RIP

What A Year Sounds Like

It really hasn't been a great year for Hip Hop but 2006 hasn't been a bad year for music.
Dubdog has been mostly nodding it's head to the following long players in the last 12 months. Some new, some re-issued, some new discoveries and some forgotten classics.

Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
The Au Pairs - Playing With A Different Sex
Beck - The Information
Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go
Broadcast - The Future Crayon
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Ballad Of The Broken Seas
The Clash - Combat Rock
The Damned - Machine Gun Ettiquette
The Delgados - Peloton
Easy Star All-Stars - Radiodread
The Ex - Turn
The Fall - The Complete Peel Sessions
Joe Gibbs & The Professionals - African Dub Chapter 3
Lambchop - Damaged
Massive Attack - Collected
The Nightingales - Out Of True
Niney The Observer - Microphone Attack 1974 - 1978
Public Enemy - Power To The People And The Beats
Adrian Sherwood - Becoming A Cliché
Sufjan Stevens - Illinoise
Mark Stewart - Kiss The Future
The Temptations - Psychedelic Soul
Trojan Records - Dread Broadcast Corp: Rebel Radio
Tunng - Pioneers EP, This is...Tunng & Comments Of The Inner Chorus
Tom Waits - Orphans
Wire - Pink Flag, Missing Chairs & 154
XTC - English Settlement
Thom Yorke - The Eraser

If You Want It

Evolution

Technology is moving so fast, growing around us like genetically modified ivy. We barely notice. We accept it. It is progress after all. But it is changing us. 12 years ago I didn’t know how to use a computer, never had one, been the wrong age at school. Now I use computers all the time. Barely a day goes by without that familiar DONG of a Mac booting up. This progress goes on around us without the blink of an eye. We are subsumed by it. We accept it. Before we know it we’re surrounded. We expect, and we take for granted. We are enriched, developed. Developing world - catch up. Our nature is being changed. We are evolving.

Something struck me while listening to Radio 4 one Sunday on the computer in my studio. My wife was listening to the same programme on a digital radio in the room directly below. The ‘live’ audience laughed below me, then a few seconds later they laughed in the room I was in. Later the News! Pips pipped. Then they pipped again. What time is now? Digital delay? That was a foot pedal I used when I was in a band. Now, which is reality and which is the delay? Can we rely on either?

When I was a boy I was obsessed with my first wristwatch telling the right time and I would set it daily against the pips. Time can no longer be trusted! What is now? What is experience? Time no longer matters. Sorry Flavor Flav, but knowing ‘what time it is’ is so old school, silly rabbit! We are evolving.

We no longer trust our ears. What is the point of the pips and Greenwich meantime now? We are developing a world supposedly better by design. Trust those that tell us this is the future. This is progress and progress can only go in one direction. Our mental environment is being re-calibrated. We are evolving.

A generation of teenagers know no different. Now is their benchmark. Now is their norm. Google is their first point of call for ideas – not their peers, not their environment, not their experiences, not their community. Art & design students rush to Google images for their source material instead of generating it for themselves. Wikipedia.org is editable ‘truth’. Like the ‘live’ audience, you just had to be there to know. Did it really happen if you didn’t witness it? Can you be sure it did happen if you were there and someone edits your version of events? Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound if no one is there to hear it? But that way is scary, that way leads to Holocaust denial. Can we catch the repeat, the listen again, the pod cast, the download? The future is here and the past has been left behind. We have evolved and I'm still making my mind up about it!

Steppin' out.

Greetings from Amsterdam 0.2

Greetings from Amsterdam 0.1

Slack Video screening

Lack of notice prevented a prior posting but Contractual Freedom was shown in Hull on 09/10/06 at a Slack Video event. Cheers Slackers.

October News

One Dubdog Design identity and business package job ongoing and a website for a local charity in the pipeline. Back into the swing of teaching now term's well and truly kicked in and off to Amsterdam for 5 days at the end of the month with 50 odd Art & Design students which will hopefully inspire something. Here in the UK, Dubdog is spreading itself further northwards, well Birmingham actually, with Contractual Freedom being given a screening later this year by 7 inch cinema. No details as yet but will post date here when I know.

Contractual Freedom

Made earlier this summer, the film 'Contractual Freedom' is a cynical sideswipe at the British Labour Government's ID Card proposal as well as a critique of the wider 'data state' we live in. Click on title to play - file size:12mb.

Songcards

As part of the F.E. Art & Design lecturing team at Suffolk College this is my submission to a postcard project we set students over their summer break. With a nod to T-Shirt design by both Experimental Jetset and Build, this is currently a set of 8 cards that might well develop into posters and further themed sets. Other artists in this series include The Special A.K.A, Outkast, Arctic Monkeys and Roots Manuva.

The Nightingales

It's been a busy summer here at Dubdog - made a film questioning data storage and ID cards called 'Contractual Freedom', taken on a new client for whom I'm designing a start-up business identity and been asked to produce a poster for an upcoming gig in Ipswich (see left) - the eighties revival continues with indie janglers The Nightingales reforming and promoting a new CD.

I protest.

My contribution to Alex Pearl's protest films. Watch it here.

Gravel Pit info

As requested, click on post title above.

Gravel Pit

It has been proposed that all this will disappear in favour of a gravel pit!
The banks of River Gipping, Suffolk.

Antigen

Summer Show

Noise Annoys, East Anglia, UK.

Ongoing Dubdog projects 0.1

Working alongside a long time collaborator who has had a finger in many a local band, I'm in the process of designing a website for any band that has passed through his hands. Under the moniker 'Antigen Records' (working title), the site will be a sort of family tree with downloads. Most of the bands will have played around Colchester and Ipswich during the late 1980s and 90s, some venturing to the big smoke and even treading international stages. Some are still recording/performing today. The content is being written as I type and will cover bands as diverse and undeserving as; Pindown, Bum Gravy, Elvispresley PLC, White Slug, Optimum Wound Profile, Earth Mother Fucker, Headbutt, Blur, Scudamor Ziadune, Haysel Dean and the Carp Enters from Hell, Gashed, Scarlet Dawn, Fuckhead, The Lost Connections, Extreme Noise Terror, Hex Minora, The Ballistics, Violent Playground...I could go on but chances are most people wont have heard of any of these bands (except maybe for one or two). It's a shame because some of them were actually quite good. The site promises to be highly entertaining and much of the music unlistenable. If anyone has anecdotes about any of the bands mentioned (that aren't libelous) or even better, lost recordings or video footage in your loft, please get in contact. The launch date is to be confirmed as paid work and social lives come first, but we are aiming for later this year.

Noise Annoys in NYC - 04.04.06