Back catalogue: All genres

Notes: Never Stop: A Music That Resists (2016, 76 mins)

Featuring the pioneers of techno music Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Carl Craig and Jeff Mills, Never Stop takes us into the fascinating universe of techno labels in Detroit.

This film highlights the deep root of the creation, more than thirty years ago, by each of the African-American pioneers of techno music, of their own record labels. It also tells and shows us how each of these artists bypassed the crisis of the record business, even though this powerful movement paradoxically emerged in Detroit.

The Cycles Of The Mental Machine (2016, 56 mins)

The Cycles Of The Mental Machine chronicles the musical legacy of Detroit, Michigan's ravaged Motor City where the great tradition of blues, gospel, jazz and Motown R&B has never died. It also tells the destiny of the young techno artists whose musical counter-culture rose from the rubble to conquer the world. Guiding us through these 'cycles' is the voice of the Electrifying Mojo, legendary DJ, poet of the Mental Machine and spiritual mentor of techno. Creative energy infused with unflagging hope keeps The Cycles Of The Mental Machine on a constant spin.

Featuring original artists, DJ's and pioneers Mojo, Mad Mike, Carl Craig.

Notes: The only up-close and personal film about the juggernaut band The Clash and their meteoric trajectory through rock'n'roll history, The Rise And Fall Of The Clash features previously unseen footage of the band at work and play as well as interviews with the individual band members and with those who knew them well.

This is not a film that pulls any punches, but neither does it overlook the life-changing effect that The Clash brought to so many. The Rise And Fall Of The Clash paints a fascinating inside story of rivalries, treachery, betrayal and the internal band dynamics and managerial interference that ultimately led "the biggest band in the world" to self-destruct.

DVD Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjOu4vTmMO0

Notes: The research project "A soft hiss of this world" is focused on the loss in many aspects such as the loss of language as a result of the Anthropocene through the absence of certain states and processes that occur naturally in the environment like different states of water, snow and ice. In Finnish there are more than forty terms* to refer to them and because of the loss of these states in the landscape, the loss is also displaced to the language, in this case, the Finnish.

This research project took these words as a starting point to make hundreds of hours of recordings in the Finnish landscape. The sound of snow, ice and snowflakes are the reference and the sound material of this research project. And to obtain these sounds, as well as the possible sound differences between each snowflake, special and specific microphones were developed for this very specific and fragile recording process.
This book contains texts by three authors: Tim Ingold, Carmen Pardo and Mikel R. Nieto, on the research carried out by Nieto in Finland during 2016. The text by Tim Ingold opens the book and introduces the reader to the main subjects of the research: language, landscape, sound and listening. This text is easy to read and aims to immerse us in the Finnish landscape and in the listening act to its sounds and silences. Carmen Pardo's text unfolds first, the way in which the gaze and listening of the snow constitute the experience of a disappearance, of a concentration in the void or nothingness of which A Soft Hiss of this World participates.

The third text belongs to Mikel R. Nieto and is divided into four parts. The third part is a code that reflects the loss of most of the sound recordings made during his research with more than 600 hours of recordings. This code is the only thing that could be recovered from all recordings, except the only sound recording published in physical format as a transparent Flexi-disc.

The fourth part is the result of silencing each and every word by John Cage in his "Lecture on Nothing," leaving only the punctuation marks, such as commas, periods, separators and the last sentence of the text of Cage. Every time the transparent flexi-disc is played, the player needle wears away the vinyl and making the sound of the recording disappear. Therefore, each listening destroys the sound."

Notes: In the mid-80s, Connors took a partial break from music and focused instead on the art of haiku, for which he received the Lafcadio Hearn Award in 1987. With his wife Suzanne Langille he also co-wrote an article on blues and haiku, "The Dancing Ear," published in the Haiku Society of America's journal. It was during this period that Connors penned the material that appears in Autumn's Sun, a chapbook first published by Thurston Moore and Byron Coley's Glass Eye in 1999. The text features diary excerpts from 1987, lyrically fragmented observations interspersed with haiku-like poems that paint an idyllic impression of the passing seasons in his home of New Haven, Connecticut. With synesthetic perception, Connors gazes from tranquil domestic streets. Sycamore, elm, and catalpa trees are activated by the breeze and made to rustle in unison with their natural and artificial surroundings, including the howling dogs from which Connors derived his "Mazzacane" moniker. As summer fades to winter, Connors portrays death as an undramatic certitude, the flux of his own maturation reflected in musings on his son's. Like his music, Autumn's Sun is tender without being sentimental, conjuring those rare, delicate moments when time stands still.

This edition includes "The Dancing Ear" and an introduction by Lawrence Kumpf.

Notes: Hip-hop is huge, and it's time someone wrote it all down. With more than 25 years of interviews, and virtually every hip-hop single, remix, and album ever recorded at their disposal, the highly respected Ego Trip staff are the ones to do it. Their "Book Of Rap Lists" runs the gamut of hip-hop information, breaking it down into chapters on art, lyrics, production, fashion, names, performances, etc. This is an exhaustive, indispensable and completely irreverent bible of true hip-hip knowledge.

Notes: Comprising about 45 pages, 'Five Ghost Stories' is a collection of five meditations on isolation and absence, each with an abstract connection to the ghost towns that were quickly built in all of our hollowed-out cities over 2020. Author Dennis Calaci also plays in the band Refrigerator and runs Shrimper Records.

Notes: Innovator, genius and trendsetter there are few individuals quite as unique as Lee Scratch Perry, aka The Upsetter. He has become a legend in his own lifetime and earned himself an army of admirers stretching across every continent. Musically, his CV is beyond compare in the worlds of reggae and dub, having helped create and define both since he first immersed himself in the 1950s Jamaican music world. Perry is a maverick who helped create today's musical landscape by pushing himself, and the recording studio, to the point of destruction.

Kiss Me Neck is an extensive, detailed and heavily illustrated, guide to the records produced by Perry and those that hailed from his legendary Black Ark Studio.

With over one thousand releases to his name, there is a wealth of material here - Kiss Me Neck serves both as a guide for the experienced fan and an introduction for the beginner. We anticipate great appeal amongst, and have already received orders from, the Jamaican music collecting communities, as well as Mods, Skinheads, Rude Boys and so on throughout the world. Good coverage in the relevant press is guaranteed. Jeremy Collingwood has, for the past decade, been documenting the music of Jamaica on CD and in books for many major labels and publishers. He has produced six packages of Perry's work, including the box set, I Am The Upsetter for Trojan Records, and is also one of the world's leading authorities on Bob Marley - he recently had his acclaimed book Bob Marley: His Musical Legacy published and has acted as consultant on the film Rebel Music, as well as recent BBC Radio 2 documentaries on Bob Marley and Lee Perry. There really could be no better guide to Scratch's archive.

Notes: Mechanical Fantasy Box is Cowley's homoerotic journal, or as he called it, "graphic accounts of one man's sex life." The journal begins in 1974 and ends in 1980 on his 30th birthday. It chronicles his slow rise to fame from lighting technician at The City Disco to crafting a ground-breaking 16-minute remix of Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" to performing with Sylvester at the SF Opera House. Vivid descriptions are told of cruising in '70s SoMA sex venues to primal highs in Buena Vista Park and composing pornophonics in his Castro apartment. The entries are introspective and show a very out-front, alive person going through the throes of gay liberation post-Stonewall.

French-born artist and Berlin resident Gwenael Rattke works in collage, silkscreen, photography and Xerox graphics. Rattke's collage works borrow from the visual codes of the 60s and 70s. Intricate, ornamental and excessive, they present "an imagined past fired with beauty and sexual freedom." For this book Rattke created 25 original illustrations inspired by selected entries, 3 street maps documenting locations mentioned herein and 4 collages of photos, ephemera and notes Patrick stuffed inside the journal. We've included Patrick's doodles too, as well as introductory essays by Josh Cheon, Theresa McGinley and Jorge Socarras.

Notes: "Graffiti At Its Best" invites the reader to peer beneath the covers and into the pages of the black books of some of the world's top graffiti writers. Usually reserved for a small personal of fellow graf heads, these sketches are now available for the hungry eyes of those looking to explore the processes and skills behind the art of the streets. From improvisational, off-the-cuff sketches, scribbles and outlines to more intricately conceived and executed pieces, this book demonstrate how writers work out their ideas for dynamic letter construction on paper.

Notes: A landmark release, the 200th addition to the Hospital Records catalogue is perhaps, rather surprisingly, not a record but a book. Written, compiled and edited by Graphic Artist Ricky Trickartt and Art Director Chris Goss, NHS200 is a must-have collector's item and coffee table book for fans new and old.

Celebrating Hospital Records' fifteenth year in business, NHS200, the two-hundredth catalogue addition, provides a visual compendium of the label's history. Exploring a decade and a half of Hospital's greatest artwork, photography, medical puns and the evolving hairstyles of the artists across over 150 full-colour pages, Chris Goss and Ricky Trickartt chart the label's development from 1996 to where we are today in 2011. From the signing of seminal artists and the evolution of the Hospitality events brand to the establishment of sister labels MASH and Med School, everything is covered in this panoramic retrospective of one of independent dance music's most loved labels.

Notes: Chunklet's third book (and first that is self-published)! 192 pages of hate, love, facts and lies. It's like what a standardized test would be if it grew a pair.

A year in the making and a successful Kickstarter campaign behind it, The Indie Cred Test is almost 200 pages of seething hate and muffled giggles. Composed by the diligent staff at Chunklet Magazine, The Indie Cred Test is Chunklet's crowning achievement.

Chunklet's crosshairs are trained on everything and everybody in their path: musicians, authors, hipsters, hippies, miniature toy poodles and everything in between. Sixteen chapters, countless sidebars. Do you think you have what it takes to take the test? Like, really take the test? Then crack this monster of a book open on any page and see if you have what it takes. Intense.