DJDOWNFALL.COM

25 abandoned Yugoslavia monuments that look like they’re from...

Wed, 23 May 2012 07:16:52 +0100

25 abandoned Yugoslavia monuments that look like they’re from the future

“These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place or where concentration camps stood. They were designed by different sculptors and architects, conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their ‘patriotic education.’ After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost. From 2006 to 2009, Kempenaers toured around the ex-Yugoslavia region with the help of a 1975 map of memorials, bringing before our eyes a series of melancholy yet striking images.”

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Sat, 19 May 2012 14:55:09 +0100

expose-the-light: The moon Tethys casting its shadow on...

Mon, 14 May 2012 00:16:00 +0100

expose-the-light:

The moon Tethys casting its shadow on Saturn’s rings, April 29th, 2009.

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Sat, 05 May 2012 18:43:47 +0100

ART / WIN

Wed, 02 May 2012 21:34:02 +0100

Very pleased and proud to announce that Elizabeth Price has been nominated for the Turner Prize. I worked with her last year on her piece ‘Choir’, which formed part of the exhibition at the Baltic that led to her nomination. Just backed her at Ladbrokes, too…

Testing the new A/C/Cs in the backyard. My own colour scheme. I...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 17:50:49 +0100

Testing the new A/C/Cs in the backyard. My own colour scheme. I like things bright.

clockkkk

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:11:24 +0100

In October 2010 I went to Japan for a week, where I bought an alarm clock based on one of the subway lines from the department store Tokyu Hands. Famously, each station on the Yamanote Line has its own unique melody played when a train appears - you can choose of three station tunes for the alarm. It ended up costing me something like 5000 yen; because of the parlous exchange rate at the time this was something like £45. Ridiculous, but hey, you can’t go to Japan and not bring back some piece of ephemeral electronic memorabilia.

Anyway, it wasn’t till I got it home that I read the instructions. It had a big warning in English: “This clock is NOT designed for use outside Japan”, because it sets itself automatically by means of a radio time signal - you can just see the logo at the bottom. However, there was a handy circle on a world map showing the limits of the radio signal, a few thousand miles, but no big deal. Probably would be if I lived in Calcutta or Macau or something. So I set the time, and there it has stayed on my CD shelf, keeping stiff-upper-lip GMT for nearly two years. I think I changed the batteries once, but that’s it. It’s kept the time. British time. English time. Temporal subjugation.

A couple of days ago, I glanced at it, and of course it’s wrong. I check, and yes, it’s gone to Japanese time (currently eight hours ahead of London). It’s picked up the signal. It’s phoned home. It’s saying I should be getting up and making coffee, not thinking about getting into bed.

But it got me thinking: Why now? What combination of propagation and ionosphere or whatever led to some faint signal bouncing six thousand miles round the earth and landing in my bedroom? Was there a comet passing? Disturbance in the Van Allen belts? Did some guy in a shack on Mount Otakadoya plug in an extra generator? I don’t know. A tiny little plastic clock still following orders from the other side of the planet, like some kind of pop-culture holdout. I’m feeling a romantic view of radio waves again, the Kraftwerkian dream, beautiful things, information not encoded and digitized and multiplexed and fibre-optic’d, but speaking to anybody who cares to listen.

I’ve reset it and it’s fine so far. I’m watching it, though. Oh, I’m watching it.

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Thu, 19 Apr 2012 17:52:27 +0100

FROM THE VAULTS pt. 3

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:04:00 +0100

Sometime in 1997 .… jesus, fiftee... Pete Gofton aka Johnny X, Kenickie drummer (later guitarist and producer) heard one of the early DJ Downfall singles and asked me to do a remix for the lead single of their second album Get In (recently reissued on Eastworld including mine own). I didn’t have a studio at the time, not even in my bedroom. I don’t think I even had a sampler then. No problem - this being the glory-days of a music industry awash with money, I was thrown into a £250 a day programming room at Britannia Row studios in Fulham for three days, despite not really having a clue what the hell I was doing or what I was going to do. (And I got a fee, as well. Ah, major labels. They were good for some things.) This pant-cacking uncertainty is what probably led to the ‘surprise’ bipartate structure, a long, slow atmospheric iteration of the song that suddenly turns into an Italo-tack monster.

I even had an engineer, whose name I unfortunately forget, working with me for the full three days; I clearly remember his look of gentle bemusement at pretty much everything. I think he was more used to the Beatmasters or whoever coming in and laying down a banger, and instead he got me, a bundle of neuroses wanting to make weirdy disco. The end of the first day’s session I went home with nothing more than a basic drum beat, and I remember listening to it and being scared that I wasn’t going to complete the thing. Didn’t sleep too well. But it gradually came together, helped by a nice clear sound and a decent desk. The studio had tie-lines to their (empty) big Neve room downstairs, and they took pity on me and let me check mixes on their fifteen-grand Boxer main monitors. Plus I got to use their expensive Studio Electronics SE1 for the bass, which was very much the fashionable analogue machine at the time.

It uses a slightly different lead vocal than the original track - the DAT tape with the multitracks on included at least one extra set of Lauren’s comped vocals, and I think we switched between them. The second section uses a chunk of vocal from the middle eight, which I always think sounds like ‘Dance, dance, dear / Don’t cry’. It isn’t. But it is, if you know what I mean.

Like a lot of the early Downfall stuff, it’s a bit long. In both sections, the ‘point’ is made a little while before there’s enough movement forward; there’s one too many iterations. But I’m pleased with it, and most importantly the band liked it. That always makes the difference. That is the juice, ultimately, long after the money is spent and the work has faded from your mind. I ended up DJ’ing for Kenickie’s last ever show at the LA2, when I played Welcome To The Jungle as their intro music. Still very proud. They were a great, great band of great, great people, and they burned very brightly for me and many others.

So, this ended up as one of about four B-sides, and got pressed onto a 12” promo too. I’m told it once got played between bands in the big tent at the Reading festival. Also, journalist Neil Mason was incredibly nice about it a few years ago.

SPECIAL TREAT: On the multitracks, I found a double-tracked ‘cocktail party’ running throughout, the band larking. Essence of Kenickie, right there. Pete told me “we billed EMI for the champagne”. You can only hear a fraction of it on the main song at the end, but I decided to put it on, smothered in delay, as a backdrop, which counterpoints the melancholic solo vocal on the first section rather well (if I say so myself). Once upon a time, some Kenickie nutter on a fansite pressed his ear to the speakers and transcribed at length what he thought he heard and put it up on the interweb; it seems to have vanished now.

Anyway, I recently unearthed the multitrack DAT, and so here, for the first time in public, is the I Would Fix You in-studio cocktail party. In stereo. You may want to pan left and then pan right and listen again. I know I do.

Thanks to Darren Hayman. More remixes from the vaults here and here.

mmmmm

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 10:00:22 +0100

mmmmm

Western?

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:28:44 +0100

Western?

Aleksey Savrasov, Lell

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 14:35:37 +0100

Aleksey Savrasov, Lell

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Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:00:06 +0100

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Sat, 24 Mar 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Madge Gill.

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Madge Gill.

Skeleton key with copper wires.

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Skeleton key with copper wires.

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Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Minimalist superhero posters.

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:00:05 +0000

Minimalist superhero posters.

whuh

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:21:07 +0000

whuh

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Sat, 17 Mar 2012 13:18:08 +0000