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.

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.

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.

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

To the Records on Ribs listeners, readers, and staff,

I was asked by Alex to write up a brief post on the work that went into designing the latest Records on Ribs layout that you now see in front of you, so I’d like to begin first by introducing myself: my name is Bryan and I’m a graphic designer and (soon to be) graduate student in the humanities. I also run a little graphic design company called Ivy Street, where you can find my portfolio and some more information about who I am and what I study. Now, on to business.

Like most websites I design, this one began in Adobe Photoshop rather than HTML & CSS. In our earliest correspondence back in October, Alex stipulated that he was looking for “something clean, simple, and with the minimum of additional graphics, that can display album artwork well.” Websites to draw inspiration from included BLEEP.com, Tomlab, and my own blog, The Velvet Howler.

One aspect of the design process that became quite important early on was to distinguishing what is clearly a record label from a simple WordPress blog. This involved drawing a distinction between News and Archives, on the one hand, and Ribcage on the other, but allowing for the two sides of the site to communicate with one another rather than appear artificially separated. Furthermore, it meant doing away entirely with the “blogging” metaphor–as found in the previous design–for the front page. Instead, a new user interface was needed to adequately express the depth and structure of the website as a whole, without seeming muddled or overwrought.

Another area in which design played a key role was in minimizing the amount of exposed interface elements. For example, in the previous design, links such as “Download,” “Buy,” “More,” and “Listen” were repeated for each release entry, which, while useful, also appears to be visually redundant and space-consuming. Our solution was to propose a jQuery alternative involving standards-compliant and accessible hover menus (both the black vertical ones on the front page and sidebars, as well as the gray horizontal ones on the releases index). These remove much of the visual clutter found in the previous design, while simultaneously retaining all of the prior functionality.

Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of the design, however, was the implementation of the 960 grid system, which structures every page and element. It may not be noticeably apparent at first glance, but using the grid system is an important design heuristic that prevents visual clutter. As the author of the system writes:

As long as we’re using shapes consisting of right angles, we might as well make some logical sense of it all. Some time after the intial work of Khoi [Vinh] and Mark [Boulton], I happened upon an article by Cameron Moll, heralding a width of nine-hundred and sixty pixels as the optimal size for design. Basically, 1024×768 is the new 800×600, and 960 makes for a good magic number to utilize the wider canvas on which we paint.

In addition to the 960 grid system, a focus on W3C standards compliance for XHTML and CSS was also crucial, and I believe we have passed all such tests, allowing for readers to view the site without any errors across a multitude of browsers, ranging from Internet Explorer to Firefox to Safari.

In truth, however, the best way to describe the design process isn’t so much by writing about it, which is often difficult when it comes to something like aesthetics (especially in justifying certain design decisions without getting overly technical), but to simply browse the site freely and explore all of the various UI elements that we’ve added.

One thing, however, that might not be gleamed from quickly browsing through all of the pages is the amount of work and restructuring that occurred under the hood with regards to the Ribcage system, which required quite a bit of labor in order to make the system compatible with all of the various ideas Alex and I had for the design. Just to name a few new features, the site now includes an integrated Events system, a beautifully-designed store for purchasing physical albums, revised indices for the artists and releases pages, and lots of other unnoticeable things like compressed and optimized code, reduced loading time, etc.

To conclude, I’d like to say that it’s been great working for the Records on Ribs team and appreciate their attention to detail and occasional pedantry, without which the final design would surely not have been as great (in my opinion) as it in fact turned out.

Sincerely,
Bryan Klausmeyer
Ivy Street Design

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.

The other day, I realised I’d forgotten Vic Chesnutt’s two albums from ’09 from my best the year list. At the Cut and Skitter on Take Off are both fine works that have moved me greatly. I didn’t go and amend my post because I couldn’t be bothered. That’s totally trivial and unimportant, especially in the light of Chesnutt’s death today, but it’s those little things you (self)-obsess over in the shadow of death. Sorry, Vic, and thanks for all the music.

Fuck Private Healthcare.

Vic Chesnutt- Coward

Alex and Jell may follow with theirs if you ask nicely. I’ve not included our own releases…

What A Prick for Forgetting

Vic Chesnutt- Skitter on Take-Off (Vapor)
Vic Chesnutt- At the Cut (Constellation) 

Love

epic45- In All The Empty Houses (Make Mine Music)
Fuck Buttons- Tarot Sport (ATP)
Bibio- Ambivalence Avenue (Warp)
The Black Dog- Further Vexations (Soma)
Six Organs of Admittance- Luminous Night (Drag City)
Omar Souleyman- Highway to Hassake (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria) (Sublime Frequencies)
Sunn O)))- Monoliths and Dimensions (Southern Lord)
Skyramps- Days of Thunder (Self-released)
Shackleton- Three EPs (Perlon)
Group Inerane- Guitars From Agadez (Sublime Frequencies)

Really Like

Nitkowski- Chauffeurs (Function)
King Midas Sound- Waiting For You (Hyperdub)
Strategy- Electric Soup (Low Point)
Andrew Plummer’s World Sanguine Report- Third One Rises (Gravid Hands)
Admiral Angry- Prince Buster (Shelsmusic)
Lovvers- OCD Go Go Go Girls (Wichita)
The Duckworth Lewis Method- ST (1969)
The Horrors- Primary Colours (XL)
Mordant Music – SyMpToMs (Mordant)
Tyondai Braxton- Central Market (Warp)
Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides- Bataille de Battle (Singing Knives)
Ulaan Khol- II (Soft Abuse)
Om- God Is Good (Drag City)
Emeralds- Emeralds (Undo Mondo)
Wadada Leo Smith- Tabligh (Cuneiform)
PJ Harvey & John Parish- A Woman A Man Walked By (Island)

Also Enjoyed

Part Chimp- Thriller (Rock Action)
Cold Cave- Love Comes Close (Matador)
Leverton Fox- Country Dances (Gravid Hands)
Oneohtrix Point Never – Rifts (No Fun)
Jay-Z- The Blueprint 3 (Some Major Label)
Teeth of the Sea- Orphaned by the Ocean (Rocket)
Animal Collective- Merriweather Post Pavillion (Domino)
Khanate- Clean Hands Go Foul (Southern Lord)
Evangelista- Prince of Truth (Constellation)
Sonic Youth- The Eternal (Matador)
The Juan McClean- The Future Will Come (DFA)
Do Make Say Think- Other Cities (Constellation)

Would Like to Hear

Focus Group & Broadcast- Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age (Warp)
Bear In Heaven- Beast Rest Forth Mouth (Hometapes)
The Xx- The Xx (Young Turks)
Gareth Hardwick- Aversions (Low Point)
Felix- You Are The One I Pick (Kranky)
Vijay Iyer- Tragicomic (Sunnyside)
That Fucking Tank- Tankology (Gringo)
Flower-Corsano Duo – The Four Aims (VHF)
Pan Sonic & Keiji Haino – Shall I Download A Blackhole And Offer It To You? (Blast First)

Plus everything Leyland Kirby’s released and everything on Sublime Frequencies I’ve not heard. There’s not enough time in the day…

Multi Artist Compilations

Plugged In: Pakistani Pops Library LP (Trunk)
Shadow Music of Thailand (Sublime Frequencies)
Algerian Proto-Rai Underground (Sublime Frequencies)

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.

To Leave A Mark, Les Étoiles’ homage to his home town of Brignorth, is released today, and will be launched in style at a party at Jam Cafe in Nottingham tonight. Come down from 8pm to watch Les Étoiles and El Heath perform, and listen to the ROR DJs spin some tunes whilst enjoying a delicious beer or two. If you can’t make it (and why not?), you’ll have to make do with downloading the album – it’s certainly one of my favourite records of the year so far.