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 106,465 releases so far, here is to even more 2010.

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 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.

Fuck Private Healthcare.

Vic Chesnutt- Coward

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)

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.

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.