Flint and Food

On Thursday we went to the Pure Evil gallery in Shoreditch, London for the opening of Kev Foakes (aka Strictly Kev's) exhibition of album artwork from 'The Search Engine', a collaboration between him and Henry Flint, who made the drawings in ink and allowed Kev to colour them up.

The resultant album imagery you'll have already seen on the previous blog post ('11 Years In The Making'), but there's never anything like seeing artwork in the flesh, and we were able to stare at Henry's drawings one inch from our noses, and drink in the black ink at close range. Henry Flint is a comic book artist who works mainly for 2000AD. You'll see Judge Dredd makes an honorary appearance below, and his comic book work has the writhing, muscly appearance you'd associate with big superheroes wielding massive weapons and snarling metal-headed foes.

(I AM THE LAW)

But the stuff he did for Kev is personal work. It's still writhing but much more 'organic' looking - creatures stroll through the images, faces appear, and you can see the evidence of a family of ink pens allowed to do what they fancy, rather than the strict, carefully-spaced and space-filling narrative work of 2000AD. See here where he's scratched into the ink with something sharp (this was on tracing paper):

This is the main image Kev used in creating the artwork - lonely spaceman, charmingly knock-kneed and delicate hand held aloft. Kev's deleted the inkblots under his massive back pack (wouldn't be done if I was in charge!):

In other work on show, little people leap and hide and faces loom out of shapes and corners. Henry sometimes works with his daughter Rosalie, who contributed to a couple of pieces on show. She draws, and Dad fills in the details! Can you spot Rosalie's bits?

I took a swig of beer and made myself brave enough to approach Henry with a few questions. I'm not one to wander right up to 'famous people' or those I look up to, especially when there's a queue of other people doing the same, preferring to watch from afar and speculate. But I wanted to know what tools he uses. As usual I shouldn't have fretted about appearing a goon; Henry was quietly charming and not at all the Comic Book Uber-Geek I foolishly expected. He talked me through all of his different pens - 'whatever comes to hand' was a common theme! - but the answer was mainly fine liners and the odd Rotring. He didn't mention an ink, but I think he must have one in his artillery in order to get those splats. I felt bad for not buying his book, but we'd just spent the last tenner on...

...one of these, a limited run of 30 postcard-sized records, which were, for obvious reasons, in high demand on the night. We managed to get one, but the pile was gone only an hour later. Check it: tiny but playable grooves on an A6 full colour plastic postcard. Sweet! (we haven't played it yet...not sure whether we will!) Number 22 of 30.

The night had the same warmth and joy as the Planetarium event, Kev beaming with the contentment (and relief) of a man for whom everything's gone smoothly, and he can relax a bit finally. We know that feeling from doing any shows ourselves, and in particular the immense amount of work that goes into producing one, and we've often wondered why Kev's not held or been part of a show of his visual work before. 'Look at me having exhibitions!' he was finally able to beam as we walked in. Indeed Kev - except you hired the Planetarium and made a record with one of your music heroes! Matt Johnson (The The) was at the show, but again..my nerves forced me to turn back as before I could tell him 'if it wasn't for your albums I doubt I'd be doing this job' (but that's another blog...!)

A contented Kev with a deserved beer:

Henry and his wife:

And this photo could have been taken at any time at any Ninja gig in the last fifteen years - lights on faces, music too loud to speak over, a chilly underground room...and check the old banner! Ah... (Kev also made a 12" slip mat on his inkjet, colourful and cute and sitting on his little record player on the stage. it was still there when we left, but it had 'cheeky souvenir' written all over it!)

Right then Kev, thanks for everything - we'll be expecting you to top that lot next time, OK?

You can read about Henry Flint here:
http://henryflint.wordpress.com/

and DJ Food here:
http://www.djfood.org

and his and Henry's collaborative album artwork is for sale as prints here:
http://scraffer.com/shop/?p=116

11 years in the making.

'In the past, trying to listen to everything has almost destroyed my desire to listen to anything' - David Toop*

Sometime in 1995, I was living in my grandparent's house and had just brought home a new fax machine. About a year before, we had begun to buy records on a new label called Ninja Tune. They were ace. They weren't like anything I'd ever heard before, knowing Coldcut only from 'that Yazz single', but we liked them a lot. (There was another label called Mo 'Wax which, if you recall the 90s Blur vs Oasis side-taking, was said to have shared a similar rivalry with Ninja Tune - though we're pretty sure this was just music press hype.)

We went to the clubs, we read the interviews, we listened to the relevant shows. And we admired the artwork. One day, in a fit of enthusiasm, we decided to send a fax to Openmind, the mysterious creative hand responsible for all of Ninja's artwork. You know, just to tell them how much we loved their stuff.

That the fax never made it to him didn't stop a friendship forming that was to last longer than our early-twenties imagination was capable of envisioning back then. Kev Foakes was Openmind, and my fax was full of clever plays on words, praise for his typographical trickery and unashamed admiration (read and replied to, with gentle amusement, by Openmind the children's TV company). Kev Foakes was also, it turned out, Strictly Kev, one half of DJ Food, and responsible for the music as well as the art.

On Thursday 19th January we went to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich to take part in the launch of his latest album, The Search Engine. As one part of DJ Food he's made many albums with collaborators DK and PC, but this album is entirely his own, and has been gestating for eleven years - a period in which he's not only become a father (twice), but taken an entire year off from his own music to design the enormous amount of collateral generated for the Ninja Tune XX 20-year anniversary (which yes, does make us feel our age). It was also a period in which the quote by David Toop above, taken from his album sleeve, became very relevant in our musical lives. Breathtaking changes to the way music was bought and sold, discovered and shared created a period of uncertainty and anxiety in which physical releases were no longer a 'given', promo releases stopped coming through the door and record shops on which we depended for new gear (and to which we sold our own goodies) closed. Factor in the loss of John Peel and dramatic changes to radio programming, and you begin to sense the slow panic induced by the loss of the structure on which we depended for our musical life blood.

Unless you lived through this dramatic shift in the landscape it might be difficult to communicate the joy and warmth of a creation delivered so thoroughly, so carefully and with such consideration as The Search Engine. Against a backdrop of thousands of pushed-out digital releases, faceless tracks composed only of pixels and megabytes (of which we have plenty), Kev's beautifully considered offering of CD LP, lovely-quality book containing CD and gold-and-silver Flexidisc, sticker and poster, along with music postcards and a show of original artwork at a London gallery, is breathtaking. He chose the Planetarium to launch it, perfect of course for the space theme of the album, an elegant venue which saw Kev 'making their stuff do things it wasn't designed to do'.

Using the Planetarium as screen, viewers sat with upturned faces, mouths full of flying saucers as familiar images hoved into view. Slices of Henry Flint's detailed space-machine illustrations were kaleidoscoped, chopped and woven across the circular screen, appearing to move up, away and then bearing down on us with sometimes horrific intensity, all the while playing to the now-familiar tracks of the album. Since this album was created one EP at a time, released a few months apart, hearing the album was like Skypeing a friend for a couple of years - when you finally get to meet them for the first time, you feel already know them, even though there are still some nice surprises. The nearness of the screen and the handful of seats made it feel all the more like it was put on 'just for us'.

Images of moon, stars, nebula, dark matter and space dust placed our tiny existences firmly into context with the certainty of Carl Sagan, but also gave the whole thing the sense of a man who's had time to reflect on his life and his creations, and is gently pleased with both. There's a generosity to this release that we're not sure we've encountered before, even in the heady days of flamboyant vinyl releases full of gimmicks and treats - because it goes further than just the products themselves; an appropriate venue, nice staff, a considerate release schedule, and careful, rich artwork, combining state of the art technological experiments with a rebirth of one of the oldest, the Flexidisc. The show wasn't perfect; the little flaws were still there, just enough to keep it organic and away from being an Amon Tobin style smoke-and-mirrors-behemoth (brilliant as that was). it had an otherworldliness, you could say.

I recommend a listen. The album features in this mix by Pinch, Strictly Kev and DK, with an interview with Strictly Kev at the end:
http://ninjatune.net/article/2012/jan/20/solid-steel-radio-20-01-2012-pinch-dk-strictly-kev

The offical review of the actual show:

http://www.djfood.org/djfood/planetarium-post-mortem

Details for his forthcoming show at the Pure Evil gallery:

http://ninjatune.net/article/2012/jan/10/dj-food-and-henry-flint-at-the-pure-evil-gallery 

and Kev's website is here:
http://www.djfood.org

Footnote: *David Toop (born 5 May 1949) is an English musician and author, and as of 2001 was visiting Research Fellow in the Media School at London College of Communication. He was notably a member of The Flying Lizards. A prominent contributor to the British magazine The Face, he also is a regular contributor to The Wire, the UK based music magazine.

The shape of things that hum.

I'm in the mood for talking about some things by other people that I like. Talking about your own work gets really boring sometimes!

My friend Kev sent me his new record recently, 'The Shape Of Things That Hum' on Ninja Tune records. Kev is better known as Strictly Kev (I never have found out why), of the DJ Food outfit and I do need to point out we were buying his records long before we started getting free ones! *winking emoticon*.

This one's a bloody corker though. Not that the others haven't been, I play A Recipe for Disaster (listen to it here and/or buy it here) a lot, even though it must be cocking on for 14 years old (my partner prefers Kaleidoscope), it's just that this one comes with exquisite art (Kev is also the Charlie Big Potato designer for Ninja) and we can't stop listening to it. The artwork is jewel-like and very pretty; it looks a bit like a mad man with a healthy dose of OCD has gone into a jeweller's, smashed up all the gems, and calmly re-arranged them all on the big shop windows with glue then shone a light through them.

The line work for the art is by Henry Flint, whose detailed writhing comic book art work you'll have to seek out in a non-web format as he does not have a site of his own. (Strangely refreshing, that). Kev has painstakingly coloured these images retrospectively and 'against all the odds'...


And it's a killer package too - big juicy poster and download and there's a DVD to go with it. But the main thing is that it really sounds like someone who's taken time to ruminate and masticate and all those other things you have to do to stir up a really fresh brew. It takes time. It still sounds like DJ Food, but DJ Food gone away for a bit and had time to fondle some new sounds and play for days on end with robots. Because this does have a robot theme, you see; Kev is a big fan of the mechanical man, and this suits me just fine because if I only ever had to watch Iron Man and Robocop and Terminator and all their sequels for the rest of my cinema-going days, I'd be a happy geek, though not quite as happy a robo-geek as Kev himself:

It hangs together really well and the sound seems, if I may so bold, more fulsome. More reverb and bass. Still very Kev though - narrative vocals, jazzy bits, groovy percussion (groovy in the old-fashioned sense of the word) and ... an element of minor threat lurking beneath. Or at least a warning.

The other thing is the cover / re-invention of one of my favourite artist's tracks, 'Giant' by The The. I put the record on without reading any liner notes (always do, listen first read later) and kept thinking, bloody hell! This is cheeky! But Matt Johnson and Kev have been friends for a long time, so it only made sense that they'd collaborate on something like this eventually. There's a fresh vocal being recorded for it too, which I can't wait to hear. The The was the inspiration behind my 'O' level art exam project (don't laugh) and to this day I go all tingly when I hear the opening notes of 'This Is The Day'.
Cheers Kev for sending it and making it in the first place, and may there be lots more. Kev's studio by the way is one we should all aspire to - tidy, clean and decorated with all things visually delicious and design-tastic - have a look. (Then go and tidy up in an embarrassed frenzy!)