Introducing "Crystallized - 15 Years of Rocket Recordings" compilation

To celebrate Rocket Recordings unlikely survival as a record label for 15 years, we have decided to put a little comp of new music together for you.

Crystallized, is a double LP of exclusive music from an eclectic mix of bands. Some are well established Rocket bands, some are good friends of Rocket and some of the bands you may not of heard of yet. The reason we have included a raft of new and fairly unknown bands is that we see this as a release that is not only celebrating the last 15 years but also celebrating the first steps of the next 15 years!

The compilation opens with the analogue drones from Rocket’s Teeth of the Sea, who drop their trademark sound for an exploration in controlled noise. Following this perfect first track we have the (self proclaimed) ‘Aggro beat' of Blood Sport, a relatively new band from Sheffield who to our ears sound like This Heat meets Blurt meets Hookworms. They have recorded a ‘live in the studio’ version of one of the stand out tracks from their recently released debut album. Then comes another relatively new band, London’s Vision Fortune, who deliver a stunning but very different take on their repetitive drone pop.

Side B starts with a looped, industrial, psych track from Salford’s kosmiche ravers Gnod. Following them is a track of high octane motorik from the relatively unknown Swedish band Uran. Staying in Sweden, we have the mighty Hills. They deliver a perfect slice of fuzz driven, commune psych rock! Side B finishes with a track that was meant to come out as a Rocket 7” back in 2001! Rollbars was a short lived project by Bristolian Latch Manghat that also featured the odd ‘Head’ or two.

The mighty $hit & $hine dominates side C with an uncompromising track that sounds like The Necks covered by the Buttholes. Then friend and collaborator of Rocket - Cherrystones presents a minimal psych groove that calls to mind early Achim Reichel.

Side D opens with our fave Italian band, The Lay Llamas – their track is a looping, spacey, afro, kraut groove that sounds very unique but strangely familiar. Following that is Goat who have recorded a short studio jam, which adds a hint of Cologne to their Swedish voodoo psych. Finally we have Anthroprophh, which is the new band featuring Paul Allen from The Heads, backed up with The fellow Bristolian’s The Big Naturals. Together they create a full on repetitive, psych-noise monster that climaxes in a wall of heavy fuzz...the perfect way to end this heady compilation!

Mastered by James Plotkin and delux packaging designed by the visual genius that is Luke Insect, this is a perfect glimpse into Rockets past, present and future.

Tracklist:
01 TEETH OF THE SEA – RUN RED
02 BLOOD SPORT – DRY WATER (REDUX)
03 VISION FORTUNE – FORGOT HOW TO SWIM
04 GNOD – HOLY EMPIRE
05 URAN – EMP
06 HILLS – NATIONAL DRONE
07 ROLLBARS – SHORT FUSE
08 $HIT & $HINE – PLEASE DON’T SHARE
09 CHERRYSTONES – CATS CRADLE
10 THE LAY LLAMAS – AFRICAN SPACECRAFT (2092 AD: LIFT-OFF, JOURNEY AND LANDING)
11 GOAT – GOAT JAM
12 ANTHROPROPHH – ANTHROPOMORPHISM

Format:
LTD 2XLP (1500 copies) / DOWNLOAD

Release date:
25 NOVEMBER 2013

We have 100 copies of this ltd 2xLP that you can preorder from here: Rocket Bandcamp

Here is a little taster video of THE LAY LLAMAS track:

The Lay Llamas - African Spacecraft (2092 AD_lift-off, journey and landing) Teaser from Rocket Recordings on Vimeo.

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Teeth of the Sea to perform a live 'remix' of 'A field in England'

Teeth of the Sea have been invited to do a live remix of the Field in England Soundtrack at the Cork Film Festival on 16 November.

For those who witnessed their Reaper performance which was a re-imagined live soundtrack of the film 'Doomsday' will know that it will be a very special event indeed.

The official site for this says:


A FIELD IN ENGLAND—REMIXED
TRISKEL CINEMA / TICKETS € 9.00 / 120 MINUTES

Performed by Teeth of the Sea, featuring the music of Jim Williams and Blanck Mass.

A unique audio and visual spectacular, bringing together the cult film of 2013 and one of the most original electronic post-rock bands of recent years for a marriage made in heaven … or hell!

England, The English Civil War: A small group of deserters fleeing a raging battle are captured by two men and forced to help them search for hidden treasure. Crossing a vast mushroom circle, which provides their first meal, the group quickly descend into a chaos of arguments, fighting and paranoia, and, as it becomes clear that the treasure might be something other than gold, they slowly become victim to the terrifying energies trapped inside the field. One of the cult hits of 2013, A Field In England is a psychedelic trip into magic and madness from Ben Wheatley, the award-winning director of Down Terrace, Kill List and Sightseers.

“Teeth of the Sea don’t just make noise, they twist sound into something more sinister and sexy than could ever be measured in mere sonics.” (The Stool Pigeon) The NME has said they make the stuff a Doctor Who composer might hear in their dreams. 

Visit the site here for tickets etc: Cork Film Festival

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Shit and Shine at Cropped Out festival

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Teeth of the Sea footage from the Lexington 07/10/13

Here is some footage from Teeth of the Sea's mind blowing album launch last night whch kicked off their UK tour with Thought Forms and Esben and the Witch

Make sure you catch them when they play near you...three great band on top form!!

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"Kneel to the Master"

This post is dedicated to the reviews of Teeth of the Sea's astonishing new album MASTER, it will be updated as the reviews come in (please send us any we miss):

Time Out

Drowned in Sound – 9/10

Line of the Best Fit – 8/10

Freq

Mudkiss

Boomkat 

Music OMH

The Quietus

Echoes and Dust

Revolt of the Apes

Psychedelic Baby

Epigram

I am not a musician

RW/FF – 9.2/10

Normans – 8/10

Decibel

Clash – 9/10

The 405 – 8/10

Gods in the TV – 4.5/5

Soundblab – 9/10

Forest Punk

Louder than War – 7/10

And let us know what 'you' think of MASTER in the comments box below:

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Teeth of the Sea - MASTER - Out Today!

Teeth of the Sea - MASTER (Launch 059)

From the radiant consciousness of Britain’s most intrepid sonic assassins comes a shattered mirrorball of a record fit to transform and transfix all that surrounds it in 2013 and beyond. MASTER, the long-awaited and devastating third album of Teeth of the Sea, is an unprecedented junket into mind-melting abstraction and neon-drenched revelation.

Nearly three years have passed since the band released ‘Your Mercury’, their transcendent second album, and the four-piece have kept very busy during this period-they’ve gigged constantly, sharing stages with the likes of Goat, Circle, British Sea Power, Trans Am and Parts And Labor, collaborating live with Wire and Esben & The Witch, and taking their incendiary barrage to festivals like Roadburn, Green Man, Supersonic, Supernormal and Standon Calling.

Yet the evolution of their third album was most dramatically affected by two specially-commissioned soundtrack projects they embarked on-at Branchage Film Festival in Jersey, the band performed REAPER, a new live score to a re-interpretation of Neil Marshall’s film Doomsday, and a year later, at Bestival on the Isle Of Wight, they unveiled BEYOND THE TRANSFINITE, a tribute to Kubrick’s 2001.

In this period, the band’s experimental instincts have continued to extend in a myriad directions, and whilst MASTER nods to the established Teeth of the Sea touchstones of Throbbing Gristle, Goblin, Heldon, Angelo Badalamenti and Slayer, recent work by the like of Byetone, Pete Swanson, Raime, Powell and Prurient, alongside a long-standing fixation on the disco stylings of Patrick Cowley and Giorgio Moroder, have helped to mark out a gritty, confrontational path whereby abrasive and sparkling electronic textures do battle with waves of incandescent noise and a merciless beat-driven imperative to form a powerful alchemical charge.

From the concrete and chaos of North London, Teeth of the Sea have taken the psychic spectres of their surroundings and allied them to the apparitions of their trash-culture fixated imagination to create a laser-guided metaphysical foray, cinematic in scope.

Kneel for the MASTER. 

MASTER is available in all good record shops as a Ltd LP, CD and Download.

Visit the Rocket Store

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'Goat – Live Ballroom Ritual' Double album to be released on 2nd December

That is right, we at Mission Control are extremely proud to announce the release of a live album by Goat in December. The press release reads:

GOAT – LIVE BALLROOM RITUAL
(LAUNCH062)

In August 2012 Swedish band Goat released their debut album, World Music. The record went on to become one of the most talked about albums of the year, topping many ‘Best of 2012’ lists and the following year, the band took the album on the road.

Starting off a triumphant year of shows was Goat’s performance (or Ritual as the band likes to call them) at Roadburn Festival. A ‘packed to the rafters’ performance was the perfect warm up to their first proper tour, that saw them take on the USA. Footage, audio and photos of their sold out US shows streamed across the internet and revealed a band at the top of their powers.

They had taken the magic of World Music, extended, psyched out and explored the groove of the album further representing it in a mesmerising live performance.

We at Rocket realised that we needed to capture and document this much hyped set for all the world to experience.

On July 27th 2013, the eve of their now legendary Glastonbury performances the band took the stage at Camden’s Electric Ballroom in London to celebrate the recent launch of their single ‘Stonegoat’. The ATP promoted show was incendiary; the 1,100+ crowd either danced furiously to the band’s psyched grooves or stood there, mouths open and gazed in awe at the spectacle they couldn’t believe they were witnessing. It truly was a band on top of their game, which this LP called Live Ballroom Ritual will forever prove. Goat went on to wow more people across Europe when their on stage rituals visited the cream of the summer festivals at Primavera, Roskilde, Flow, Way out West etc.

After a long but successful summer the band are now back in Korpilombolo, writing the follow up to World Music.

We hope to see the first fruits of this at December’s appearance at the last ever ATP festival curated by Loop, and at the official launch party of this live album at London’s Koko also promoted by ATP (tickets) on December 2nd.

For more information contact: rachel.silver@silverpr.co.uk

Tracklist:
01 DIARABI
02 GOLDEN DAWN
03 DISCO FEVER
04 STONEGOAT
05 LET IT BLEED
06 DREAMBUILDING
07 RUN TO YOUR MAMA
08 GOATHEAD
09 GOATMAN
10 GOATLORD
11 DET SOM ALDRIG FÖRÄNDRAS –KRISTALLEN DEN FINA
12 THE SUN THE MOON

Format:
LTD 2XLP / CD / DOWNLOAD

Release date 
2 DECEMBER 2013

You can stream Let it Bleed from the album here:



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Stream Teeth of the Sea's MASTER in full via 20 Jazz Funk Greats

That is right, if you can't wait until Monday to hear the new Teeth of the Sea album MASTER, you can stream the whole album here at the great 20 Jazz Funk Greats

Enjoy

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Gnod go on a TRIP to London

Gnod are playing London's Waiting Room on 21 November as part of THE TRIP event that is happening across different London venues

More info and tickets can be bought from here: The Trip

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Freq review of Teeth of the Sea MASTER

Another glowing review:


Bloody hell lads. Bloody hell.

So I’ve seen Teeth of the Sea a few times. First time a good four years ago when they were playing with Gnod and Thought Forms at a time when Gnod were, with due deference, about the best band in the country. So my memory of that night is a bit tinted in Gnod’s colours. TotS live, as I recall (this is the first record I’ve actually heard) were throwing some great electro-kraut shapes with psych-ish punctuations but not quite as whole-sum as Gnod.

Don’t take that too much to heart though – I was as stickily plastered as a new ceiling.

Master though, it’s a whole different thing. Rocket Recordings might have a bit of a reputation as being a slop-house for psych on just the right side of mongy but TotS are legions away from the hallucinogens/studio wah triumvurate. This is a fucking sharp record.

And ambitious. And confident. There’s an opening track in heavily-effected German (“Leder”). There’s a monologue set over and under something close to Terry Riley‘s sax work with some Moroder-esque timbre-fancying speaker-bothering (“The Servant”). There’s a couple of whacking great proper 80s metal chords thrown in (“Pleiades Underground”). Often with bands with high ambition there’s a gulf between the band’s narrcissism and their record collection, but Teeth of the Sea are quite seriously and successfully throwing in all sorts: Italo disco, Throbbing Gristle, day-glo doom, opulent proggery and art-house fuck yous. A record that’s definitely got influences but more as an accident of mutual history than of artificial caprice (or worse, record company promo-fluff).

It’s also got the right weight. By which I mean it’s got slow songs in the way a symphony has slow movements. It moves around tempos but not out of fidgety inertia and muso show-offery. It’s probably more synth-led than their live show was last I saw them a couple of years ago and they’ve definitely earned their disco-wings, finding the disco kernel of earlier kraut tendencies.

I’ve always been probably closer to the glasses-wearing sexless turd side of plate-scraping noise wankers than their previous sound (as it was live, anyway) but they’ve found a way to segue some cracking, well-considered textural noise (“Responder”) and brutal industrial touches (“All Human is Error”) into the general feel of shedding krautish repetition for poppers o’clock electro. Again, the weights and colours are brilliantly disposed here. Holism is a cock of a word to use but it sounds like a huge committee of well-meaning auteurs have done the unthinkinkable and made a fucking brilliant record touching all bases (or at least making me forget the ones they’ve not touched). There’s a 10 minute closing song (of course) which somehow teeters like a ginned up lush in murderous 8-inch heels through vocoder malice, bliss-out noise, coming up trance synths, modem racket all over a beat that screams CHECK MY FUCKING SWAGGER.

Good then? Yeah. Really fucking good. Not in a “yeah, that’s alright, I’ll stick that on” way but in a “should I listen to one of the other new ones? Nah, I’ll listen to the fucking TotS record again, that’s a fucking belter.”

-Kev Nickells-

See the review here: Freq

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