The lost art of keeping a secret

More info on this here
xB

RED AND BLACK

Zootime is the name of our US-only album soon to be released on Dim Mak, Steve Aoki's hollywood based label, past and present home to the likes of Battles, Bloc Party, The Rakes, Gossip, Von Blondies and Scanners. I believe the record is due for release in april but for a more accurate estimation check the Dim Mak site in the up and coming weeks.
If you look at the track listing below, you will notice that a few numbers off 'Making Dens' have been subsituted for newer recordings. In a sense 'Zootime' is a compilation of some of our favorite recordings of the past 18 months, regardless of where abouts each one might have origiinally surfaced. We figured that people are always going to be able to get hold of 'Making Dens' on import or off the web anyway (in much the same way as the american EP is available over here), so why not put together something completely new with some pretty old school looking graphics on there too?
Heres how it will sound:

Diamonds in the Dark.
Inside Four Walls
Scarecrows in the rain
The Boy who ran away
Soluble in air
Horsedrawn Cart
Zootime
You Can't fool me Dennis
Puprle prose of Cairo
Little Bag of Hair
Umbrellahead
Crosswords

At christmas we put up a free download of umbrellahead (Erol Alkan's version) on our website. Well, incase you missed out on it, here is the link again:
Umbrellahead MP3
Hold CTRL when you click on the link and choose "download linked file"
Check out Steve Aoki's own kickass blog here
over and out
xBlaine

A recent history of the Jets.

Hello hello...the picture above is a list of the ten songs that we've been working on for the last month or so.All of them are at slightly different stages, some are fragmentary ideas that might leap to life in the studio with the right synths and sounds around them, others are alot more complete, sounding very close to the versions that you'll eventually hear.All of these however, have a kind of lyrical tightness, they all seem to be saying something, slightly different from eachother, but cohesively, like they all belong to a large extended family....Elizabeth is definately the old grandma of this family, being the first song of the new wave that we wrote (in an airport in spain.....after a very heated discussion about what are songs needed to start saying...) it also sets a kind of theme for all the other 10 songs, each of them about people in some form or other (people we know, we knew, we wished we'd known.) The black sheep of this family has to be "metal soul", its the closest we've ever come to writing a glam-rock song, in the style of Marc Bolan, or aladdin sane era Bowie.Its covered in hand claps, and sharp falsetto backing vocals, its also very hard to really know what this ones about, what do you make of "six of us on the heath, wearing nothing underneath, he likes her and she likes me..."? someone suggested it might ellude to the nudist parties that occur on hampstead heath, i wouldn't know.Anyway, it all seems to be going to plan, the last week we made 4 songs in five days (a mystery jet record, seeing as zootime and on my feet took about 6months to make), and we are exactly a third of our way towards the musical dream thats been recurring in our heads for so long....having 30 songs written.Why such a tall task?? well we want to make the best album possible, and also have loads to spare, so we can wittle together some limited edition EP's, with songs that noone would have heard.Another private ambition is for us to be able to play new songs every time we play live, keep it exciting for everyone, and bring in an element of the unexpected to our gigs. I've put up a very raw demo of elizabeth on our myspace page, its close to how we play it live, but there's some different synth parts in it, and some rather chaotic guitar, i think the main thing we wanted to capture with this is just a really good feel....also, please please please listen to it with headphones, i just heard it through my computer and i felt very embarrassed.turn it up loud too...

Here are some photos of us rehearsing,(very poor quality i'm afraid) in our new gaff,well it isn't really ours but it does feel very homely thanks to the friendly family of eastenders who run the place, they also have a huge bull dog that looks like it eats a baby everyday, and you can tell when its been sniffing round your rehearsal room as it leaves a trial of slobber every where it goes.




































I thought i'd give you all a download of a song i've been obsessing over recently, its a song called No Hay Igual (don't know what the title means...its spanish though) and its on nelly furtado's new record.The rythms and the vocals are incredible.Its really well put together too, all the components fit like a puzzle and everything seems to be treated equally in it, like the drums are as important as the vocals...which i think is a really interesting approach to making music.so many songs seem to be about one thing,i.e. the words, or the strength of the melody, but in this song, nelly takes a back seat and uses her voice as a part, a mere puzzle piece with which to make up the song.enjoy.Get the rest of her album too (Loose) it is brilliant, i know its very easy to overlook it as a mass marketed piece of corporate pop, made in Los Angeles with a 100grand a track producers, but that doesn't stop it being amazing...i think its the best thing i've heard for a about 3months( not including late of the pier) and has definately influenced a handfull of the 10strong batch of new songs. Does this mean we are going to make a hip hop record, replace guitars with mcp beats, and hire in timbaland.....YES.(well...no, i'd never put down a guitar, and i know erol's got enough ridim in his blood to out beat any LA producers)

I hope this finds you all well, let us know what you're thinking about nelly and "elizabeth",
lots of love,
william.X

First Kerblam! remix

As we've been slowly getting to grips with the world of DJing and learning the tricks of the trade, we decided at the end of last year to try and do a remix of our own, which will hopefully be the first of many!
I found a Chic best of in a really cool second hand cd shop in Glasgow and decided to learn a bit from the disco giants.
I took 'Dance Dance Dance' and messed around with Blaine's 303 drum machine and here's the result. It's not exactly how i expected it to turn out, but think it's a reasonable start. It was a load of fun to make, and please give any feedback!!!

The link is: www.myspace.com/kerblamuk

You may be wondering what Kerblam! is... its basically a dj name we came up with after playing one night... i think it was inspired by the batman and robin tv series, and should be pronounced in cartoon form like Pow! and Whaam! etc... drunken creativity eh...
let us know what you think...
till the next,
love kai

NATURISTS PICNIC

Some of you will remember Leslie Feist's mushaboom as "That song of that advert"...Which indeed it was. But when the postal service got thier hands on it, This happened.
Thier version is still pretty soft on the ear, but those of you who are into people like vashti bunyan and joanna newsome and animal collective will agree that theres nothing wrong with making music which makes you want to invite your neighbours round for a naturists picnic.
mushaboom (postal service naked lunch scrub)


TALKING OF ANIMAL COLLECTIVE, can you believe they had the cheek to actually do what umpteens of trendy New York bands would rather perish without food and water than be caught doing? Believe it of not they took two bites out of the 10 million copy-selling Nervermind and fed it back out though thier noise encancing generators and signal warping harmonic defrangmentors at a radio session not too long ago.
Animal Collective - polly mp3
Animal Collective - On a plain mp3
I like these but then i am a hideously subjecive animal collective groupie. I once asked Panda bear (AC drummer/madcap) to write the first thing that came into his mind into my diary after a solo show, and ive still got it. My plan is to ask Robert Wyatt to sing the words onto a dictophone which i will then send to jeremy Barnes (hawk and a hacksaw) to play drums on and then pass onto jeff mangum who could put some guitar down and then post it on to Beirut's Zach condon for brass and backing voices. When i eventually get the tape back i will douse it in petroleum, and fire it into the night sky, where with a little bit of luck an old and greying joe meek will have his hands stretched out to catch it, and put it all together.
Watch this space.
B

What a good year for the roses

Well Seeing as this week is the most loved-up week of the year, i thought it would be appropriate to post something of a heart warming nature. Watching the Arcade fire at Reading festival a couple of years back was definitely pretty high up there in terms of coming close to a religious musical experience. I was therefore most pissed off when i found out about The Arcade fire playing in st Johns Church about 5 days too late. My friend went and said the only downer was that the sound was kind of washy inside the room.Well i think he was probably just saying that to make me feel a bit better about missing out on
THIS:




Now this next nugget is hardly hot off the press. But i fell upon it by accident on my ipod the other day, which reminded me how pretty it is. Julian Casablancas playing "Ill try anything once" (an early demo of you only live once) all on his own, sat at a fender rhodes.
Induldge here
XB

NEXT GENERATION AUDIOFIED BLOG

SHITS AND GIGGLES.
So here's what you should do.
1.Highlight the entire content of this page and copy'n'paste it into your TEXT EDIT software (if you are mac user).
2.Now Highlight everyting again within TEXT EDIT and click on the content whilst holding down CTRL.
3.When the drop down menu appears, click on SPEECH, then START SPEAKING.
4.Enjoy all the bullshit out of our mouths fed back out through the mouth of an 8-bit monotone female android Bitch.
5.Welcome to the next generation audio blog.

The best things in life. Aways discovered by accident.
XB