Albums
I’ve started a Kickstarter project…
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1198043864/six-by-seven/widget/video.html
I’ve started a Kickstarter campaign to pay for the manufacturing costs of a limited edition vinyl album. The album has already been partly recorded in our studio above the Maze in Nottingham. It’s gonna rock. I only need 80 or so backers to make this work.
Head over HERE to read all about it.
I’m also subsidising postage so that those of you living abroad don’t have to pay loads for shipping.
I’m also offering 5 guided tours of Nottingham with a free Thai meal in my favourite restauraunt for a laugh!
Vive La France.XXX
Wrangler – LA Spark
It’s not often a great album comes along, that is to say, one I like so much I have to listen to it until something snaps. Music is like girlfriends. As a youth, I used to weep in butchers shops, er sorry, no, as a youth I used to constantly be on the look out for a girlfriend (even if I thought I wasn’t.). Eventually you would find one who is great and you’d hang on to her until you just naturally started to look for something else. Eventually this behaviour stops, it saps your energy. The great thing about music is you can be a slag and keep fucking around, it doesn’t have to stop.
So you keep looking and eventually you find something and you spend the first two weeks in bed before you have to start to get to know each other. I’m in bed with Wrangler at the moment and their album LA Sparks. I came across Wrangler because a friend told me about them. He recommended this hot chick… Long time six by seven producer and friend Ric Peet was doing front of house for LoneLady (check out her album Hinterland its’s brilliant) and he came round and we were talking about Cabaret Voltaire. Stephen Mallinder is of / from /made Cabaret Voltaire. Wrangler is three people; Stephen, Phil Winter and Benge. Sort of Stock Aitkin and Waterman from the underworld. (There are some links below).
Me and Ric are both the same age. In 1980 I was 15 and I was into Rock. I spent most of my time working my way through Deep Purple and Black Sabbath back catalogue records and going to see the new rock bands of the time like Iron Maiden and Saxon. Around that time there was the New Modern Romantics movement of fashion and music; I hated it. The strange thing was that I was living in Germany back then and, even though I didn’t know it at the time, I was a Kraftwerk fan (I was also buying Disney and Pinky and Perky Records), but I had been collecting Kraftwerk records since Autobahn came out. The last Kraftwerk record I bought was Computerworld in 1980. I should have gravitated towards all this new synth music but I didn’t. I liked Kraftwerk because I thought they were funny, I was a kid. Believe me, ‘Farn-Farn-Farn-Auf-Der-Autobahn’ is hilarious when you are ten and later, Robots was even funnier.
New Romantics weren’t funny, they were deadly serious and it was music that girls liked!! Unfortunatly I lumped Cabaret Voltaire in with The Human League and Adam And The Ants and Haarschnitt Einhundert, without even listening. I was wrong. If you think Cabaret Voltaire are that sort of band you need to go and listen to their stuff. For me, they are one of the most interesting bands ever to come out of the UK. I have to listen to the whole of their album The Conversation now and again just to flush my system out and be able to think straight again, in musical terms. It’s like listening to Hallogallo, just strap in every now and again and you’re guaranteed to always hear something you never heard before.
Which brings me onto Krautrock because for me LA Sparks is the perfect Krautrock album. Let me explain. Too many people think that to make a Kraut album you just use the Dinger beat. I’m sick of it. Krautrock was an idea. Like all the best bands, you need to nail the metaphor and hang the music on that framework. I worked with Julian Cope for years, who was a self proclaimed ‘expert’ in Krautrock after writing the highly personal book Krautrocksampler (he actually told me he made most of that book up: “How the fuck was I to know what Faust were thinking of when they made their second album? I just thought ‘What would Odin do?'”) and he too would instantly puke at the sound of a new band playing that beat (we’ve all done it, it’s like jamming Roadrunner for three hours in the rehearsal room).
I was in Germany during the Krautrock years, it was a very small movement as I remember. The krauts my older sister was hanging around with were into Barclay James Harvest and Pink Floyd. I once read somewhere that Krautrock was ‘most German music shops selling out of bongos’.
I remember seeing a band in Munich at the time at a free festival. I was travelling up from a holiday in Germany. It could have been Can or Faust for all I knew. The guys looked cool and my Dad muttered something about ‘long haired fucking louts’ as he looked at them with interest. It sounded and looked like Deep Purple trying desperatly to jam out a B-side after taking too many drugs. I think it had an effect on me, I never forgot it.
This Wrangler album has the same effect. It’s not the B-side Deep Purple thing, it’s the statement of intent, it’s hung on a clearly defined metaphor, it’s proper Kraut, it’s beautifully excecuted and it sounds brilliant, from front to back. Me and this record are gonna be fucking each other for many weeks. Go and buy it please.
Some links:
My own Electro-Kraut project Twelve
Record Store Day
Just got 20 of these delivered today…looking great, 12″ vinyl, so glad it’s back and production costs have tumbled.
I’m really pleased with this record, it sounds great. Excellent drumming and fantastic grooves which feel totally unique. We used very little compression and a tiny touch of reverb and absolutely no computers or plug ins at any stage of the recording, including the mastering.
The result is a real dynamic sound, like Can and Neu!. For me it’s a true Krautrock album. It has the sound and feel and doesn’t feature that fucking Klaus Dinger beat that everyone thinks makes something Krautrock.
I’m gonna send one to Michael Rother (of Neu! and Harmonia) and see what he thinks! (Slightly shitting myself).
Get Sum…
I’m loving this new little Twelve album I’ve just put out. It’s totally different from any of the other Twelve albums but still fits the Krautrock brief; Acid-Kraut! I played it live with a Roland 707 drum machine and two 303 bassline machines into a multitrack recorder (not a computer). It has an old skool sound and it’s got a helluva groovy bounce to it.
The title track, Get Sum, reminds me and my wife of an old acid track but we can’t put our fingers on which one it is. Quite possibly from the 90’s but could be later…a free album to anyone who can tell us, it’s driving us mad!
Great bands have great fans!
There’s some great news which I am now at liberty to talk about. Beggars Banquet will be releasing a S I X . B Y S E V E N compilation album this year because they were so impressed with what you all did with getting Eat Junk to number one in the Amazon chart. How cool is that!
This is fantastic news for the band; to get a major label release again after all these years that will result in press coverage and radio play and possibly much more! Hurrah…and it’s all thanks to you.
Free Twelve album
TWELVE – N O _ C O U N T R Y
Grab your free download by clicking on the circle…
It’s an album I played live with 303 and 808 machines and mixed with sounds and dialogue from a film. For those of you who don’t do downloads you can buy a vinyl style CD in a card for just £5.00. It’s cosmic.
Twelve will be playing in London at the Sebright Arms on 16th January.
MuZiK KluB’s sent out…
All the MuZiK KluBs were sent out today and they looked really awesome I must say! Thanks to everyone who bought one. I’ll be releasing the F*** Me USA album CRIMEWAVE, which is free with this months MuZiK KluB release, sometime in the next few days through the F*** Me USA bandcamp site.
MuZiK KluB and other stuff…
Sorry, I’m a bit late with this but MuZiK KluB 26 is out now. Some of you might remember that I did a limited edition EP about 6 years ago called Six 8-Track Demo’s. This months MuZiK KluB has the follow up to that, the aptly titled, Six 8-Track Demo’s part II. Also included are 8 six by seven rehearsal room demo’s recorded through a desk from around 2008. Although unfinished, there are some really good songs from those sessions which included myself, Sam Hempton, James Flower and Pete Stevenson. I often thought about finishing them but was always too busy moving forward. That’s what the MuZiK KluB is all about though, being able to release stuff like this so it remains exclusive and stays in peoples collections rather than ending up on YouTube!
Yesterday I sent out a free download code to everyone on the six by seven mailing list so they could redeem a remixed and remastered version of the original Six 8-Track Demo’s EP. If you aren’t on the list and didn’t get it, please email me for a code and I will add you to the list.
Sorry I only posted one blog during our recent bike trip to Spain but it was more complicated than I thought and I had many problems uploading stuff in hotel rooms when all I wanted to do was be outside eating a pizza! I will post some pictures soon though.
Free Twelve album
TWELVE – Houston IV
(HERACLEUM MANTEGAZZIANUM)
Free Krautrock multitrack Koncept album available now for FREE or make a donation…
This album was made as a multitrack concept album. One commercial studio album was taken and a loop was made in a CD player for each track. Each loop was played over with various vintage instruments and then a vocal was laid over the top. The top and mid eq of the vocal was removed so it’s difficult or impossible to make any words out. Online booklet contains 9 pictures of the studio. No computers were used.
ITS A FREE GROOVY COOL PSYCHEDELIC COSMIC SOUND FOR YOUR SUMMER LISTENING!
THERE IS ALSO A KNOCK DOWN PRICE JEWEL CASE ‘VINYL RECORD’ CD FOR THOSE WHO DON’T DO DOWNLOADS. ALSO, A FREE SIGNED CD AND LIMITED EDITION TWELVE ART POSTER GOES TO THE FIRST PERSON WHO CAN GUESS WHICH ALBUM WAS USED TO CREATE THE LOOPS!
CHRIS OLLEY'S BLOG 