I have just emailed the following to the Formica company after they forced our good friends My Formica Table to change their name:

Dear Formica,

So, you see fit to stop a group of people releasing music for free under the name ‘My Formica Table’ because you own the letters FRMOIAC when they’re put in a different order and you didn’t want them to use them. How grown up of you. In all honesty, I’m surprised that we – the people – hadn’t stopped them earlier. They were, after all, using the word ‘table’ with staggering impudence. Everytime I went to eat my tea in my dining room I found the whole eating experience very confusing. I put the food on the ‘table’- but this was not a table like My Formica Table the record label. It was a wooden one for putting food on. My miniscule brain really struggled to cope with these two uses of the word table. I can only imagine the trouble I would have been in had I had a Formica Table in my dining room.

Seriously: you bunch of staggeringly petty dullards. A group of people put a few years work into releasing music by DIY bands onto the internet for free (do you get that? making no profit), increasing the number of people who listen to this music by an enormous number. Having built a following, you tell them they have to change their name (which was meant reverently, because they’re fans of formica tables). You say their name causes “detriment” to the “distinctiveness” and “reputation” your trademark. I’ll tell you what causes ‘detriment’ to ‘reputations’- being petty killjoys. When you’ve got time, read Wilhelm Reich’s ‘Listen, Little Man’. You might recognise some of its insights.

All is not lost thankfully, because My Formica Table (that’s the record label, not the thing some people eat their tea off) is reborn as Foetal Orange, although how I’m going to cope eating my daily dose of citrus I do not know. The orange industry is surely bracing itself for a terminal decline to its reputation and distinctiveness.

Yours,

Records on Ribs

New Releases

As one great band ends, so another begins. The Butterfly’s final EP Time Spent In Reconnaissance Is Never Time Wasted will be unleashed on the world shortly, and we’re absolutely thrilled to be able to bring you the self-titled debut EP from Oxford’s Elapse-O. Physical copies will be available to buy at the album launch in Nottingham on Friday 27th June (more details soon!) and it’ll be available for download from here a week or so later. You can get a preview by listening to the EP in its entirety on their myspace.

Physical Releases

Something we’ve been promising for a while now. We’re working on a way to make beautifully packaged CD-Rs of all our releases. We’re getting there and should have physical copies of our albums available soon (artist made copies of Les Etoiles’ and We Show Up On Radar’s albums can already be purchased in physical form). Elapse-O’s EP will be ready in physical form for their EP launch.

Tapes on Ribs

Tapes on Ribs is our new project: a sub-label of RoR. Whilst we love the way downloads mean you can have free music, we also love tapes. So we’ve decided to launch a tape label! Tapes will be available to buy from here fairly soon, but in order to keep in with our cash-less ethos you can send us a blank tape and we’ll post it back to you, plus the music, free of charge. The first release will be a split tape by EL Heath and Strap the Button’s Jack Hunter.

Releases on Other Labels

EL Heath’s ‘A (Rather) Dead Sea Liner EP’ is now available from Weymouth’s fucking ace Dead Sea Liner Records. We hope to have a few copies to sell here shortly. It’s a beautiful record of “abyssal drones and ambient sea shanties” and comes packaged in pages from the Manual of Advanced Seamanship (Volume 3). My copy informs me of the correct way to ballast a submarine.

Elapse-O, meanwhile, have gone transatlantic. Montreal’s YUL Records will be releasing a 7″ with two of the tracks from their RoR EP on in the autumn. Again, we hope to have a few copies to sell from here.

It’s worth reminding you that Strap the Button and their associated side-projects have an absolute shitload of stuff available for free download from My Formica Table.

What Our Artists Are Up To

EL Heath is working on about a zillion EPs. There’s Anime Songs– soundtracks for imagined Japanese anime films and the spaces they open up; an album called Pattern which is inspired by the likes of Cluster and Harmonia and is more beat orientated; some live improv with drums which sounds like it should be on Rune Gramofone and the first of a planned series of albums inspired by the machines of W Heath Robinson. EL is also playing a couple of rare live dates: at the Wheaton Aston Festival (Staffordshire) on Saturday 17th May (with Epic45, Millimetrik and July Skies) and at Lee Rosy’s Tea Room in Nottingham on Sunday 18th May (with Cat Green Bike and Glissando). RoR honcho Dave will be helping Mr Heath flesh out his sounds at both shows.

Strap the Button are set to record their epic The Blood’s A Shimmerin‘- a single track album- which we hope to release in late summer/early autumn. Sections of the track exist in live form on their myspace.

Les Etoiles and Talk Less, Say More are also working on new material.