new midwich product! ‘faraday cage’ on matching head

January 1, 2012 at 10:12 pm | Posted in midwich, new music, no audience underground | Leave a comment
Tags: drone, lee stokoe, matching head, midwich, midwich for sale, mp3, new music, no audience underground, noise, shameless self-congratulation, tapes

midwich – faraday cage (matching head 176)

Hello again, dear reader, and a happy New Year to you.  I trust that you had a splendid Christmas and that you proved sufficiently nice throughout 2011 to warrant a visit from Santa.  All was lovely here at RFM Towers.  The internet was put away in a cupboard and shameful acts of gluttony were followed by equally delicious periods of languorous torpor.  I waddled back to my desk today satisfied, content and humming ‘Damage Case’ from the best of Motörhead double CD I found in my stocking.

Quite a pile has gathered during my absence and I am enjoying the latest Ashtray Navigations LP (and their Cosmetic Penguin mixtape), grooving on downloads originating in New York, looking forward to others from Texas and Ciudad Juárez, tapes and CD-rs from that same Mexican location and something rather special from Striate Cortex, RFM’s 2011 label of the year.  I will write more about some/all of the above once the seasonal brain-fug has cleared.  But first some shameless self-congratulation and promotion…

RFM is delighted to announce that, following last year’s archive releases, the first wholly new midwich recordings for years are now available.  Faraday Cage comprises three tracks totalling 44 minutes presented on one side of a C90 cassette.  This punk-as-fuck release is issued by Lee Stokoe’s legendary tape label Matching Head.  It is packaged in the house style: minimal lettering typed on a manual typewriter then pasted onto a monochrome photocopied image – this time a disconcerting film still.  It’s perfect.

The music was recorded with Matching Head in mind and is thus dirtier, noisier and perhaps darker than the crystalline and (I hope) humorous and life-affirming fare to be found on my other soon-to-be-revealed efforts.  The three tracks in short: ‘part one: magnets’ is an industrial folk drone, corrosive for a refreshing brain-scouring effect, ‘part two: f4jb’ is a bristling, high voltage asymmetric throb that smells of ozone and ‘part three: feathered machinery’ is a 20 minute epic of digestive rumbling and guttering arc lights.  At the time of writing all five people who have heard it agree that it is (and I quote) “fucking great”.  Short clips can be heard by clicking here.

So how to get hold of it?  A word about Matching Head.  There is a partial (“65 submissions pending” – one of which presumably being #81, my first MH midwich tape) discogs page but otherwise Lee’s label has no significant web presence at all.  His catalogue is an A4 sheet of paper distributed samizdat style with orders and amongst those in the know (pdf of latest version I have to hand here – consider yourself one of the elite).  I’d suggest dropping him a line at lee_stokoe@hotmail.com and entering into correspondence about paypal etc.

And here is a little bonus for readers of this blog.  I realise that tape has been enjoying a renaissance over recent years but, for all its charms, the format is no longer convenient for some.  If you find yourself in that sorry category then do not fret.  When you buy the new midwich tape from Lee just ask him to forward your email address to me and I will then use the magic of WeTransfer or mediafire or the like to provide you with a high quality mp3 version of the album.  Thus for your few quid you will get a physical object and files playable on less romantic devices.  What service, eh?