Serendipity

If you know The Black Dog you'll know you're in for a techno treat when you go to The Black Dog. Gorgeously timed mixes abound in these sets from Sheffield's Kings of the Bleep.

One of the first electronic albums I bought was The Black Dog "Bytes" back in about nineteen ninety mumble. Hear how The Black Dog evolve their sound a level beyond Plaid and take it deeper into techno territory for the 21st century. All terrific but especially recommended is "Live at BLOC Weekender".

Don't forget to support musicians like The Black Dog and O.O.O.D by buying their albums as well as downloading the sets they generously upload !

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Back from Shamania, we listen first to Fluffy Spangled Sunrise mix from www.oood.net/mixes. Steve OOOD lulls you into a smooth but energetic set of trance lines and banging beats, before subtly - before you know it - letting you down into deep breakdowns and lengthy progressive or ambient breaks. Just when you think the set is done it picks you back up into the psychedelic groove with acid riffs and a progressive beat before finally landing you gently on the ground, after an hour and a quarter of journeying.

Future Progressive - continues the same vein with more acid buildups and breakdowns in a progressive vibe. Always keeping moving, the 4/4 beats twine and build around the synthesizer channels and samples before annihilating the rhythm with some acid trance classics and a final bounce of classic techno bass lines.

May Manoeuvres - Electro/Progressive. Although it's "prog" there is always plenty going on in this festival of electro psychedelia. Mixing subtly between house and trance beats the bass ranges are laden with hooks and tweaks, which suddenly move to the foreground and bring your mind with them whilst the melodic electro sounds take second place for a few bars.  Under-stated acid noises form patterns and counterpoints, and then breakdown to form a hole in psychospace with more twisting sounds inside it.

Electronington is not in any way minimal despite the roots in techno bleeps and beats. Solidly rooted beat lines strum out the measure as acid riffs both mid and bass trill and twirl among them. Lines of samples come and go counterpointed by a bass and double-bass synth clef, ever returning smoothly to a driving progressive groove. Great set for chilling along in the evening or turn up the bass a bit and dance, the type of journey set that is all too rare nowadays !

Shamanic Dreams - Chill Mix

My good friend Acidfairy made some tunes :

Acidfairy - 666.mp3 - Fast kicking bassline with Prisoner stabs. Tune should be twice as long, it's great.
Acidfairy - Acid Angel.mp3 - Slower more measured but insistent bassline. Nice build-up into a bouncy and fun 303 main theme.
Acidfairy - Acid Illusion.mp3 - Soft yet moving bass under swirling acid themes, multiple layers of hooks and complex changing kicks take you down the rabbit hole. Recommended.
Acidfairy - Acidraaaaar.mp3 - Acid plings segue into hoover stabs and an accelerating techno bass, building under rising 303 based dischords. Keeps you on your feet and your mind on its toes.
Acidfairy - Chanter.mp3 - Rock your body and set your feet tapping with an acid ceilidh :)
Acidfairy - Distortion Pipe.mp3 - A piping hot medley of sounds for discerning dancers.
Acidfairy - Foreplay.mp3 - Just the thing to get you in the mood ;-)
Acidfairy - God loves the 303.mp3 - Well doesn't everyone ? 303s a-plenty in this short but lovely little piece of nostalgia.
Acidfairy - Intergalactic Bootleg.mp3 - quickly gets down wierd and dirty, bootleg techno stylee. Knock 'em up some more, sistah.
Acidfairy - Kicksome.mp3 - piratical screaming acid pipe ceilidh with leftfield Moby/Massive Attack influences. One for the dancefloor. Nuff said.
Acidfairy - Kicksome remix.mp3 - Kicksome kicks the pipes in !!
Acidfairy - On the 7th Day.mp3 - Bein a good Glasgow girl you have to have a religious song, innit. Recommended.
Acidfairy - Play it.mp3 - Rockin da massive, acid folk dub stylee.
Acidfairy - Sistah.mp3 - Kickin' up your skirts with Acidfairy.
Acidfairy - Somewhere around Barstow.mp3 - Nuff said. Top tune. More please !
Acidfairy - Special K.mp3 - not one for the Kiddies, but just go for it ...

Unfortunately I seem to have blown my ISP's bandwidth limits two months running with that burst of downloading. Whilst I wait for the end of the month I'm going to mention some of these recent downloads we've been listening to here at the Warren.

On the big speakers first we have Rama OOOD - Chilli Om which I mentioned before. Smooth deep chill just the way I like it :-) Amarok rating: 5.0 Favourite, 2 listens

There are a load of Rama sets on Psytunes of varying style and I can recommend them all. Next up, Psysoup is a nice piece of daytime psychedelic trance on a sunny Saturday, with wide swirling riffs around a firm underlying beat building up to a crashing finale. Amarok rating: 4.0 Excellent

Third on the electronic wheels of steel is Planet Rama, a lilting journey around the oceans of Ram's home world with mists of African and Indian chords drifting over the sea. Amarok rating: another 5.0 Favourite, 2 listens

All Over The Shop dives sideways into the James Bond dub, rap, swing and underground Latin room of Rama's style. Well you get the idea it is indeed all over the shop. Got to be worth a listen just for the Bagpuss sample ... Amarok rating: 4.5 Amazing, 2 listens

Finally with Breaktime Rama shifts it into the breaks and off-the-beat house mood for some final jiving. Amarok rating: once again 5.0 Favourite, 2 listens

You can see why I'm so excited about the quality of music available for download on the net today. Needless to say new ISPs are being considered. I'd be interested to hear what Be are like as they have unbundled our exchange so should give a good speed and they are supposed to have very good transfer allowances. Mail me at the address near the top right of this page.

I just downloaded a brilliantly funky set from a DJ called Doyley who played recently for Audiophile in Nottingham. If you insist on a name for it, I'd call it deeply twisted prog electro housey stuff. I think he hails from an outfit called Zerozero in Cardiff. You lucky, lucky sods down there, having talent like this around :-) I can see I'm gonna have to brave the students and get along to Audiophile one of these months.

And whilst I've got this editor open, here's another funky electro prog house set . I've had this one lying around my hard drive for a couple of years, but never listened to it before. It's a single-label promo mix of tunes from Hadshot by DJ Clown, not as dirty as Doyley's stuff (I mean it's even got psy-style house in it at one point, and ethereal hard house verging on trance!) Not to mention a couple of great remixes of familiar tunes (shame i haven't a clue what they're called, eh). Nevertheless rather good. Both of them are just the thing for a sunny Saturday afternoon relaxing with a glass of vino ... enjoy.

Just want to give a biiig pointer to the new Manmademan album Free To Listen. By coincidence I was sorting my old email folders this past week. Did we really go and see Manmademan at Brixton Academy in July 2001 ? Doesn't time fly. I wrote that it was a really great night – well it must have been because I don't remember very much ;-)

Anyway get yourself over to their website and download a copy of Free To Listen. Just select the album or track(s) and then use the "download" button on the right (the paypal option is there in case your browser doesn't run the plugin). Also available for free download are Manmademan's older albums Cell Division and Lovetechnology, which by some coincidence I already have on vinyl. However thanks to www.manmademan.com we now have a CD version too that can play on the hi-fi.

Free To Listen is an innovative album not only in its distribution format but in the sheer variety of ways acid noises are tortured into Manmademan's exquisite sound. Available in a smooth mp3 mix session or DJ friendly individual tunes, I guarantee you'll be hearing these beats on the dance floor and in the chillout. Get yerself sum now !

I've just discovered Psytunes which offers free mix hosting for psychedelic DJs, and there is some great music on there. We've been listening yesterday and today to some of Steve OOOD's mixes on there (Steve, Ryo and Rama of the Collective are all there). Just going to download one of Rama's for offline listening. I'm blown away by the quality of the music available. Do go and get a slice of that OOOD action :-)

I've got to get them to lose the autoplaying music on their Myspace home page though. Not that it's not good, but I tend to go there when I'm already listening to some OOOD mixes and the Myspace track just blasts over the top :-(

Colin from O.O.O.D's latest DJ set, which was podcast on Chaishop recently, starts off with a funny little sample of somebody rambling on about a telepathic race called "the Ood". It's a great set, full of unreleased killaaah mixes of the sort OOOD do so well. Go have a listen if you like trouser-shivering acid trance.

Anyway, I seemed to recognise the voices in the sample, and having chatted to the esteemed Colin O.O.O.D. a few times at The Awakening (website now offline), I assumed he sampled himself or someone else I knew, speaking whimsically about their band's own name.

But no ! Due to the <sarcasm> high quality and innovative programming </sarcasm> we get on our 30+ digital telly channels these days we were reduced to watching repeats of Doctor Who one evening last week. Though for me it wasn't a complete reduction, as I missed all but one of the so-called “second series” (actually something like the 28th season, and I saw almost every episode of seasons 1 to 23 as they were first broadcast). I think Billie Piper is a great Doctor's Companion and I will be sorry to see her go. Her character is well up with the best-written of the short-skirted low-cut lassies from the 1970s and she's a good actress to boot. The Doctor has had intelligent and capable companions before, but I think only Stone Age apparelled companion Leela was given as independent a personality as Rose Tyler. But the big question is, has Rose actually done a proper full-on Doctor's Companion stylee scream yet ?

I was pleasantly suprised to find, after my 20 year gap in watching the programme, that I really enjoyed Christopher Eccleston's single season as the ninth Doctor. A Doctor who (sorry...) was believable for adults and kids alike. I'm starting to accept David Tennant as the Doctor now, provided I don't have to watch him for too long. Even with a good character it always takes me a couple of stories to get "into" a new Doctor. After the first Doctor's regeneration, the seven-year-old me thought Patrick Troughton and his penny-whistle were far scarier than the monsters he vanquished. In his first serial the second Doctor definitely had me hiding behind the sofa !

Now the character written for the tenth Doctor, apparently drawn from a composite of Ant+Dec and Richard Hammond, just irritates the hell out of me. Great entertainers of course, all of them, and I love the Hamm-ster on Top Gear as he regularly punctures Clarkson's inflated self-importance. But all characters lacking in the gravitas and other-worldliness which should deepen our renegade Time Lord's quirky irreverence. I mean, the Doctor getting slushy ? Never happened even with his old Time Lord flame Romana. That's just a cheap fallback by directors and scriptwriters who lack the imagination to show an alien character, genuinely adapting to the human emotions he's been exposed to for so long (see authors such as Ursula Leguin, C.J.Cherryh, etc.)

Russell Davies please note, suspension of disbelief will stop when you break the spell. If you're going to take characters in a new direction, it does actually matter that it's compatible with their previous behaviour. We don't need no steenking Personality Transplant Fairy, let alone alien abductions.

But I digress ...

The episode we watched, or at least watched part of until Tennant's antics irritated me once more, was The Impossible Planet ^{[plot spoilers]} from last summer. You could have knocked me down with a sonic screwdriver when the bloke in the mining base, the Doctor and Rose started quoting that deadpan sample about the odd Ood. For a minute I thought the script writer was into psy-trance too. I'm always cheered up whenever I spot the origin of a sample I know well. Apart from increasing your enjoyment of the tune by sharing the composer's sense of humour, you can bore people for ages afterwards telling them where it comes from and then rambling on about Doctor Who ;-)