Have you ever thought to yourself that there must be huge, towering piles of obscure but wonderful music out there that you would, in all likelihood, love or at least find interesting, but you just don’t have the gumption to find it? Wouldn’t it be amazing if a couple of dance music freaks got together and found it all for you and then fed it to you in little Weetabix Mini Crunch-sized portions? Well, that’s exactly what the guys at Fervent Moon do, and they have just re-launched their site. (...)
Read the rest of FERVENT MOON - BACK IN THE GAME (66 words)

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Post tags: better off dead, Dance, fervent moon, mp3, music, raid pace, zines

Unless you punch two-year-olds in the face in broad daylight, you deserve a break once in a while. After all, you’ve been paying for gig tickets your whole life, don’t you deserve to have a pair presented to you on a silver platter by some nine-foot bimbo? Yes you do, and you deserve some CDs as well, so enter this competition and perhaps you’ll win some CDs and tickets to a show you would like to see (sadly, the odds are it won’t be nearly as good as that one above).

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Read the rest of Free tickets to any show you want (64 words)

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Post tags: Free Stuff

Once upon a time Mumdance was simply known as plain old Jack Adams and he used to book events and nights for us at The Old Blue Last. Nowadays though he has forgotten all about little old us and has become a superstar DJ. Literally. Just look at his MySpace page – the upcoming shows list looks like the itinerary for Around the World In 80 Days. He’s also decided to invent his own genre, which he’s calling “kerplunk”. This is not a joke. Click on to hear his remix of Maximo Park’s “Let’s Get Clinical”, which is without a doubt the first attempt at nailing the kerplunk aesthetic anywhere ever. Jack’s also kindly supplied us with a whole mix that he recently put together with a bunch of folks like Jammer and C-Gritz all over it.

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Read the rest of MUMDANCE HAS GIVEN US A MIX AND A REMIX, AND HE HAS INVENTED A NEW GENRE (114 words)

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Post tags: C Gritz, Jammer, Maximo Park, Mudance, The Old Blue Last

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (10 981 ko)

audio/mpeg (42 560 ko)

Night Gallery was the follow-up show to the Twilight Zone and featured Rod Serling in an art gallery unveiling paintings that depicted the story ahead. I only know about it because it is parodied in a Halloween episode of The Simpsons. I don’t think it was as popular in the UK; over here we are all about Michael Aspel.(...)
Read the rest of Good evening and welcome to the Night Gallery (103 words)

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Post tags: gatekeeper, Labyrinth, Leonard Nimoy, Night Gallery, Rainbow Body, Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (4 495 ko)

Menudo were the biggest boy band in Puerto Rico for a long time. They had the same scattergun membership policy as the Sugababes, although rather than internal spats, most members left when their voices broke at one point. Ricky Martin (yes, THE Ricky Martin) was a member at one point too. Like most boy bands, they were also rubbish, but on drugs they might have sounded great. Davila 666 reckon they sound like “Menudo on drugs” and they’re a gnarly garage punk band.

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Read the rest of Davila 666 are a Puerto Rican Boy Band on Drugs (101 words)

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Post tags: Davila 666, In The Red, Menudo, Puerto Rico, Ricky Martin, Sugababes

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (5 928 ko)

Babelgum’s Vice Versus series continues with an episode on raggare. The raggare gangs are a subculture found in Sweden that started in the 50s, causing controversy and moral panic. Their ethos seems to revolve mainly around old cars, music, sex and beer. They ride around in their Chevys and hot rod cars with leather jackets and duck’s-ass hair-dos playing pure rockabilly. Now they’re uniting in Stockholm for their biggest ever annual power meet. Check it out here.

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Post tags: Babelgum, Vice Versus

Lamo Wizard are a video-making duo made up of Amy Leverton and Skill Wizard head-honcho and Invasion riff-machine Marek Steven. They have just finished Comanechi’s new video, so we had a chat. Below is what they had to say about said video, themselves, Chinese takeaways with free fruit, and bell-bottoms.(...)
Read the rest of NEW COMANECHI VIDEO BY LAMO WIZARD (648 words)

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Post tags: Comanechi, invasion, Lamo Wizard, skill wizard

Everyone loves Music Go Music, right? They are like a warm shot of fizzy summer pop perfection to help even the most morose motherfucker out of the winter lull and back to vague contentedness at the very least. Someone from their record company sent us a link to a video of them playing a song. Apparently they’ve sent us this link before they sent it anywhere else, so if you click on you’ll be seeing said video before anyone else ever. While you’re at it, have a look at another video of us having a word with the band right after their first ever UK performance a little while back. How many first evers can you pack in to one post, huh?

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Read the rest of Video Exclusive - Music Go Music (0 words)

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Post tags: music go music

First there was Veronica Falls – who, if you remember, had absolutely nothing to do with Kirstie Alley – and now there’s Golden Grrrls, who, as far as we can tell, have nothing to do with Bea Arthur. What is it about hazy indie-pop bands who bury their glory under a mountain of fuzz and split their time between worshiping C86 and worshiping second-rate American sitcoms? You could at least call your band Friends or M.A.S.H.(...)
Read the rest of ALL THE GOLDEN GRRRLS (91 words)

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Post tags: Golden GRRRLS, The Sound of Young Scotland, Three Cheers, Veronica Falls

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (2 557 ko)

All the cool dudes are single. Come and join the Vice Singles Club. (...)
Read the rest of Vice Singles Club, 16 November, 2009 (602 words)

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Post tags: Singles, various bands

As there is no real theme to the new issue as such, I am just going to post some stuff I’ve been listening to a lot of of late. Okay? Great. First up, Brazil’s Psychic Possessor.

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Read the rest of A Fist in the Face of God - Psychic Possessor (151 words)

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Post tags: Brazil, deathrash, psychic possessor, thrash metal

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From this Saturday the ICA will be overrun for a whole nine days by people making weird noises. Calling Out Of Context is a haven of workshops, talks, shows and recording sessions for people who take things like modulating the sound of a nail scraping down a blackboard very seriously indeed. If that’s your bag then you probably got your tickets months ago. However, if you’re yet to book and want in on the action then fear not, as we have a pair of tickets for the Lucky Dragons performance tomorrow, which kicks the whole thing off. First person to email in and tell us which fancy pants art festival Lucky Dragons played last year gets those. If you miss out on the freebies though, don’t cry, you should go check out the festival anyway as a lot of the day-time lecture-y type stuff is free and in the evenings there are a bunch of performances by guys like Aaron Dilloway, The Red Krayola, Chocolate Monk and Gravetemple (aka Stephen O’Malley), Oren Ambarchi and Atilla from Mayhem. It’s basically a Wire reader’s wank fantasy come to life. Oh, Rhys Chatham is playing too so we had a chat with him earlier in the week about what to expect from his show. Click on for that and all the details and stuff are here.

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Read the rest of The Chin Stroker’s Choice (1,025 words)

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Post tags: Aaron Dilloway, Calling Out Of Context, Chocolate Monk, Gravetemple, Lucky Dragons, Rhys Chatham, The ICA, The Red Krayola

It’s Friday the 13th and a lot of horrible shitty things are bound to happen to you today. In fact they may have already happened. But hey, that’s just how it goes (especially if you have paraskevidekatriaphobia). We can’t fix that. But what we can do is offer a counterbalance.(...)
Read the rest of FREE SHOWS, FREE CDS (94 words)

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Post tags: friday the 13th

Being on tour with a hot indie band involves waking at 4am to throw up from motion sickness only to find a toilet so brimming with piss that you’ll get splashed if there are any turns up ahead. This, like everything else on tour, is played out beneath the soundtrack of a stuttering download of Southpark season 13 and a stoned sound-engineer summarising Anvil! The Story of Anvil!

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Read the rest of ON TOUR WITH A HOT INDIE BAND! (765 words)

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Post tags: The Virgins, Tour diary

Last month my friend Nicholas sent me a package filled with photocopies of vintage soft-core biker porn with headings like “How to Buy Women Legally” and “The Last Nazi Bikers of the Third Reich.” Attached to the last page with a note written in magic marker promising two more gifts that would be following shortly: a tour tape from a group called Sex Church and a pair of black leather gloves. While I never got the gloves, I did get tipped off to one of the best new bands on the West Coast.(...)
Read the rest of SEX CHURCH WRITE ABOUT BUMMERS, MOSTLY (172 words)

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Post tags: mp3

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (8 499 ko)

Being pregnant doesn’t sound much fun. You get huge, everything hurts, it’s hard to walk upstairs and you can’t drink gin. I don’t want to even go into the whole giving birth thing, because that seems like a real struggle. However, Pregnant is a pretty good band name.(...)
Read the rest of DON’T GET PREGNANT (65 words)

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Post tags: KDVS, Life's Blood, Pregnant, The Sun

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (3 126 ko)

What are you going to be doing next Tuesday? Well, I’ve checked the TV listings and it’s a choice between James May’s Toy Stories and How To Look Good Naked, and I checked your bookshelf and it’s a choice between The Beach and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, so I reckon your best bet is going out. Luckily, we have two pairs of tickets to a gig that you might enjoy. Click through to learn and win.(...)
Read the rest of DON’T READ OR WATCH TV ON TUESDAY, GO OUT AND MEET NEW LOVERS (59 words)

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Post tags: Crystal Fighters, Violins, Wild Palms

To me, Night Control sounds like the name of a slightly lame superhero whose aim would be to control the nightlife of a city and whose special power would be the ability to turn people sober. He’d halve teenage pregnancy and drink-driving deaths, but he’d be really fucking unpopular and every time he arrived everyone would turn down their music. Thankfully he doesn’t exist; something much funner does. (...)
Read the rest of Call for Night Control (66 words)

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Post tags: Ariel Pink, John Cale, Kill Shaman, Night Control, Three Cheers

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (12 200 ko)

audio/mpeg (7 270 ko)

Calgary, Alberta is a generally pretty cold city I know little about apart from that it hosted the Winter Olympics when Jamaica entered; and I only know that because Cool Runnings was my favourite film when i was a kid (I still think it’s great. And, interestingly, pint-sized gambling football substitute Michael Owen claims it’s the only film he’s ever seen). There’s something in this cold, bleak environment that must inspire dark, post-punk bands. I guess having to wear big coats and seeing steam come out of your mouth must make everyone feel a little more like Ian Curtis. (...)
Read the rest of Watch those Sharp Ends (79 words)

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Post tags: Calgary, Cool Runnings, Hozac, Sharp Ends, Three Cheers

Attached Media: audio/mpeg (5 911 ko)

Do you remember the mixtape that Silk Flowers made for us six months ago? It was rad, so you should listen to it all over again. You should also listen to their own music, because it’s kin of a tropically twisted Japanese arcade version of Kraftwerk fronted by Tom Waits and Ian Curtis reborn as Siamese twins joined by the jugular. They’re playing in London tomorrow, by the way. We can get you in. (...)
Read the rest of SILK FLOWERS ARE FREEING YOU FROM PIZZA (449 words)

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Post tags: gig, silk flowers, win