| Money For Old Rope |
[Jul. 25th, 2011|11:04 pm] |
Someone asked if I'd do a brief compilation of my own songs so they didn't have to wade through the forests of baffling track titles and albums on my website/SoundCloud. So I started one, and then realised I'd been making music for 10 years, which seemed like a good time to compile an insulting 'Best Of', even though compiling your own Best Of of your own shit is just about the most self-regarding and downright weird thing you can do.
So here we have a thing, a minimum of one track from each of the last 10 years and then some of my musical life, heavy hit after heavy hit after heavy hit with all the awkward experimentalism excised to leave a fresh pop taste in your mouth. You can download it for free from the following link, or simply use the comments to point out all the stuff that's not on there and call the whole thing a farce.
Enough Rope - Money For Old Rope (A Collection 2001-2011) (128mb zip file)
The tracklist in full, then:
disc one:
1. ...some monsterism
2. destroy the earth
3. reluctantly
4. alienface
5. fear of knives
6. broken song
7. tiny fragments of nothing fired into the gaping void (hell yeah)
8. what you can't see
9. hey! let's all grow fashion mullets again
10. you in?
11. the sleeping eight
12. bottle rockets
13. i make the following promises
14. blank faces
1. with throats raw, we sang...
2. the weekendist
3. one mistake after another
4. limbs
5. casey
6. views from windows
7. endless footprints leading to and from the source
8. flip the witch
9. you kiss like your dad
10 yeah something!
11. you'll get us all killed
12. dotwrk
13. comfortflows
14. hey motherfucker |
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| I Woke Up And Nothing Had Changed - the album! |
[Aug. 8th, 2010|12:17 pm] |
Hello people, it's tedious self-promotion time once more! Enough Rope (that's me!) has released its 27th album. This is what the front cover looks like:
This is the tracklisting:
1. i woke up and nothing had changed (6.29)
2. lull (2.11)
3. destroy the earth (6.17)
4. you kiss like your dad (4.38)
5. whose footprints are these? (3.11)
6. atoning (4.37)
7. army of light (2.35)
8. the master of unlocking (4.28)
9. the inconsequential (7.46)
10. ...and maybe it never will (3.17)
Here is a link to download the full album in a zip file complete with artwork in full high-definition blurriness: i woke up and nothing had changed (44.4mb .zip file)
And here are some individual songs which I haven't posted here before, and one which I have:
atoning (4.37)
The newest mega-hit on the record, this is a slab of open-tuned rumbling featuring some wobbly phased melodies and a whiff of some of the tracks off of 2007's 'The Weekendist'.
...and maybe it never will (3.17)
The melancholy album closer, featuring some poor timekeeping in the central third, harmonics up to here, and a sense of ill-defined longing.
the master of unlocking (4.28)
Slow-moving, Resident Evil-referencing bendy nonsense containing interlocking layers of half-noise and a possibly disappointing absence of video game samples.
destroy the earth (6.17)
...which I shall continue to post around the internet until either people listen to it or I die, whichever comes first.
You can also download all tracks individually and listen to the whole thing on last.fm here: http://www.last.fm/music/Enough+Rope/i+woke+up+and+nothing+had+changed |
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| the inconsequential |
[Jun. 26th, 2010|10:32 pm] |
Well it's been a month since I released any new songs, so just in case you were freaking out thinking I'd gone on indefinite hiatus or slipped into a coma, here's some new shit:
the inconsequential (7.46)
Warning: contains melancholy, murky basslines, crude noise interruptions, submerged tunefulness and some mild dread. |
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| Some music for a sunny Sunday |
[Jun. 13th, 2010|09:19 am] |
So, I made a compilation of (mostly) late 80s/early 90s hip-hop for my car, and on request I'm sharing it with the world, or at least those tiny parts of the world that interact with me in some way.
It's 160mb but it's a direct download so it should take no time at all. Most of it rocks a kind of laid-back, summery vibe, except for 'Daylight' by Aesop Rock which feels largely out of place but is included due to it being awesome. You could always take it out and replace it with some Eric B & Rakim who I inexplicably forgot to include.
http://www.enoughrope.net/files/ropesto93tilinfinity.zip
1. Slum Village - 'The Look Of Love'
2. Main Source - 'Just Hangin' Out'
3. J Dilla feat. Pharoahe Monch - 'Love'
4. Souls Of Mischief - '93 'Til Infinity'
5. Digable Planets - 'Rebirth Of Slick (Cool Like Dat)'
6. Aesop Rock - 'Daylight'
7. Big Daddy Kane - 'Set It Off'
8. KMD - 'Who Me? (With An Answer From Dr. Bert)'
9. The Roots feat. Erykah Badu - 'You Got Me'
10. Gang Starr - 'Just To Get A Rep'
11. Boogie Down Productions - 'My Philosophy'
12. Mos Def - 'Ms. Fat Booty'
13. Busta Rhymes - 'Show Me What You Got'
14. Pete Rock & CL Smooth - 'They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)
15. The Pharcyde - 'Passin' Me By'
16. A Tribe Called Quest - 'Verses From The Abstract'
17. Nas - 'It Ain't Hard To Tell' |
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| destroy the earth |
[May. 17th, 2010|09:52 pm] |
Work on the new Enough Rope album is still ongoing, but here's another cut to tide you over, six minutes and a bit of woozy melodic drifting mixed with the occasional outbreak of The Noise, which I hope you'll enjoy:
destroy the earth (6.18) |
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| you kiss like your dad |
[May. 3rd, 2010|08:46 pm] |
Hey folks, just a reminder that the heavily armoured Enough Rope bandwagon is still trundling on; here's another chance for you to climb on board with a new song taken from the forthcoming album 'I Woke Up And Nothing Had Changed';
you kiss like your dad (4.38)
This is a straightforward two-part kind of drifting lament, possibly reflecting on the human condition, which I have elected to confusingly lumber with a deeply unsuitable title based on a chance mishearing of the title lyric in Cex's "You Kiss Like You're Dead". Enjoy... |
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| 2009...some bits of my year, in words |
[Dec. 31st, 2009|06:48 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Drive Like Jehu - 'New Math' | ] |
Well, it's the end of the year, and despite being fully aware of the ludicrous of attempting to meaningfully analyse 12 months of varied happenings as if they were a cohesive whole, what the heck, it's time for a sideways look at my 2009!
2009 will go down in my personal history as the year after 2008. At the start of this year I couldn't even drive, now...I can drive! Amazing how things change. Not only can I drive but I experienced my first self-inflicted car crash, and my first incident of scratching someone else's car and getting the fuck out of there because my insurance premium for next year is already going to cost about the same as it would to hire Girls Aloud for a week. As hookers.
It was also the year my travellin' hobo job relocated my ass from convenient but slightly grim Wythenshawe (4 miles from my house), to massively incovenient and slightly grim Burnley (40 miles from my house). This hasn't particularly bothered me since I got a car though, it takes less than an hour and I get to scream tunelessly along to my CDs as I roll, something which may be partly be responsible for me fucking my voice up the other month. Also, at Burnley I have my own office where almost everyone leaves me alone and no-one can see that I'm just browsing the internet all day instead of doing my work.
It was also the year where I started feeling somewhat old. I'm glancing through the 2009 records I bought and while there's loads of great shit there, it's almost all from established artists whose stuff I've been copping for years (The Necks, Themselves, Antipop Consortium, James Blackshaw, Do Make Say Think, Om, Animal Collective, Flower-Corsano Duo, DOOM, Russian Circles, Pelican, Black To Comm, Why?, Magik Markers...). I think Teeth Of The Sea, Thought Forms, Serpent Throne and The xx are pretty much the only bands I bought new records by that I hadn't heard of before this year, and of those Serpent Throne were recommended to me by someone on a forum while The xx I'm not even really arsed about. So, if I bothered making New Year's resolutions, one of them would be to get back on the musical train and discover some new shit again like I used to. I ain't fuckin' dead yet.
I did find time for doing my own music this year, and I'm pretty happy with it. I did one fairly straightforward album in the form of Other, which you can download off that link. I think my favourite thing off that is still 'You In?', which kind of condensed a lot of the things I've been trying to do into a nice, easily-listenable 4 minutes and 50 seconds and doesn't really outstay its welcome. At the other end of the scale, of course, there was the slightly deranged Disintegration Blues, a 53-minute song which unsurprisingly didn't get many toes tapping. I still fucking love it though, and will roughly buttfuck anyone who suggests it was a bad waste of time. I mean, what else was I gonna do, have sex?
The other thing I did which didn't really get much attention was the brief one-off singing thing, 'Army Of Light', which is three minutes of slightly miserablist singing about conspiracy theorists. I still don't know if I like it.
More successful than my music was my all-singin', all-spittin', all-media-complain' blog No Sleep 'Til Brooklands, which has been good fun and is still going at the end of its first year. Every time I go out people say to me 'hey, I've been reading your blog', which is quite gratifying. It's slightly depressing to realise that I'm a more convincing blogger than a musician, since music is actually fun and inspiring to me, whereas blogging involves having to read the Daily Mail, but here we are. The world is a pretty competitive place these days and every fucker has a guitar and a blog, so I know I'm not special, but I have to write something here or else this will be a review of the hilarious things that didn't happen to me at work because work is fucking boring.
Time for one of those awkward GMTV-style tonal shifts now as I have to mention clearly the most significant even of my year, my relationship breaking up and leaving me even sadder, bitter and more twisted than I was last year. Just kidding, of course; I seem to have taken it surprisingly well and have managed to mostly shift my thoughts onto other things. It would be a gigantic lie to claim I didn't miss Tina, she was the most important thing in my life for seven years and it takes time to forget that, but I am at least genuinely convinced now that it was the best thing for both of us, and that at least I'm only ruining my own life now instead of mine and hers *awkward 'half-joking' laugh* It's been quite weirdly matter-of-fact since, to be honest, with relatively few teary breakdowns, although I did have a weird sad moment last week when I came back from the pub drunk out of my skull and started briefly crying at silly photos she'd posted of her holding kiwi fruit in amusing ways...I do miss the way she used to make me laugh like a twat. Having said that, I have reconnected with some friends since the break-up and have had some really awesome people to talk to, so it's not been all bad. I went out and saw loads of friends on Christmas Eve, got properly drunk for the first time in years, and then I hung out with Phat C a couple of days later when he came up from London.
So, hey, onwards and upwards. There's a whole world of potential excitement out there, right? I don't really understand dating or any of that shit, but right now I'm not trying to force it. It's only been a few months and I'm still not probably in the right frame of mind to be throwing myself into anything. My plan for 2010, moving out of my house aside, is to focus on non-girls shit; better blogging, better music, hanging out more with friends, and just generally being way cooler than I was in '09. Yeah, even cooler, bitches! I'm quite possibly starting this badly by being at home writing a blog on New Year's Eve, but y'know, one step at a time. But I think I've nearly completed Borderlands on PS3, that would count as an achievement right? I'll get a fuckin' trophy for it anyway. Girls don't give you trophies.
Anyway, I feel it's appropriate to end this with an absurdly reductive attempt to squash all of culture into a tiny set of lists like everyone else does, so here goes!
Albums Of The Year (no particular order): Antipop Consortium - 'Flourescent Black', Do Make Say Think - 'Other Truths', Om - 'God Is Good', Animal Collective - 'Merriweather Post Pavillion', Six Organs Of Admittance - 'Luminous Night', Thought Forms - 'Thought Forms', Telefon Tel Aviv - 'Immolate Yourself', Russian Circles - 'Geneva', That Fucking Tank - 'Tanknology', The Necks - 'Silverwater'...
(PS3) Video Games Of The Year: 1) Uncharted 2, 2) Assassin's Creed II, 3) Infamous, 4) Batman: Arkham Asylum, 5) Killzone 2, 6) Modern Warfare 2, 7) Borderlands, 8) Ratchet And Clank: A Crack In Time, 9) F.E.A.R. 2, 10) PES 2010
TV Shows Of The Year: The Thick Of It, Peep Show, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia
Film Of The Year: In The Loop (although this is literally the only 2009 film I watched. It was good though)
Worst Poll Category Of The Year: that one I just done.
So there you go, now you have an approximation of my worthless opinions! Feel free to remind me of obvious shit I missed. Anyway, have a good NYE everyone, I hope Santa brought you some glittering gifts to distract you from the obvious misery of your existence, and I'll see y'all in 2010. Or possibly tonight on Twitter/MSN. Who knows, maybe in 2010 I might even blog here occasionally, even when I'm not pimping Enough Rope records. We can all dream... |
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| Disintegration Blues |
[Oct. 28th, 2009|10:33 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Om - 'Cremation Ghat I' | ] |
It's been five years since 'Monsters On My Lawn', and every so often I got the itch to do another frighteningly long piece of music. During these moments, sanity often prevails and I go and make a sandwich or look at some porn instead, but for some reason this year my self-indulgent side got the better of me. Hence 'Disintegration Blues', a 53-minute long album consisting of a single track, which you can download in full for no money here:
Disintegration Blues (52.57) (53.8mb zip file) 
This really came out of me tooling around, coming up with bassy drop-C riffs for a prospective follow-up to 'Other'. There were a lot of riff ideas that really sounded like they could come from different points in the same song, so it seemed natural to me to start trying to sellotape them together into one slightly overwhelming tune. I knew it would come out kinda long, but I didn't have a target length, and over the course of five months it spiralled slightly out of control and came out a monster. It's not quite as repetitive as it might sound; there's a metric assload of different elements in there and although a few themes and riffs repeat later on, for the most part you could probably cut it into 5-minute chunks and treat it like a normal album. There are some changes of pace, some moments of quiet ambience, some jumpy bass riffs and some passages of really slow, lurching drone, rather than just fifty-two minutes and fifty-seven seconds of the same thing. Although that would have been cool. So, yeah, probably not the place to start with Enough Rope, but if you do listen, you will at least realise that any shitness is unrelated to its longness. Or length, I suppose. Longness sounds better.
The cover was again self-made, the front being a photo of an incongruous sunflower which just started growing out of my neighbour's chimney, and the back being the largely unused table/gazebo at the end of our garden. Keen observers might notice that I clearly ran out of ideas for the inside front cover and ended up just taking a photo of the side of my house on the way back from the garden. I'm in the market to date another photographer I can abuse for free album art, so if you can take photos marginally better than that and have functioning lady parts, call me. Seriously. |
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