Kaleidoscope

Last month the DJ Food album 'Kaleidoscope' had its 20 year anniversary.

It's obviously a strange time right now in which things like birthdays and anniversaries, anything with associated memories or emotional significance, arrive with additional gravitas and tend to trigger a period of reflection and pondering. We've been on 'lockdown' for such a short time relatively speaking, but we're already pining for suspended associations and swerving off down nostalgic paths of reminiscence. This particular record's anniversary has had us reflecting for a few weeks!

DJ Food is really called Kevin Foakes (but see below) and has been a chum for about a quarter of a century. It feels completely bizarre to type that, having been a bunch of cocky, sleep-deprived twenty-somethings when we first met, with the concept of middle-age not even a speck on the horizon of expectation, but here we are.

'Kaleidoscope' the album was released in 2000 and was the first DJ Food album produced by PC and Strictly Kev, two producers who'd been part of a larger squad known as 'DJ Food' for a few years, around a core of Matt Black and Jonathan More, themselves otherwise known as Coldcut. So Kevin Foakes is Strictly Kev - come on, keep up - everyone's got a DJ name haven't they? (Well we should, even if we don't DJ) - and it was buying and playing his records on the new and exciting Ninja Tune label from the early 90s that brought him into our line of sight (he designed the label's iconic logo).

In the early to mid 90s Leigh and I were fast and furious, setting the pace for future life, playing, buying, performing and reviewing records with a voracious appetite. With no 'online' or streaming - just tapes, CDs and vinyl - music was sourced through record shops, gigs, trips to London, word of mouth, sharing and swapping, making tapes for each other, radio (both legit and otherwise) and through hassling record companies for their new releases. We were just beginning to play regularly on a pirate radio station in 1997, and 'acquired' much of our material by telling record companies just that, who in turn were eager to get their releases heard by the people who were bored with the mainstream and would be the hands that spun the records on the turntables of clubs and festivals. If you wrote an honest review and faxed it back to the label, your feedback helped shape what was released and in what form (this remix or that one?) and the deal worked handsomely in both directions.

      

We met Kev in 1995 or 6. We were fans, and I'd sent a keen and wordy fax from my Grandma's vacant bungalow where we were living. I'd sent it to what I thought was his Openmind fax number - that being the design and art direction side of his operation - by phoning directory enquiries for the number. We knew roughly where he/Ninja were based, so when a London number came back I didn't question it. I think it was a children's television company who politely rang me back to say 'wrong number, but thanks for the enthusiasm' - so I tried again, I think via Ninja direct.

Either way, we got through and swapped a few faxes (the phone phaux pas breaking what little ice there might have been), talking about music and art and life until at some point, Kev pointed out I didn't have to keep faxing, we could just have a phone chat. So we did!

And that was the beginning of a friendship that went on longer than any of us could even be bothered to think about at that time. Leigh and I went to gigs, we visited, drank tea, we swapped little pressies; we made him post-gig cakes, he gave us records and coveted guest list spots. Nevertheless, when April 2000 rolled around, the annoying millennium guff finally out of the way, and we received an advance CD copy of 'Kaleidoscope' with a hand-written note, we were chuffed to bits.

It was a barking mad but brilliant record made of cue balls, jazz, riffs, big meaty breaks, velvety Ken Nordine voiceovers, the near-goth sulk of 'The Crow' and some Debussy. You could dance your bollocks off to it (let's say in Hoxton Square's so-cool-it-got-annoying Blue Note, long since closed) or noodle away to it in an armchair with headphones,  pontificating about the samples and nodding. Or, in my case particularly, you could get a shitload of work done to it, such was its pace and absorbing texture. It never, ever feels old, or tired; we're wary of nostalgia, and are reluctant reminiscers, so we never like to ruin a good record by loading it with too much memory or colouring it with one of those emotional time-stamps from which it can never progress. Thankfully, though, this record never succumbed to that; as well as being very much of its time, 'Kaleidoscope' was always well ahead of its time, so it's still as fresh and silly and ornery as the day we first played that CD.

What 'Kaleidoscope' always was was a 'trip' - in both senses of the word. Composed of what feel like two distinct halves, the album is nonetheless a journey, rollocking through tracks which flow into one another despite being very different from each other (hmm, I sound like an apprentice music reviewer...) You can dip into it repeatedly, if you just, for example, fancy the pick-me-up of 'The Riff', or the soothing goth-tinged murk of 'Nevermore', a swooping fantastical thing of whispers which erupts into a drum frenzy of trumpets and cymbal crashes.

One of the noticeable features of the DJ Food albums that Kev had more of an influence on - those he worked on with PC or, later, solo - is that sense of a voyage, with stops along the way, rather than a collection of separate tracks. They're more like epics - 'The Search Engine' is something of a magnum opus - than the early DJ Food albums which were essentially a box of DJ tools which you could remove one at a time and fit to your DJ set! We adored them though, because nothing like that really existed before; they spoke to our love of beats, scratching and hip-hop, and also ANYTHING coming out of Ninja at that time was exciting and novel. Picture these albums arriving at about the same time as Portishead, also new and vivid, and you can begin to visualise the scene. (I also thought the knife and fork in the Food logo were supremely clever.)

What Kev's always done is something we feel we've always done too: projects that he WANTS to do, which may or may not work, and are certainly not driven or shaped by commercial outcomes or monetary gain. 

If it's interesting, creative, hasn't been done before and represents a bit of a challenge - and we think we people will enjoy it - we'll give it a go. Our working lives have been peppered with projects that wouldn't make any commercial sense - in that they cost us more to do than they will ever return - because we want to do them, and we think we can do them, and because we're only on the planet once. We've been inspired by Kev for many years; who memorably told us "I look forward to Mondays, I can do exactly what I want every day of the week".

Take his 4-tonearm turntable project for example. When he told us what he was plotting to do last year, we were delighted at this gleeful release of the (not so inner) nerd, being an investigation into using four tonearms on a single turntable. It's more sophisticated than that of course, but I'm writing as a turntable outsider with almost no technical knowledge. He's also got the confidence to recruit his heroes into his work - weaving his writing, archiving and design prowess into live projects based on his love of Frankie Goes To Hollywood and all thing ZTT, for example, and bringing in "The" Matt Johnson to work with him on his own cover of The The's GIANT, a boyhood favourite, on 'The Search Engine'. Bold moves, you might say, but it shows you really can work with your heroes when you're offering something creatively interesting, relevant and authentic.

Now sharing all of the outcomes of his new turntable experiments with locked grooves and effects on Bandcamp under his new label Infinite Illectrik, you can hear the present and future sound of DJ Food.

 

Kev and his music have remained in our lives ever since we first made contact, through over two decades of creativity, house moves, a wedding, new albums, kids, life and evolving careers. Funny, kind, prolific and a total realist (not to mention hardcore archivist and mighty handy with the pencils and a Mac) he was the first person we thought of to feature in our 'Stupid Enough' documentary - about how real people carve out creative careers for themselves - and we liked his 'Search Engine' album and ensuing body of visual work with Henry Flint so much that we put on an exhibition of it in our little gallery space. We hope we'll creatively cross paths again in our lifetimes, we just have no idea yet what form that might take, if it does.

So I suppose having said all of that 'Kaleidoscope' is loaded with emotions and memories, just not the sort that hobble you with backwards glances in the middle of doing something, or leave you thinking 'those were the days'. Those WERE some days, and then there've been all these other days too, since, full of more music, and friendship, and laughing inappropriately at things in the small hours.

It's awkward to write about your friend when you're also still a fan of them, but what a wonderful thing to be feeling awkward about.

~ † ~

'Kaleidoscope' can be heard on Apple Music or Spotify

can be bought from Ninja Tune

or read about in more detail on Kev's massive and incredibly thorough blog

DJ Food's visual work can be explored here

and he has a busy Mixcloud collection here, which is added to weekly.

A Mole Playlist: Contrary January

Well it has been hasn’t it? Grim, chilly, all self-denial and sobriety; the B-word and T-word boring and scaring us in equal measure. Now it’s snowing! And my first collection of chunes for 2019 is ready to listen to.

I've been doing monthly playlists since July. I've compiled them for a few years, one here and one there when the mood seized me, a way of trying to manhandle a gargantuan, messy, five-figure iPod/iTunes collection while keeping abreast of the avalanche of marvellous new gear that's released every week. For a while there was a period where we felt ourselves in suspended animation as crate-digging hovered between trawling the record shops for The New Hot Shit, hurling cash over the counter for a record on which only one of the tracks was 'the one' and taking risks on things you might not like by the time you got home, and developing systems to keep track of the glut of new, easily-missed releases online. (As record shop after record shop closed we feared the worst, but what followed, of course, was a well-documented vinyl resurgence the likes of which no-one could have predicted.)

And just like my 13 year old self, I get to draw the artwork for each one.

So. Strictly not a mix - more like the kind of radio set we used to do on our pirate radio stations, all gusto, 3am chips and endless tea - this is a two-C90-tape (or three ish hour!) collection of loosely-assembled new discoveries, electronic soothers, 4-to-the-floors - and a minor bangathon in the middle. 

There's Bicep, Fourtet, Leon Vynehall, Bawrut, UNKLE, Planningtorock, Thundercat, Max Cooper, Clouds, Fontaines D.C., Orbital, slowthai, Cid Rim - and a heavy contingent of women: Kelly Moran, Holly Walker, Róisín Murphy, Karen O, Junior, Ninna Lundberg, Otha, Julia Jacklin. And more, because there's always more!

There'll be another one in February, and I know that because I've already started it!

👉Listen on iTunes 👉 OR, if you haven’t got Apple Music, you can listen to this one *here* on Mixcloud 

Tinselsnakes.

In 2015 I sent a few hundred special objects out into the world, the product of two years’ development working with talented mates and colleagues. A unique Christmas release harking back to the storybook records of my childhood - Puff The Magic Dragon, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and others - Tinselsnakes, as it came to be called, is a 7” snow-white vinyl record, complete with glow-in-the-dark custom-made record adapter and full colour illustrated picture book.

My daily work is fast and furious, turned around in sometimes what feels like record time for demanding clients on urgent projects. Even the long ones don’t really feel like they have much time to ‘stew’. When I do get a chance at a personal project, they always feel like they take ages, or ‘too long’, when in fact what I’ve come to learn is this is actually just the length they should be, and with no-one but us telling me when something's finished, they really can be subjected to endless tweaking and furtling.

Two years seems a lot when you look at the small, full colour book that might have dropped through your door just before Christmas, but there is an awful lot in there, and here is why it took so long - and why it’s a good job it did. But why did we spend an incalculable amount of time and money on a thing I was just planning to give away? Because it was time, and my clients deserve nice, interesting things, especially at Christmas - and because I get a chance to make something personal and off the clock, for better or for worse!

Ed Garland’s worked with Inkymole for many years, contributing words as inspiration for, and the basis of, many projects over time. He was the voice of the Pendle Witches in ‘The Witches’, wrote Kaleidoscope Gloop for 2013’s Christmas project, and has made shout lines, short stories and paragraphs for all manner of projects, some of which have won prizes (which we sent Ed to collect on our behalf!) He’s published two of his own novels and writes every day, consuming books like hot whiskey-laced cups of tea on a freezing cold morning.

His writing is ornery, unpredictable, studiedly rough-textured and undulating, so he was the only person who could possibly write the dark little story I wanted for this project. We needed one story, told three ways - the 'Child's Story', which I would illustrate with pictures; 'Daddy's Story', which would be narrated, and 'Mummy's Story', to be read. It was also practise for him at writing in a child’s voice (though he’d done this before, as Jennet the treacherous nine-year-old Pendle Witch), and as both male and female characters. In January 2014, we met in a Bristol pub, and thrashed out the brief.

I also made Ed a little notebook full of pictures, photographs and sketches, ideas to steer the story, pulling imagery from my own library, drawings, collections and online bits. It took four or five more pub meets and conversations to reach the story that made it into the book, with the first version being fabulous and gory - I loved it - but way too murky for client consumption (I’ve saved it nonetheless, of course).

While the tracks were off being made into records, the final part of the job fell to me, making the storybook. Hm, scary. I had always known how the book would look, using the ink-driven, slightly unpredictable style I’d been working with for a few months prior and which utilises slices of inked paper and textures to create quite simple, atmospheric illustrations - a far cry from the line-made, heavily art-directed detail-filled work I’ve become so known for. This was not to be a typographically heavy book either - I wanted the images to speak for themselves and be more about the ‘feel’ of the story. So I went for it, ‘for better or for worse’, a large chunk of the illustrations produced in the grip of a perfectly-timed seasonal chest infection! (As we all know by now, the show must always go on.)

Once the story and pictures were honed, we needed someone to read 'Daddy's Story' aloud in classic narrator style to be captured on record. The perfect voicebox for the job was owned by B.Dolan, Strange Famous record label resident, Rhode Island rapper and spoken word poet who I’d worked with before on projects professional and personal. If you haven’t heard his deep, rounded chocolate tones, check them out on the recording - you can see instantly why Bernard was The Perfect Man For The Job. More used to terrifying booms of political and poetic resonance, here was no Jackanory presenter - but whether he could fit in our request in the middle of prepping and album and a tour was another thing. To our eternal relief, he liked the story, and made the time - I cried a bit with excitement when we played the initial digital file.

Just look at him - bedtime stories will never be the same!

Bernard managed to punctuate and intone the story in unexpected ways, bringing punch and clarity while somehow infusing the piece with a breathy holiday excitement, despite neither the words ‘Christmas' nor ‘Holiday' appearing anywhere in the piece. The ‘relentless prose’ (the feedback of a recipient) which begins with the words ‘Deranged I may be’ and ends with ‘a mutilated splendour’ was brought to fulsome ruddy-cheeked life in just 3 minutes 14 seconds (there’s a full transcript of the narrated story at the end of this blog).

Awesome (and I use that word in its classical sense) as it sounded on its own, the vocal needed the backing of some music to give it context, and for that Bernard's right-hand collaborator in music Buddy Peace was recruited. Prolific, charming and skilled, Buddy was also in the white-hot core of album production and tour prep, but put a lively, perambulating backdrop behind the narration with just the right placement of sparkles, twinkling bells and the sounds, somehow, of snow. We too were away in Baltimore by this time, busily working up a live-filmed mural for a hotel chain, so the whole exchange of back-and-forth creative honing was completed from iPhone to iPhone 3000 miles away.

The logistics of mastering were conducted by the same company who master the vinyl of one of my favourite electronic artists, and took much longer than you might expect - it’s a detailed thing, with track length to consider, playing speed, grooves in and grooves out, whether to ‘lock’ them, and what you want inside the space near the label. Much discussion was had about me travelling down to the masterers to hand-etch the centre space with illustrations, but the final word was that they were too nervous to let me do that. I protested hard of course! Scaredy cats.

With ink-drawn labels designed for A side (vocal and music) and B side (vocal only), and with the mastering approved by all, they went off to be squashed onto cobs of white vinyl and magically turned into records.

The book went to press with Jason, from a printing company auditioned from many to be just right the right people for the job, and we waited for the books and the records to arrive.

What happened next was the reason the project went into hypersleep for a year, and the reason I’m eternally grateful I made those little Christmas cards to send out ahead of time. Though sent to the pressing plant in plenty of time, our little record (500 copies) was, in actual fact, being shoved aside repeatedly for weeks while The Big Guys, unbeknownst to us, were placing orders for massive Christmas re-issues and Christmas-market releases. Having always believed the timeline to be generous, and not believing that such a culture of queue-jumping really existed, distinctly unseasonal bells started ringing when no news became bad news at the start of December. Apparently, this is a known phenomenon among record producers, and by all accounts there doesn’t seem to be a lot one can do about it, if you’re one of the 'little guys’.

Out went the ‘Announcing Tinselsnakes’ Christmas cards while we tried to get a final word on the delivery, and juggle printer’s questions about whether to deliver the now-printed items or not. Still no records. At some point we accepted the pressing plant had scuppered our project for the year, told the printer to store the books for us, and yielded to a disappointed gloom. Still, we thought, we have a year of knowing our 2015 Christmas project is already done!

On Christmas Eve 2014, at noon, the records arrived. I couldn’t bring myself to open the box as I was so furious about all our hard work - as I saw it then - being wasted. When Leigh eventually did, we found they’d been pressed without the holes in the middle for the specially-made adapters, and couldn’t therefore be used anyway.

This is how they SHOULD have looked:

To add to the pain of the initial treacherous delay, the faulty records were picked up by the pressing plant and re-pressed within the space of a week - further suggesting that we really could have got them in time to run the project if we hadn’t been bumped down the list. Up into the loft the finished records went, we took the website down, closed the shop, and carried on with our year, which proved to be unexpectedly busy and exciting.

In the late summertime of 2015, as planned, we took the project out of hibernation and re-examined the artwork, making some small adjustments to the book and its details; some dates needed to be changed anyway, so we took the chance to add and improve upon some things. After designing and printing some ‘Announcing Tinselsnakes’ postcards, sent in November to let people know what was coming, we made the little video in front of the wood-burner to show the beautiful white vinyl in action, re-designed a fresh website from scratch and re-opened the BigCartel shop.



This all happened against a backdrop of weeks of forensic checking on my address book, buying glitter and enough tinsel to decorate every tree in Hinckley, which left ‘just’ the hand-writing of the specially-made accompanying Christmas cards and all of the wrapping and posting to be done, a third of which were destined for foreign shores.

*Do*not*ever* underestimate (as I annually do, like the proverbial forgetful goldfish) the time involved in hand-writing over 700 cards with every recipient’s name, hand-tying the same amount of tinsel, hand-glittering all those covers, hand-stamping 700 board envelopes (and setting up three different versions of the type blocks beforehand) and applying stamps, stickers and labels. The project took over the entire ground floor for weeks, and turned us into factory-floor workers with awkward social lives and, yes, sore hands.

3 parcels Fedexed to the US, 23 sent to different parts of the globe and the rest flung into the furthest reaches of the British Isles, and the job

is

DONE.

We hope you had a lovely Christmas!

If you didn’t get a Tinselsnake but would like one, you can still get one here.


tinselsnakes.net

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'Deranged I may be, but sober as a hammer and nearly as useful, these days.

Having enlisted the help of people who’d left the pub but didn’t really want to go home yet, tipped-off the local news that something unlikely but believable was about to happen near the river, and warned the family at home to tune in while they decorated the walls, I glued the silver tinselsnakes to my eyebrows and got to work.

Now the word “warned”implies a level of threat that I didn’t intend to bring about. I wanted them to think of it more as a hearty recommendation. But as I watched them swallow their questions I thought “they’re taking this more seriously than I’d like”. And I suppose I have this history of announcing projects that never come off, but two weeks ago I’d bought a van, and started sticking eyebrows to my face every morning, before work, looking in the hall mirror and telling our watching spawn that “equilibrium starts in the face.” Being a tinsel-eyed man in a van asking shiny-faced and whooping people to come and help me do something worthwhile, I was surprised by the amount of shiny-eyed and whooping participants I was able to gather. Maybe it’s the way you ask them. They didn’t seem threatened. They seemed drunk, sure, but so does everyone whenever there’s no friction on the pavement. They asked what exactly it was I was planning to make. I said “proof”.

So when we got to the hill, most of them were out the door before I’d stopped the van. The people who were already on the hill kind of scampered away, towards the bridge, which was closed to vehicles and full of stalls and lit up like an emergency service. “But what’s this proof going to physically consist of?” someone chirped. “A reindeer head”, I said. “Of a decent stature. Think magnificent.” Immediately two bare red glistening hands moulded a snowball, and rolled it through the knee-deep white, and were joined by other hands, up and down the hill until the ball was like a small car wrapped in freezing fluff, and came to a rest looking at the bridge and the gorge and the river below.

They stopped and turned to me and asked “now what?”, and from the back of the van I took my saws and sticks and scoops, and set to work on the lump, pretty pleased with myself because they seemed impressed by the speed I was sculpting and were passing round a hip flask and didn’t mind when I realised I’d forgotten the ears. Two of them went off and ten minutes later came back with two flat lumps looking like small warped televisions, mounted on thick sticks, which they thrust into the head at almost the right locations. I’d forgotten the novelty of having people take my suggestions on board.

I didn’t notice the camera people arrive. One of them was awfully inquisitive. I said a lot of I-don’t-knows and maybes, gave the family a shout out, pulled a serious face and got back to directing the nose details, which were being finessed by a sparrow-handed lady in what looked like diamond gloves, while a man with a lion’s beard settled two black bowling balls into its eye-sockets.

We stopped. It stared at the bridge and grinned every time a passing car’s lights swept its eyes. Its constructors took pictures and began to leave. We didn't intend the head to be so big: we didn't think the snow'd be so abundant.

Just as the camera crew departed, the right eye slipped out of its socket, rolled through the downhill snow, hit a rock at the edge of the gorge, and sailed like a lacquered comet into the river. It was out of sight before we heard the splash, and its absence lent the sculpture a mutilated splendour.'