Legendary Pink Dots are back with a new great concept album.

This is first Volume of a complex story about conspiracy, magic, and spirituality. Minimal synths, guitars, syncopated rhythms that are making weird, psychedelic and transcendental noises which are of course accompanied by the distinctive voice of Ka-Spel. Lying on your sofa, pumping up the volume and just dream away on their ethereal sounds.
10 to the Power of 9 is a dark and exceptional trip into their warped and bizarre musical psyche.

For sure one of the best Concept album of the Band.

There are 10 people who run the World. They are all male and presidents, magnates and high priests all do their bidding. The 10 live in villas in the remotest part of the Himalayas- a place that absolutely NO – ONE would ever stumble upon. Although the 10 live in such close proximity to each other, they choose to have meetings in the back room of a small office in London. That’s where the decisions are made. That’s where the wars begin, that’s where the dice are tossed across the table to establish who wins, who loses, who lives, who dies.

The classic conspiracy theory to end them all and I listened ,open-mouthed , hair falling into my eyes. It was maybe 1976 when I heard this first. You are right to snigger at my naivety. I listened and twisted this story around inside my head , and it did indeed seem completely unbelievable. Now of course it’s 2014, and Im older and wiser and I have to laugh at myself too. Now I know wasn’t a theory. Now I know it’s true - Edward- Ka-spel

In the fall of 2011, Colombian hardstyle darkravers TERRORKODE delivered “Corrosive Audio” – a hammerblow of bass and beats, including a rash of remixes from luminaries of the genre such as NOISUF-X, SAM and PHOSGORE, mixed and mastered by Kolja Trelle (SOMAN).

In the interim, programmers Neural and Sacro have been perfecting their own mixing skills and experimenting with various added elements – the results of which have now been assembled into their second slamming album “Frequency Overload”.

Mastered this time by Jan L of NOISUF-X/X-FUSION himself, “Frequency Overload” takes the basic blueprints of “Corrosive Audio” and rebuilds them into a ferocious new model for 2013 – more powerful, more dynamic, more aggressive.

14 tracks, including the final versions of “I Am The Death Machine” (from “Dying World Anthems”) and “Operation Q” (from “Endzeit Bunkertracks VI”), plus 12 new songs including “Evil” co-written by and featuring the vocals and lyrics of Eugene Nesci/VPROJEKT – an hour of instrumental intensity, designed to make your body move.

Packaged once more by Vlad McNeally of Kallisti:Design in a slick continuation of the video-game theme established with “Corrosive Audio”, the CD-version of “Frequency Overload” comes in a limited first edition of 200 in 4-panel digipak – augmented by remixes from CHAINREACTOR and VAULT-113.

I saw my future in the fizzing bubbles of an alka-seltzer...” so opens the Helen EP by UK trio The Wave Pictures, a band so suited to the Record Store Day ethos, it comes as little surprise to find them issuing the EP on limited edition 10” vinyl for the April 19th event.

From the bright tropical guitar rhythms of ‘Red Cloud Road (Part 1)’ to the hoedown tuned blues of ‘The Easter Parade’, the six-track EP continues a precedent long-set by the trio for idiosyncratic songwriting - shimmering guitar parts and wry observational lyrics from lauded frontman Dave Tattersall.

The Helen EP follows fifth studio album - the double album ‘City Forgiveness’, released via long-term label home Moshi Moshi at the end of 2013.

A prolific 20 track concoction inspired by 6 weeks driving around America on tour with Allo Darlin’, the album edged The Wave Pictures further towards cult status, their ebullient, sardonic pop once again coupled with an unending desire to eschew the traditional industry model and make their name the old fashioned way; phenomenal live performances and stellar songwriting.

Rounding up a string of UK dates, The Wave Pictures will play London’s Islington Assembly Hall on April 18th (tickets here).

The band are also pleased to present a moving short-film for evocative ‘City Forgiveness’ closer ‘Like Smoke.’ Shot by Tabitha Denholm, the film captures Louisiana’s trail riding community letting loose at a local dance party in hypnotic slow-mo

Having already shared a handful of demos earlier this year, it is with great excitement that Italian Beach Babes announce the release of Blueprint Blue's debut EP, Undertoad.

The EP was recorded with the help of some of the band's friends at The Horrors’ studio in East London, and was engineered by Joshua Hayward (The Horrors) and Jerome Watson (The History Of Apple Pie), who also produced it. Undertoad will be released on 5th May on 12" vinyl + download. Listen to new EP cut 'Rattlesnakes' below...
 

Blackest Ever Black presents to you Dead Unique, an album by Officer! recorded in 1995 but - outrageously, inexplicably - never before released into the public domain. This then is not a reissue or a revival; it’s a new record that just happens to have been maturing in the cask for, oh, a little shy of 20 years. It also happens to be a lost classic of English art-rock, and the crowning achievement in the career of its mercurial creator, Mick Hobbs.

Londoner Hobbs’ roots are in the fecund RIO scene of the late ‘70s and early 1980s, initially as guitarist in The Work (alongside Bill Gilonis, Rick Wilson and Henry Cow’s Tim Hodgkinson), and subsequent related groupings The Lowest Note, The Lo Yo Yo, and The Momes. Over the course of the decade he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage studio in Brixton, working with the likes of Flaming Tunes, Family Fodder, Catherine Jauniaux and Zeena Parkins, to name but a few.

Officer! – the project that this incorrigible collaborator and connector calls his own - surfaced in 1982 with a cassette tape entitled Eight New Songs By Mick Hobbs. It marked the blossoming of a singular writer and improvisor, with a gift for plangent melody, ingenious arrangement and lyrics at once caustic and courtly, playful and profound (two songs from this tape, ‘Life At The Water’s Edge’ and ‘Dogface’, have been remastered for a limited edition 7” release on Blackest Ever Black later this year). The Cold Storage-recorded Ossification LP arrived a year later, followed by Cough (1985) and Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes (1988). Megaphone Records, responsible forOssification’s recent 30th anniversary reissue, rightly describe it as “one of the most unusual, pleasurable and character-filled ‘pop’ records anyone has heard…a timeless anomaly in the history of recorded music.”

By the start of the 1990s Hobbs had joined Jad Fair’s Half Japanese (he continues to play in that group as well as Strobe Talbot, a trio with Fair and Benb Gallaher). In the early months of ’95, Half Japanese were in Baltimore to record their Hot LP; Hobbs stayed on to cut the bulk of the songs that comprise Officer!’s Dead Unique – songs drawn from a rich store of material written and refined in the seven years since the band’s last outing - with a talented assemblage of local and visiting musicians. Returning to the UK, Hobbs brought the tracks to producer Julia Brightly to mix at her 16-track home studio in Bethnal Green; by the end of the summer, Dead Unique had taken shape.

And then? Nothing. For reasons that no one, least of all Hobbs, can remember, Dead Unique was shelved, all but forgotten about until 2012, when Blackest Ever Black chanced upon it while trawling the Officer! archive maintained for Hobbs by Andrew Jacques. Finally, rightfully, on May 26th, 2014, the album will be made available to all for the very first time - on double-vinyl, CD and digital formats.

A complex but thrillingly immediate avant-pop song cycle that charms and confounds at every turn, Dead Unique will give immense pleasure not only to Officer!’s existing cult following, but to anyone with an appreciation of piquant, idiosyncratic songcraft – fans of Kevin Ayers, Flaming Tunes, Art Bears, Woo, Dislocation Dance, R. Stevie Moore, Robert Wyatt, Cleaners From Venus, Lol Coxhill or The Monochrome Set should especially pay attention. It touches upon ragged-raw rock ‘n roll, sumptuous chamber music, pastoral folk, blowsy prog-jazz and paranoid dub-space, effortlessly shifting from skronking abstraction to rousing harmonic refrain and back again.

Dead Unique is also the culmination of Hobbs’ lifelong collaborative impulse: his visionary ability to bring musicians together, galvanise them and wrestle coherence out of the collective free play of ideas, arriving at something far more than the sum of its parts. The tension between composition and improvisation is key to the LP’s power, with Hobbs abetted by an extraordinary supporting cast that includes Tim Hodgkinson (bass clarinet), Pleasant Livers’ Fred Collins (vocals), Legendary Pink Dots’ Patrick Q (violin), filmmaker/animator Martha Colburn (vocal), Gilles Rieder (drums), Jad Fair (vocals) and Jason Willett (bass, keyboards, trumpet). Special mention must go to John Dierker, whose superbly expressive clarinet and saxophone parts are a fixture throughout, and to Joey Stack, who takes lead vocals on ‘Good’ and the show-stopping ‘Elephant Flowers’.

Nonetheless it is the voice of Hobbs – as principal writer, performer and protagonist of these songs – that resonates most powerfully. Blurring the roles of storyteller, poet and prankster, he turns memorable line after memorable line, booby-trapping them with mischievous puns, fleet-footed literary allusions, sudden digressions and shifts of register, nonsense rhymes and other wordplay. But his acute wit and flair for the absurd is moored by a deep romantic sensibility, and though it delights in the minutiae of the human comedy, Dead Unique ultimately addresses its biggest themes: love, loss, commitment, independence, the mutability and inconstancy of all things. “You lose, you learn, you advance…but you always go back.”