Curious about Blockhead, the Ninja Tune label’s relatively recent signee — the New York-based, big-eared, hip-hop-oriented producer, best known for his work with Aesop Rock on the Labor Days album? Head over to his newly launched website, at ninjatune.net/block, …
The BBC radio show of John Peel has posted a short’n’sweet streaming interview with leading techno producer Richie Hawtin. The Peel webpage for the show, with pictures, is here, and the RealAudio stream is available directly here. “I’m …
Chachi Jones bends circuits to his will. Well, not really. He does take sound-emitting children’s toys, such as Texas Instruments Speak & Spells and Touch & Tells, and mess with their innards. He adds switches to make them stutter, and …
The new album by Scanner, Double Fold, on the Slovenian record label rx:tx, is apparently inspired by Nicholson Baker’s excellent book by that name, which was an alarming study of how libraries have forsaken their duty as custodians of our …
It has long been standard operating procedure for 12″ versions of singles to include both the instrumental (which is to say, vocal-free) and vocal (which is to say, instrumental-free) edits of the title track. The rapper Jay-Z made the vocals …
The BBC’s website(s) is/are so enormous, so maze-like in their multimedia sprawl, that finding anything requires the navigational equivalent of a Freedom of Information subpoena. In any case, the Mixing It radio show, filed under “World & New,” located somewhere …
Speaking of musician Chris Coode (see yesterday’s Downstream entry on the fall of the house of 8bitrecs.com), his latest album under the Motion moniker, Every Action, is out on 12k Records, the label headed by Taylor Deupree. The 12k.com …
If the 17-minute A-side of Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie’s Variations (Elevator Bath, 2003) seems to shimmer, credit that scintillation at least in part to the source material: this lengthy ambient piece is apparently built from the sounds …
Perhaps there is no such thing as a free MP3. Thorsten Sideboard, who founded the 8bitrecs.com netlabel, got back to London after a recent trip to the U.S., only to find he’d lost his job. Why? Because 8bitrecs.com had …
The BBC’s Hear & Now radio program has been posting segments of an interview with composer Gavin Bryars. The first three parts (of a total four) are up now (here). The primary focus of the conversation is Bryars’ new …