CLUNES

FAR, FAR AWAY

2009-08-21T01:11:00.001-07:00

FAR EAST PSYCHEDELIC

2009-07-24T11:57:00.000-07:00

POOL BAR HALF SPEED

2009-07-12T16:44:00.001-07:00

"POOL BAR (half speed)" by CLUNES by clunescorporation

SOLAR STORM

2009-07-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

Wikipedia yes:

The solar storm of 1859, also known as the Solar Superstorm, or the Carrington Event, is the most powerful solar storm in recorded history.
From August 28 until September 2, numerous sunspots and solar flares were observed on the sun. Just before noon on September 1, the British astronomer, Richard Carrington, observed the largest flare, which caused a massive coronal mass ejection (CME), to travel directly toward Earth, taking eighteen hours. This is remarkable because such a journey normally takes three to four days. It moved so quickly because an earlier CME had cleared its way.

During The solar storm of 1893, 2/3 of the world watched lights in the sky much like the aurorae in the polar regions, but much bigger. Much bigger.

Brilliant stealing-stuff-off-the-radio-so-you-can-actually-listen-to-it blog Speechfication has a full Radio 3 program HERE! HERE! HERE!

no, really:

HERE! HERE! HERE! HERE!!

Question is, could it ever happen again? And when it knocks out all the power, what then?? From New Scientist magazine:

First to go - immediately for some people - is drinkable water. Anyone living in a high-rise apartment, where water has to be pumped to reach them, would be cut off straight away. For the rest, drinking water will still come through the taps for maybe half a day. With no electricity to pump water from reservoirs, there is no more after that.

Uh-oh, etc...

TEMPEST

2009-06-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

RASPBERRIES & RUM

2009-04-21T07:29:00.000-07:00

The Guardian reports that researchers have found an area of deep space which smells of raspberries and tastes of rum, or tastes of rum and smells of raspberries - I've already forgotten which.

Smell

Taste

Warning: The following excerpt contains the phrase "space raspberries":

'In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.
'"It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries," Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian.'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/21/space-raspberries-amino-acids-astrobiology

WHOAH, etc

2009-04-11T09:32:00.001-07:00

ANOTHER ADVERT FOR YES WAY VERY CLOSE TO THE LAST ONE

2009-03-27T10:17:00.000-07:00

MY MUM'S PICTURES OF THE SHUTTLE LAUNCH

2009-03-17T02:56:00.000-07:00

NASA launched yet another multi-million dollar space shuttle the other day. My mum was on hand at the highly secretive ClunesCorp. NASA monitoring station near Cape Canaveral, Florida, to get the exclusive pics JUST for YOU.

She reports: "Sunday night there was a shuttle launch from Cape Canaveral which we saw from the ~~house we are staying in~~ research centre and you can see the shots we took. The "vapour trail" was spectacular to see and ~~all the neighbours~~ our team of operatives were out watching in the street. Apparently the vapour trail could be seen from as far away as the Bahamas"

They also visited Celebration, the Disney-owned 'ideal town', and found a hat stall.

Our special thanks go out to our Florida team for their dedication and hard work these past few weeks. Great going, guys!

OH YEAH, AND YES TO THIS TOO

2009-03-13T05:48:00.001-07:00

THE "YES" WAY

2009-03-13T05:44:00.001-07:00

11 MINUTES OF SPERM

2009-03-08T17:13:00.000-07:00

THESE GUYS REALLY KNOW HOW TO MOVE!!!!!! (joke)

THE LIFE STORY OF A STAR

2009-03-03T07:12:00.001-08:00

CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGENESS

from the "Junior Mirror Fun Book" by George Thaw, Mirror Group publishing, 1975

CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE

2009-02-18T02:58:00.000-08:00

SOLAR RESONANCE

2009-02-18T02:57:00.001-08:00

UP AND COMING UPCOMINGS

2009-02-13T12:01:00.000-08:00

We're playing at Tottenham Chances for another Klinker on March 3rd.

Tottenham Chances is on Tottenham High Road just north of The Swan, up from Seven Sisters tube. Bus-wise, most of the ones that go north/south through Dalston end up going all the way up to Tottenham.

View Larger Map

In other Klinker/Clunes-related news, Dan (that's me) is/am playing in a new trio at the same venue on the 27th March, with a feller named Elwell and Hugh Metcalfe. The trio is called "Bolgwell Elcalfe" at the moment.

AND on the 5th March at Cafe Oto, Tom is putting his fingers in all sorts of places and playing a solo guitar set, along with a set from the formidable Wilkinson/Edwards/Noble trio. Details are on the cafe oto website. If by some weird stretch of the imagination you've managed to hear Clunes but not Tom's solo stuff, then check him out at his myspace.

The Problem With The Turtles

2009-02-12T07:31:00.000-08:00

Ever read The Problem With Music by Steve Albini?? Well, here's The Turtles' version. It's funnier.

Any resemblance is between these guys and a certain space-informed improv duo, 40 years into the future, is purely coincidental.

Anyway, Flo & Eddie seem like nice guys. They were in The Turtles, who had that hit with 'Happy Together'. After they split they joined Zappa's band, did session work all over the place (including the backing vocals on 20th Century Boy by T Rex!).

From the Wikipedia entry:

Flo & Eddie: Howard Kaylan ("Eddie") and Mark Volman ("Flo" aka "Phlorescent Leech") are a comedic musical duo. The two were the original founding members of the Top 40 pop group The Turtles. After The Turtles dissolved, Kaylan and Volman first joined the Mothers of Invention as "Phlorescent Leech & Eddie". Due to contractual restrictions made early in their career, Mark and Howard were prevented from using the name "The Turtles", as well as their own names in a musical context.
When bandleader Frank Zappa was injured during a concert in London in 1971, Kaylan & Volman found themselves at an impasse, as the Mothers Of Invention were out of action for a time. They responded to these events by recording "The Phlorescent Leech & Eddie" on Reprise with the other members of the MOI.

Although the album failed to chart, they continued releasing albums including the more successful Flo & Eddie, Illegal, Immoral and Fattening, Moving Targets, and Rock Steady with Flo & Eddie.

During the 1970's Kaylan and Volman continued to do session work, lending their trademark harmonies to T-Rex, John Lennon, Roger McGuinn, Hoyt Axton, Ray Manzarek, Stephen Stills, Keith Moon, David Cassidy, Alice Cooper, Tonio K., Blondie, Bruce Springsteen, The Knack, Psychedelic Furs, Sammy Hagar, Livingston Taylor, Burton Cummings, Paul Kantner, Duran Duran, The Ramones and others.

They also had their own TV show. Here they are, interviewing two jerks:

God, the guys in KISS are such douches. Anyway.

Doing the US national anthem at an American football game:

And their hit. Yes!

CHINESE MYSPACE

2009-02-11T10:32:00.000-08:00

We have a Chinese myspace profile. who knew?

http://us.profile.myspace.cn/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=41838364

The difference is, it loads slower!

PLANET CARAVAN

2009-01-14T08:31:00.000-08:00

We sail through endless skies
Stars shine like eyes
The black night sighs
The moon in silver trees
Falls down in tears
Light of the night
The earth, a purple blaze
Of sapphire haze
In orbit always

While down below the trees
Bathed in cool breeze
Silver starlight breaks down the night
And so we pass on by the crimson eye
Of great God mars
As we travel the universe

Youtube user MOWIZER817 says:

"Black Sabbath Planet Caravan. This is my first time using Windows Movie Maker. A collection of photos I thought showed the atmosphere of the song. Enjoy."

Check out this guy's other videos! Missile explosions set to rock classics?? Yes! A video analysing the fibonacci sequence and it's basis for the structure of a Tool song? Yes!! YES!!

MYSTERY ROAR FROM SPACE DETECTED

2009-01-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

Yes mate!

From space.com:

ARCADE's mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.
"The universe really threw us a curve," Kogut said. "Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted."

Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.

Other radio galaxies also can't account for the noise – there just aren't enough of them.

WHAT IS IT?????

links:
Full article on space.com
"Listening To Space" from the Clunes myspace blog

REAL PLANE SOUNDS

2008-12-27T16:06:00.000-08:00

"Real Plane Sounds", A.R.C. Records, date unknown

First side, war plane sounds. Second side, airport sounds!

++GET IT HERE++

Happy new year!

THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN

2008-12-23T04:16:00.001-08:00

C L U N E T I D E B A N G E R S ! ! ! !

Last year we made a Christmas album, interpreting some classic Christmas songs with an interplantary twist.

They're still online and available FOR FREE at http://www.ai-em.net/clunes/* ... either click on each track to preview/right-click to download, or download the whole thing as either a .zip or .m3u archive. Burn it to a CD, slip it into your parents' CD player at dinner and enjoy a "cosmic christmas" with your turkey, your nut roast, your christmas crackers and your slowly dissolving familial goodwill at your Christmas Day dinner table. Or stick it on your new mp3 player and shut out the screeching sounds of any younger siblings, cousins, nieces or nephews as they destroy their presents! The possibilities are endless.

* * * DOWNLOAD LINK * * *

image of christmas tree nebula by flickr user panshell, under creative commons

MERRY CHRISTMAS ONE AND ALL!!!!!

*hosted by our good friend Mike Whiting

NEW SECTION-FREE DOWNLOADS!!!!!

2008-12-18T14:27:00.000-08:00

We've created a new section to the right of this post where you will find free MP3's of a selection of our live performances available for download, and which may in the future also feature other studio, bedroom, kitchen, and practise room recordings. Please enjoy!

RIP Oliver Postgate 1925 - 2008

2008-12-09T05:33:00.000-08:00

"There is no such thing as 'the children of today'. Children are not 'of today'. They come afresh into this world in a steady stream and, apart from a few in-built instincts, they are blank pages happily waiting to be written on."
- Oliver Postgate

Clangers final episode, "Music of the Spheres"

Links:
Obligatory Wikipedia entry
Obituary on the Guardian website
Postgate's personal website (with essays)
Postgate's New Statesman columns

More Klinkering

2008-11-19T05:39:00.000-08:00

28th NOVEMBER with:

King Knob
Thomas Kumlehn, Jeff Cloke and Sylvia Hallett
Hugh Metcalfe film "Thru The Tears"
Clunes

Tottenham Chances
399 High Road
N17 6QN
ø Tott Hale/7 Sisters

"A new Klinker venue with affordable booze & homemade food. Three hours of fun from 8.30pm"

NEXT MONDAY HOUSE SHOW

2008-11-12T04:38:00.000-08:00

We are playing a house show in the golden district of Dalston, E8 on MOnday.

Monday 17th November
7.30 Doors
TROUBLE VS. GLUE
Experimental pop Girl/Boy duo all the way from Rome, Trouble Vs. Glue split their attentions between an array of instruments and piles of 80s electronic detritus. Within their irregular style of party music sections of hyperactive rock get happily slopped together with squelchy samples, camp, dueling Europop vocals and goofy drum machine beats.
www.myspace.com/troublevsglue

CLUNES
In their promotional literature, Clunes assert that they have the ability to channel the "vibrational energy" emitted from a name-sake planet into their own particular form of improvised music. Whatever its origin, the sound they generate plots an intergalactic course through meandering drones and crescendos of joyful sonic space junk. Science fiction references aside, their awkward charm will leave you feeling glad to be a citizen of the planet Earth.
www.myspace.com/clunes

PLEASE
Please sound a bit like Amon Duul II condensed into gratifying song-chunks with clattering drums, eccentric vocal styles and feudal system riffs. A bit like a grouse being stuffed into the mouth of a wild boar.
www.myspace.com/pleees

The venue is a secret, so email planetclunes at gmail d'ot com for all the infos and a nice little flyer.

Goodnesses!!

Shameless Nostalgia Corner - Sound Design in Stoppit & Tidyup

2008-11-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

Have you ever sat through the perennial pub conversation-o-round that is "do you remember kids show X?"? Man, oh man they're annoying. Most of the time they're nothing more than deja-vu trip through previous near-identical conversations you've sat through many times before - an exercise in consensus-building, if you like, a do-it-yourself companion piece to all those "top 100" shows which spend so much time informing the viewer of television's great moments passed (the Blue Peter shitting elephant, all of Tiswas, Button Moon etc).

Nostalgia, in short. And though nostalgia has been around for over a hundred years (and it was better in the old days), more recent nostalgia is the worst of all, a cheap way of filling time with old news, numbed to the misery of the present.

So please, then, forgive me this self-inflicted gunshot in my own hypocritical foot for this post, which is about an animated children's series from the 1980s called Stoppit & Tidyup.

The cartoon was narrated by xenophobic national treasure Terry Wogan, and featured a cast of characters called things like Clean Your Teeth, Don't Do That and Eat Your Greens. Each episode centred around the two main characters Stoppit & Tidyup; Stoppit was the devilish, ill-behaved monster, the thorn in the side of Tidyup, the series' sensible, anti-litter moral compass. Each episode saw the two of them in the Land of Do As You're Told (listen, no-one said it was subtle) getting into various standard-but-nonstandard kiddy cartoon scrapes. You'd say it was surreal, if the term 'surreal' hadn't been devalued to the point of ridiculousness. Anyway, it was all quite a merry set of tales, with a kind of lilting, ironic tone throughout and the kind of gentle pacing which, it has to be said, you rarely see in kids TV 'these days'. Fun, as the saying goes, for kids and adults alike.

Far and beyond this however, the real revelation is the way the show sounds- the voices of all the characters (provided by the winningly-named Terry Brain) and the lo-fi, sometimes concrète-ish sound effects are all cheerfully jump-cut, giving the whole production a kind of freewheeling anarchic feel. And of course there's the theme tune, similar to an Art Of Noise cutup rhythm track, in that it's made up of essentially non-musical slices of information organised to somehow form something maddeningly catchy, and mildly addictive. Great stuffs.

Anyway, here's episode 1:

As you can tell, the plots were sketchy to say the least, but sonically - musically - there's plenty of slapdash beauty in each episode. Tidyup's foghorn voice is just lovely - awkward and full of a kind of melancholy, made funny by the animated character's bovine smile. Stoppit's frantic high-pitch squabbling is the perfect wordless distillation of A.D.D. mania, and the bees - oh, the bees! Isn't there something kind of sinister about the noise these two make, with their anuses for mouths and their blank, droning hovering? Brilliant. My suspicion is that Terry Brain made most of the character sounds using his mouth alone, and sped them up in his Atari ST or something.

All the episodes of S&T have been uploaded onto the ForeverNet by YouTube user SpeedoJoe, along with a music video from Finnish folk-metal band Korpiklaani (?!). Other notable (sound-wise) characters are Say Please, Don't Do That (who, like the bees, would sound great on a loop) and also the one-line cameo from the "squeaky old weed" in episode 2. check them out if you like.

Trawling for more stuff, I dug up this clip from Rolf's Cartoon Club, which features the creators of Stoppit & Tidyup showing how they animated some of the characters, and also their MIDI sound-editing software in action on the much more famous Trap Door (That's The Trap Door to you by the way), itself probably one of the 'most cited' works in any booze-fuelled kids telly round-up. That's another story though, and one I can't quite bring myself to go into. Look them up for yourself.

(Note that even Rolf's show has a pretty natty theme tune... but then Rolf has always been a slightly out-there musician).

SPACE BASS

2008-11-03T17:11:00.000-08:00

NEXT SHOW ON MONDAY

2008-10-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

(scanned and defaced from the upset the rhythm website)

"There is no such thing!!"

2008-10-13T16:36:00.000-07:00

"shit!"

K L I N K E R L I S T I N G S ! ! !

2008-08-09T15:58:00.001-07:00

CLICK ON THE PICTURE TO FIND OUT WHAT'S HAPPENING THIS MONTH...

(this'll take you to flickr)

WE'RE DOING 'IT' ON THE 21st...

Not famil with klinker?? Another person with a keyboard says this:

"as far as what’s going on now, it’s not the rock clubs that are gainfully fucking things up, being playful for the sake of it, having a bit of innocence about the whole music-making lark - no, it’s the Klinker. It’s right here."

...which, I suppose, is a very good point. Anyway.

COME AND SEE US!!!! AND EVERYTHING ELSE!!!!!

Thank.