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.

On The Radio

Today is World Radio Day, and although I'm not doing anything specially audio-related today, it's caused me to reflect on our life-long relationship with the wireless.

Mine and Leigh's involvement with radio goes back a long way. As a child I listened to my Mum's radio plays as she stitched, knitted or cooked, getting deeply involved in the imaginary worlds emanating from the speaker. Later, John Peel, Tim Westwood and Annie Nightingale would shape my life-long musical preferences with a mixture of synth-pop, hip-hop, electro and new wave, while Leigh's listening was laying down the foundations of a love of rap and hip-hop. I was never to be found without music playing, and on Saturday nights and Sunday evenings in particular, the radio was up full while the homework was completed, notes being taken and tracks recorded for listening back and, if pocket money/shop wages allowed, buying later on.

I didn't even know pirate radio was a thing until discovering some years later that other stations existed which had be searched for along the dial, with poor sound quality and unreliable listening schedules; during a brief period accompanying an ex to the unfortunate Muke's house on a regular basis (essentially a Trainspotting character who arrived 6 years too early for the film) I would hear these long, rabid acid house tape mixes, with the DNA of jungle just beginning to nibble in at the edges. As an ex-breakdancer who was already hiding a deep love of electronics behind a rocker-boyfriend Led Zep veneer, I was excited to my very core, but somehow felt this needed to be kept a dirty little secret.

As rocker boyfriend departed and new boyfriend and I hung out more, I was finally able to expose my love of jungle, drum'n'bass, ambient and music made by electronic hands. Playing me Public Enemy, Redman, Method Man, Terminator X and the Godfathers of Threatt, NWA, Dilated Peoples, Phjarcyde, KRS-1, Black Sheep and what felt like billions more woke up bits of my listening brain that had lain dormant - the bit that has to tune into the words and stories. And rap lyrics and words would, as you will know if you've followed my work for more than the last few years, become a core part of my creative development and core.

We courted to Portishead, Massive Attack and Tricky and soon realised we were at the start of a nerve-tingling period in music, having already begun to witness, although we didn't really know it at the time, the atomic-mushrooming of dance music in all its micro-genres and evolutions. Wanting to be part of it all - from the start, we never liked the sidelines - we reached out by fax to the DJ Food we'd heard on Mary Ann Hobbs' Breezeblock, and made friends we still have today. When hearing DJ Shadow's 'Lost and Found' on Radio 1, we couldn't find a copy anywhere, so I just phoned the record label and spoke to the boss (presumably, James Lavelle) and asked for a copy. We were gladly given one - as was the spirit of the time - and promptly played it at the club nights we ran under the name Coma (a hint both to our mutual love of sleep and the relaxed cushions-and-beanbags natured of the club, and a nod to Massive Attack's Karmacoma).

I'm skimming over so much detail here, and this isn't about to turn into a list of artists we like - that's as impossible a task as was ever invented - but so it went: Leigh worked in record shops, and my record collection began growing exponentially at a rate far faster than it ever had before - crate-digging was a thing, and I carried my Notebook of Elusive Tracks heard on the radio with me at all times, sometimes getting to tick one off.

As mainstream radio began to show signs of gently squeezing the more interesting and enriching shows off the air, we discovered my old school friend Solo One (largely responsible for my breakdancing period and penchant for electro) was running an 'independent' radio station at the time. We listened, it was tight: jingles, ads, schedules, a solid rota of genres and contributions from his cohorts in graf and music. And there were plenty - this bloke had connections, balls of steel and an insomniac work ethic - but he needed help. Mix FM was beaming straight outta *Midlands town's name*, and he'd found two willing volunteers.

Leigh began doing shows by himself, making creative little jingles with me helping out on flyer and admin duties, which soon became a regular weekend job running the station diary, looking for ad sponsorship and organising guest slots. Connections we'd already made ensured that blatantly ambitious requests for people to travel up and do a show were often met, resulting in a roll-call of guests and contributors including Beard & Philph from Fused and Bruised records, Skint Records,  interviews with The Cherry Stones and Fingathing, an in-at-the-door-early interview with Basement Jaxx and sessions from The Mild Mannered Janitors, Jamie Hombre, DJ Food, Plone, The Freestylers, Meat Katie, Crispin Dior and plenty of others who've gone on to poke both ends of the 'fame & success' spectrum.

I would often work on the floor of the station, between making tea, answering the early mobile phone and manning the text requests. Sunday nights for years meant working to the soundtrack of the Drum'n'Bass show, with Mugshot, CT, Will and Nippa, which guaranteed I'd burn through the jobs at a fantastic pace. I wasn't the most confident DJ, and I certainly didn't attempt to mix, but it did ignite a love of presenting and talking on the radio which wasn't to be rekindled till much later in life.

As the station moved from location to location, and the station became more serious and us more and more committed, our Fridays and Saturdays became longer as we both worked in the daytime and did radio at night. We broadcast from the tops of long-demolished tower blocks long on the outskirts of Birmingham, affording us, simultaneously, breathtaking views over the city and an often heartbreaking view of the poverty many people lived in, characterised by their incredible generosity - they'd give you their last tea bag if you needed it to get through the final hour of your graveyard shift - and warmth towards these people carrying records bags and offering home made cake around. Of course, the legends are true - we did get 'busted' sometimes, though remarkably infrequently, and with very little drama, as the technical set-up was so sophisticated it was hard to track us down, and we were always back on with decent speed.

Creeping into locked spaces, working in the dark, keeping curtains closed and regularly posting up Dos and Don'ts for station safety and protocol were the norm. So much tea was drunk, so many fags were smoked, and SO many bags of chips were eaten from the legendary Six Ways Chippy in Erdington, with its £1.50 fresh naan-wrapped masala fish chips at the unholiest hours of the night.

Of course my illustration/QuarkXpress/Photoshop skills were called upon regularly, for flyers, posters and ads, and even when not directly for the radio, it was finding its way into my work: 90s radio illustration! Behold, inkpen + mouse...

(That's me carrying the pie - it was usually my job to make and bring sustenance, too. In the middle is Matt Thornhill aka Monkichi, now Head of A&R /Young Turks at XL Recordings).

My archive from this period is massive, and indeed this blog could be a nine-parter with hundreds of photographs and stories. But that'll have to wait for a less busy day, when I can comb the records without worrying about the hours lost in reminiscing and chuckling. The discipline and hard work which the radio demanded - for what might be seen as negligible return - were excellent training and installed in us a work ethic which has directed us through life. We still don't like being on the sidelines, if we see something happening that we love, we like to get involved, and the element of risk is still appealing. When the phone was pinging and the shout outs were queuing up, the map on the wall filling up with red dots, one for every listener calling in from a different area, all the baggy eyes, lack of sleep, arguments, team politics, dodgy night missions and petrol spends were worth it: we were making radio for people who needed it.

When broadcasting on FM became too risky and expensive, and with our tech man off the scene, we were a frustrating amount of years too early for online broadcasting. We had a Worldspace Receiver to listen to radio stations around the world and still pined for our own. We were determined - I had several heated discussions with Apple Store people and software makers, insisting that among the existing technology there HAD to be a way to do it - but despite iTunes radio and podcasting being round the corner, there wasn't a solution for the independent, not without prohibitively large sums of cash. Nonetheless, expensive software was purchased, learning curves were climbed, but we had to concede we were too early to make it happen. When we set up Altar Ego Radio years later, notwithstanding the odd technical brain-boggler it was all there, and online broadcasting can now be done any anyone, almost for free, with online radio stations running into their thousands.

As I write this blog I'm listening to Rinse FM, one of the other pirates at the time who were eventually granted a licence and the rest, as they say, is history - a hugely successful club, record label and station. The same can be said of Kiss FM, again another pirate who went legit - now a household name!

Today's involvement with radio continues, recently manifesting itself in Cocoa Amore Radio, set up for the Leicester-based chocolatiers, which as part of our creative directorship broadcasts curated sets around the world from the store via its own App (it all feels so easy now!) I'm a regular contributor to BBC Leicester too, taking part in interviews, reviews and news programmes. I feel a healthy amount of pride at being part of pirate radio for so long, but remaining creatively involved with broadcasting and music, and I hope for it to expand into...I don't know what, maybe something, we'll see!

Pirate Radio Archive

DJ Food In Your Ears, Cocoa Amore In Your Mouth.

It might have become obvious over the past year that Inkymole has been building on its involvement with chocolatier Cocoa Amore, whose shop and all-round hub of chocolate education moved last year into its beautiful new store in ancient Silver Street, in the heart of medieval Leicester (just along from the cathedral where Richard III is buried).

Our role there began with an event we put on - a chocolate-infused Buddy Wakefield show co-organised with Pete, Cocoa Amore’s owner - and has evolved from helping out with a little window decoration and signage here and there to fully immersive Creative Direction. We’re currently enjoying the fulsome challenges of everything to do with getting an exciting new franchise off the ground - branding, consistency, interior decoration, marketing, merchandising, communications…and more. It’s hard work, but we’re loving every part of it.

One of the first things we focused on is the in-store music. It’s well-recognised that music can help enhance the atmosphere of a cafe and store (Cocoa Amore is both) and so as soon as we were given the ‘keys to the shop’ we installed a new amplifier, good speakers and a live music streaming system. Playlists curated by us or by our guest artists is not only streamed live into the shop from our studio, but as Cocoa Amore Radio can be listened to anywhere in the world courtesy of Tune In.

Our first playlist we put together ourselves, but our second has been by our long-term friend and collaborator Strictly Kev aka DJ Food. Pivotal in the founding of groundbreaking record label Ninja Tune in the early 90s, Kev’s worked non-stop as a musician, designer, collector and writer ever since, staying ridiculously busy at the forefront of new music and design for music over a jam-packed two-decade career.

His current playlist takes a sci-fi, cosmic/psychedelic vibe and smushes it into different genre corners, roping in such glittering gems as Radiohead (from the new album), Gaz Coombes, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Jane Weaver, Annabel (lee), The Dragons, Lalo Schifrin, Jan Hammer and Vangelis. It strides across decades easily and with audible panache, and has provided the soundtrack to many an overnight session working at the shop. And we’re still not bored of it - in fact, it’s one of my favourite playlists of all time.

Listen in at any time, and feel the cocoa-y feels as you go about your day! (better still, if you’re close enough, get a gingerbread hot chocolate in the shop and listen in the warm chocolatey fug):

Cocoa Amore Radio

You can also listen to more DJ Food music and mixes and/or follow at these online establishments:
Soundcloud.
Bandcamp.
Facebook.
Twitter.
Instagram.

There is plenty more happening at Cocoa Amore to write about, but here are some historic blogs about our work at the shop:

Halloween Windows http://blog.inkymole.com/2015/11/halloween-signwriting-at-cocoa-amore.html

Share Certificates http://blog.inkymole.com/2015/11/i-liked-company-so-much-i-bought-it.html

Christmas Trees http://blog.inkymole.com/2016/02/christmas-trees-at-cocoa-amore.html

Mothers’ Day http://blog.inkymole.com/2016/02/snug-like-two-beans-in-cocoa-pod.html

The Legend That Is Solid Egg http://blog.inkymole.com/2015/03/solid-egg-2015.html

His Master's Voice

Today the news of HMV entering the hands of the administrators broke. It IS a shame, of course it is, for the founders of the business (although no longer with us) and the 4000+ staff who are possibly about to lose their jobs.

But this is clearly a business that could not compete with the likes of Amazon. Either because they failed to see the future of music and film buying or because they did, but didn't make the necessary changes and plans to enable the company to absorb them. And because Amazon will eat everything in its path, skilfully dodging taxes en route.

A shame. But use it, or lose it. Our source of power comes from our wallets and purses. If you choose carefully who to spend your money with, you have the power to affect who stays in business and who doesn't. There's a reason the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury's own such an enormous chunk of the British grocery-buying public's budget.

So if you have a local record shop, patronise it. Even if you have to order in what you want and wait a little bit. The Record Store Day website will find your nearest record shop for you.If you have to order online, order music direct from record labels - Ninja Tune are an excellent example of this, along with online stores such as Bleep, Boomkat and Juno. For harder-to-find stuff, there's, predictably, Hard To Find in Birmingham (shop and online), Music Stack and the deeply impressive Discogs, where you can bash that long-sought record into their search engine and find copies wherever they lie - and buy one!

I'm sure at this point my record-buying friends will be only too pleased to suggest further outlets which circumnavigate the behemoths.

Books don't have to come from Amazon either - The Green Door Bookshop is a beautiful little outlet for children's books - and good grief, while we still have Waterstone's, bloody well use it (their website states robustly that their taxes are all paid within the UK). If you're in London, you're spoilt for choice - one of our favourites is Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace - physical and virtual - and the charming little chain Daunt Books is now online too.

Elsewhere localbookshops.co.uk will find your local book shop for you via a search for the book you're after, or via your postcode (a search for independant book shops in my area found eight). There's always the British High Street legend WH Smith (also online) - we may not pay that much attention to it, but we'll all be mourning when that's gone too. Use them. Their selection of stuff may be patchy and mainstream, but have you actually tried asking them to order you something? They can do it for you, again if you're able to exercise a little patience.

These gems are out there - use them. I saw a meme going round just before Christmas encouraging people to shop ''elsewhere', and while I applauded its sentiment, I got mad about its Christmas-centric message. Why not all year? Why not for all your stuff? I could write blog after blog on where to shop - the likes of Etsy, Folksy, artists' own shops, museum shops, Big Cartel shops and all manner of tiny 'long-tail'* businesses deserve your money far more than Amazon, and always offer more diverse, changeable but unique range of goodies.

Maybe I will write blog after blog, and share the love. After all, we're a nation of shopkeepers aren't we?

(Image created in homage to HMV, for our record label Blunt Force Trauma in 2005.)

*products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals, or exceeds, the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, but only if the store or distribution channel is large enough.

Read more: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long-tail.asp#ixzz2I2gUoKa5