REAL PLANE SOUNDS

"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

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!!!!!

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

"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

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

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

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

NEXT SHOW ON MONDAY

(scanned and defaced from the upset the rhythm website)

"There is no such thing!!"

"shit!"

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

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.