Keep Warm

Mr. Weatherall returned to the controls at BBC 6 Mix last night and played his usual eclectic selection, including a couple of his own forthcoming remixes, one a techno/rockabilly/glam remix for Soft Rocks and another other for The Horrors. Amongst it all he played a song by Warm Digits, a duo who’ve released their debut album Keep Warm With…The Warm Digits on Newcastle’s Distraction Records, and very good it is too. The album’s over at emusic and other digital outlets or you can order the double vinyl from the band website or Distraction. Piccadilly Records, fine record emporium that it is, made my eyebrows raise slightly wanting £22 for the record. It’s less from the band site. Weatherall describes Warm Digits as ‘machine funk kraut-a-delia’ and I can’t come up with a better label, but suffice to say they were very good, a bit like a less head-splitting Fuck Buttons.

Weapons Destruction

>Lone Star Psych

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Another track by a band featured on Weatherall’s 6 Mix show last weekend, this time from The Black Angels, a psych rock band from Texas. They make the kind of 60s influenced dark psych-rock that seems to be part of the birthright of people from Austin , Texas. Maybe they pump it into the water supply over there. The Black Angels released an album last year called Phosphene Dream, which is now on my shopping list.

River_of_Blood.mp3

>Cosmic

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Another track that’s come from Andrew Weatherall’s 6 Mix record box (which is where half the new stuff I hear comes from these days). This one is from the show he did last Sunday night. In the last half hour Weatherall played his customary 30 minute disco mix, where we were treated to a Weatherall remix of Alice Gold, his own cover of AR Kane’s A Love From Outer Space (original featured here last summer) and his remix of this- Stratus by Pablo. There’s almost nothing about Pablo from a cursary internet search other than he’s actually called Michael Hunter, is from Glasgow, has released this single through Soma, and it’s ‘cosmic synth dub disco’. It’s very good cosmic synth dub disco too. If anyone knows anything else, please write in, usual address, no prizes though it’s just for fun.

Stratus.mp3

>Route 1

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White Williams is an American artist whose music I first heard when Andrew Weatherall played his first 6 Mix show a few years back. White’s record label said the album Smoke is ‘unapologetic pop that flirts with the vacuous nostalgia of the American dream; engaging ambiguous and schizophrenic instruments with impressionistic lyrics; driven by a casually heterosexual backbeat’. Got that? A heterosexual backbeat. I assume this is supposed to be ‘ironic’.

This song Route To Palm mixes synths with a vaguely rockabilly guitar line and is really rather good. The album also has a decent cover version of I Want Candy. Other than this, I know nothing.

Route_To_Palm.mp3

>There’s Been A Brainwave At The Radio Station

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Two pieces of wireless related news as Bagging Area toys with becoming an online listings service. Andrew Weatherall, featured once or twice round these parts, is in the chair on 6 Mix tonight (Sunday) from 8 until 10. Don’t touch that dial.

On Tuesday night Mick Jones is on Radio 2, also from 8 o’clock, with Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie talking about The Clash and Big Audio Dynamite. The original line up of B.A.D. have reformed for a tour this spring to play their still wonderful, groundbreaking first album (Medicine Show, The Bottom Line, and E=MC2 are all firm favourites) and hopefully this 1986 follow up, C’Mon Every Beatbox- a rush of guitars, samples, machine drums and catchy lyrics. B.A.D. play Manchester on Friday April 8th, the day we drive off for a week away. Bugger. I’m currently weighing up Liverpool and Leeds as alternatives.

02 C\’mon Every Beatbox.wma

Dangerous Liaisons

This is the third post that comes from the Weatherall Screamadelica influences show last weekend, and a new one for me (and isn’t that what good radio djing is about? Opening your ears to stuff you haven’t heard before mixed in with with records you like). This is Liaisons Dangereuse 1981 record Los Ninos Del Parque, described by Audrey Witherspoon as ‘acid house before acid house had a name’. A reviewer at Discogs says of it- ‘equally cold and dark, yet sensual and exotic’. To Bagging Area’s ears this is a tough sounding early electronic dance record, stuffed full of post-punk stylings. However you want to describe it, it’s good stuff, and hey, it’s Friday night. Bottoms up.

Los Ninos Del Parque.mp3

Mind Duly Blown

Another track from Sunday’s Screamadelica special when Andrew Weatherall played the tracks that inspired Primal Scream’s 1991 album. This is Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) by The Delfonics, an epic piece of funky Philly soul from 1969. Mind blowing outfits too.

Delfonics, The – Didn_’t I Blow Your Mind This Time.mp3#1#1

Some People Think They Jive Me

That Weatherall Screamadelica show on 6 Mix on Sunday night revealed a wide range of influences on the making of the album, from PiL to dub, Can, proto acid house, Eno, The Delfonics, Suicide and Dennis Wilson and more. It’s widely available at blogs all over the place (have a look at the links on the right, or head straight to the reborn Ripped In Glasgow). One of the tracks Weatherall played was this one- I Walk On Gilded Splinters by Johnny Jenkins. I’ve had the Dr John original for years, an 18 carot gold song if ever there was one, but had never heard this version by Johnny Jenkins from his Ton-Ton Macoute! album. So a little internet jiggery-pokery and voila- I Walk On Gilded Splinters by Johnny Jenkins. Jenkins employed a young Otis Redding, and later played with Duane Allman, who contributes some wild guitar to this. Top stuff.

Johnny Jenkins – I Walk On Gilded Splinters.mp3

Saturday Dub

Weatherall played this on his 6 Mix show in August, and then I stumbled upon it on emusic the other night. From their 1975 album The Legendary Skatalites In Dub, dubbery provided by equally legendary King Tubby. If you’ve any interest in dub the whole album is knockout- I listened to it the other night while typing away at a mammoth report/review for work, and it made the whole experience vastly better.

Skatalites_08_African Roots Dub.mp3

Woods ‘Blood Dries Darker’

Woods are a ‘psychedelic folk rock band’ from New York. Wait, come back, this is good. I know the words psychedelic and folk and rock don’t normally get the pulse racing, but this track has a real fuzzy, woozy charm. I don’t know much about them, but Weatherall played this on his 6 Mix show a couple of weeks ago, and it sounded great. I downloaded the album from e-music but havn’t got round to listening to it yet. This post is dribbling away from me isn’t it?

Bagging Area is looking forward to the England-USA game tonight, albeit gritted teeth and the fear that we’ll be awful. Not sure from the picture that Woods look like big soccerball fans, but you never know. Good luck to Drew, JC and North Country Bhoy playing Glasgow’s Flying Duck this evening at Blog Rocking Beats. I’m sure all my Scottish readers will get down there after they’ve cheered England on for 90 minutes.

4shared.com – online file sharing and storage – download Blood Dries Darker.mp3