of The Lid (the last album comes to mind). Rich warm waves of neo classical drone wash over. Occasional vocal tracks take on a different approach as they go down a more British 60’s folk route….. They blend seamlessly as the folk tracks still have some of the those warm sounding drones in the background. A remarkably moving and soulful album which gets my highest recommendation!

We’ll be helping Wayside & Woodland host a download of the album soon. Downloading it will require a minimum donation of £1 to the Shropshire Mines Trust.

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

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.

Newness imminent from Records on Ribs!

All The Empires of the World

Yes! After their critically acclaimed ‘Last Rites EP’, All The Empires of the World will (very) shortly be releasing their full length debut Blessings with us. It sees them moving in a slightly more progressive direction, but without toning down any of their trademark stargazing sludge. A second version- featuring contributions from members of Astrohenge, The Exploits of Elaine, …And Stars Collide and others will be out sometime in the new year too. Bonus!

Spiral Jacobs

Mr Dominic Fox has just published an excellent book. It is worth quoting the blurb in full:

To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of ‘depressive’ black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur. The author then develops a theory of ‘militant dysphoria’ via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction’s activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the ‘cold world’ of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.

And we will be releasing his excellent companion album, Prolegomenon. Eight dysphoric tracks of hopeful alienation: International Socialist Ambient Black Metal for a cold world and for a better world. Cover art from Toby Price.

EL Heath

Fresh from touring Europe with epic45, EL Heath is putting the finishing touches to an album about the long clsoed Snailbeach Lead Mines, which are near his Shropshire home. Tracks evoke the eerieness of desolation whilst purveying a sense of the clatter that once must have filled these mines. Three tracks can be heard on his myspace, including Heath’s first venture into ‘conventional’ songwriting with the heartbreaking ‘Tragedy at George’s Shaft’. We will be actively seeking donations for this release, with all proceeds going to the Shropshire Mines Trust. The new year will also see Heath release his mini-album Shropshire Hill Country via Wayside and Woodland.

Ga’an

We’re just a little bit excited about this one. Ga’an are a Chicago band who blend the aesthetics of prog, kraut, ambient, post-punk and black metal to create something compellingly otherworldly. They’ve self-released two tapes thus far and we’re mind-blowingly excited to be able to re-release them. Vultures of the Horn II: Living Tribunal is one of my absolute favourite pieces of music right now.

Earth Defence Force

Last but by no means least, purveyors of the finest hardcore/punk/metal Earth Defence Force will be gracing Records On Ribs with their debut album once we sort album artwork out. Recorded by production genius Ian Boult at the marvellous Stuck On A Name Recordings, Nottingham. Imminent riffs.