Office Parties: OUT. Rock’n'roll parties: IN

December 3, 2008 · Filed Under stuff we like · Comment 

We love Christmas here at Music Towers. We’re running a video advent calender at the moment up there in the video box - go on, look up and to your right a little bit. Every five days we’re going to collect them all so you can catch any that you’ve missed. Think of it as an early Xmas present.

Speaking of which, Christmas is also the time for parties. We’ve all been to office parties before, and I think we can all agree that they suck harder than an elephant given a bowling ball-sized gobstopper. You get drunk with people you wouldn’t normally socialise with even at the barrell of a gun, eat some stale crisps, get off with that girl from accounts, and pass out on the bus home and are late for work the next day becasue you woke up at the bus station in Ealing with a hangover that rates alongside Hurricane Katrina in the damage-stakes.

Well, we here at Music Towers want to put a stop to Bad Christmas Parties. So much so that we’re throwing one of our own. On December 11 - next week, calendar fans - alongside our friends Beef Warehouse (that’s them there in the picture up at the top) and BigSexyLand,  we’ll be throwing a FREE party over at new venue, South Of The Border. It’s right in the heart of Shoreditch, mere minutes walk from Liverpool St Station and Old Street tube. If you’re going to be about next Thursday, drop us an email to david at musictowers dot com to RSVP!

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I Set My Friends On Fire: the band you never heard of, are coming to sellout a festival near you soon

November 25, 2008 · Filed Under Videos, stuff we like · Comment 

So: the design is perfect, the name and logo are excellent. It seems they have fourteen billion MySpace listens already and 100 date tour. Already no doubt sold more records then Guns N Roses and The Killers combined. And nobody has ever heard of them. I can already see them on main stage at Download or Bloodstock or somesuch, book them up now.

Music Towers can only assume thar this summer, I Set My Friends On Fire will come over here to blow our tiny little minds, with their accomplished mix of hardcore electro, High School Musical pop, and their comedic yet postive outlook.

Here is them putting all of that into practice, in a YouTube video masterclass:


You Can’t Spell Slaughter Without Laughter

Epitaph 2008, Audio CD, £11.99

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VIDEO: The Count & Sinden ft. Rye Rye - Hardcore Girls

November 25, 2008 · Filed Under Blather, Videos, stuff we like · 1 Comment 

This should make me feel old - it wasn’t like this in my day. I should talk at full volume in a grumpy old white man voice, saying “This isn’t real music. Real music is Soundgarden or Slayer’s ‘Angel of Death’, or Led Zeppelin‘.

I should be dismissing this as  “Yes, very good, but not my sort of thing”. <aybe I should dislike it for simply being on the same label as Emmy The Really-Not-Very-Good-Let-Alone-Great.

I would say all those things…but i am too busy grooving. Someone put me in the club, this move is too fresh to waste!

Seems they are doing a London residency, down Old Street way -

The Count & Sinden present:
MEGA MEGA MEGA

With guests:
Nov 27th – Skream, Emynd & Bo Bliz (Philly), Frankmusic
Dec 4th - Chase & Status, Example, Mystery Jets DJs
Dec 11th – Sunship, Mistajam (BBC 1Xtra)

But don’t go to the one on the 11th - come to our Beef Warehouse party instead.

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Just remembered not everyone knows who the Fuck Buttons are

November 16, 2008 · Filed Under Videos, stuff we like · Comment 

I was watching Top Gear last week, and was stunned to hear a Fuck Buttons track, ‘Sweet Love for Planet Earth’, creep in as they tore some supercar round their airbase. This band have blown my mind this year, and I mean literally - ever since catching them at ATP last Christmas, I’ve had a headache. I think I actually went blind while standing in the front row; I know I woke in the middle of the night shouting obscenities. All these I can only attribute to the mighty Fuck Buttons. I think the band didn’t take it as a compliment when I told them so later - in fact they just walked away from me. Maybe I was just talking in white noise.

Anyway, fans of avant garde electro rackett listen up. Actually, non-fans of bristol based electo racketts listen the hell up and get experimenting. They don’t seem to have a real video, but if they did I would expect it to have massive space ships colliding.


Street Horrrsing

Atp 2008, Audio CD, £10.99

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Interview: Simian Mobile Disco - a duo in demand

July 23, 2008 · Filed Under Features, Interviews · Comment 

“I saw a few reviews of the records that were all ‘after all the hype …blah blah blah’ – what?” James Ford splurts incredulously. “The press created the fucking hype themselves!”

Ford is talking about The Age of the Understatement, debut record from The Last Shadow Puppets, which he both produced and played drums for. Ford is very much the indie producer of the moment, having taken production duties on Klaxons’ Mercury-winning Myths of the Near Future and Arctic Monkeys’ Favourite Worst Nightmare among others. Now he sounds like he is having trouble in not spitting his lunch out when I ask him about his reaction to the press hysteria over The Last Shadow Puppets record, which he both produced and played drums on.

“I suppose I was a bit naïve, because I supposed anything Alex [Turner, of Arctic Monkeys] touches would cause people to talk about it, but really when we recorded it, it was just like a two-week holiday where we were trying to record an EP,” he recollects. “The original intention was for it just to come out quietly. But I don’t think Domino pushed it too hard – off the back of the Arctics, it was never going to be a quiet affair”.

‘Quiet’ isn’t really one of the things one associates with Ford, or his cohort Jas Shaw with whom he forms electro-devil duo, Simian Mobile Disco. Come August, the pair are set to become the latest act to put out a mix for London über-club, Fabric (it exists somewhere far in excess of what used to be called superclubs) as part of the Fabriclive series.

The promo video for ‘Hustler’:

“We wanted it to be a set that we’d play at Fabric. It’s pretty techno and pretty mean in places”, says Ford. “But we also wanted to try to put stuff that you wouldn’t normally hear at Fabric in there. There’s Raymond Scott and Moon Dog and things like that. But hopefully we’ve put it together in a way that wouldn’t break someone’s stride on the dancefloor, but people will be exposed to a few tracks they wouldn’t normally hear in that context.”

So they weren’t tempted to push something controversial then? There was more than a bit of controversy with Justice’s allegedly ‘rejected’ Fabriclive mix. Ford seems pragmatic on the issue unmoved: “If we were doing a Late Night Tales or something to listen to at home, that’s one thing, but we wanted to do a good reproduction of our DJ set at this point in time”

In addition to the Fabriclive release, Simian Mobile Disco have a packed summer of DJ slots and live performances on the European festival circuit. The pair are hard-picked to come to a decision over which they prefer.

“ Well, our DJ set is really easy,” Jas states matter-of-factly. “You just pick up a big bag of records and just head to the club! With the live show, it’s a lot more involved.” He goes on to describe SMD’s setup: “We’ve designed this system – a fair chunk out of our studio, a mixer and lots of old analogue gear and loads of vintage output and guitar pedals and lots of kind of stuff all plugged in together. It allows us to play the tracks but jump around in terms of the structure and improvise. We can make new stuff up on the spot and there are quite a few bits of the set where we have no idea what’s going to happen.”

For many musicians, that sounds like the idea of a hell. Or Jazz. “The whole idea is to make it fun for us,” explains Jas. “But it’s quite a pain in the arse. We’ve got loads of fragile kit that always takes too long to set up, but it’s worth it in the end.”

The promo video for ‘I Believe’:

“We have sections in the set where there’s planned chaos,” adds Ford. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. Basically we can tell pretty quickly if it’s ‘happening’ or if it’s not, and we can skip over it or extend it on the go.”

“ Because we put so into the live show, it’s more rewarding when we do a really good show,” says Ford, weighing up the pros and con’s of live show vs DJ set. “But I wouldn’t want to give up DJ’ing as it’s a lot of fun – you can just go to a lot more far-reach places, you get treated really nice and you can get hammered! Which is more fun in a traditional sense…”

James and Jack’s Essential Records

We asked the duo what records they couldn’t do without when DJ’ing. Their choices were:

  • ‘Erotic Discourse’ - Paul Woolford presents Bobby Peru
  • Spastik’ - Plastikman
  • ‘Huncut Hacuka’ - Fine Cut Bodies
  • The Don’ - Sisters of Transistors
  • Sleep Deprivation (Simon Baker Remix)’ - Simian Mobile Disco

All of which are on their shiny new Fabriclive mix. Which is handy.

‘FABRICLIVE 41: Simian Mobile Disco’ is out on Fabric Records in August. The pair are playing festivals all over Europe this Summer – check here to see if they’re playing at one you’re going to.

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