"The Salford krautrock merchants play The Trip fest next week. Ahead of that, Samuel A Smith took a trip to/in their HQ to catch up with the band:
In the foreword of The Archaic Revival by ethnobotanist and sage of psychedelia Terence McKenna, Tom Robbins writes of "a cyclone of unorthodox ideas capable of lifting almost any brain out of it's cognitive Kansas."
This is Gnod. The auricular incarnation of McKenna’s strangest philosophies, re-imagined by some pissed off Norse demiurge to be enacted in an amphitheatre made from multi-coloured crystal skulls. The flower children have been forced to violent revolt and what’s left is bizarre, and fucking magnificent.
On a Friday night, ahead of their first night set at the five-day psych odyssey fest The Trip, I’m at Gnod’s Islington Mills base in Salford, the epicentre of Gnod's collective mind, and about to be immersed first hand in a practice session. They have a banquet table of kit - analogue gadgets, pedals, drum machines, all manner of wires and strange twisty bits like some genius teenager's wildest aqueous dream, all set up ready to transport to some peculiar and freakish realm. Lead to a black leather sofa at the back of the room, they hand me a bin bag blind fold. This was something to be experienced without vision…"
Read the rest of the interview here: The Quietus
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Here is the not seen before footage of the Heads playing San Francisco on their one and only American Tour. The show saw the Heads share the stage with Nubula, Acid King and High on Fire and also sported a stunning Kozik poster
Rocket's Mission Control was there on the night (can be seen down the front) and we remember it fondly, it was a stunning night!!! Paul is wearing his 'fresh from the printers' first print Rocket Big Muff shirt.
Sit back and enjoy...
This is the first of a series of unseen footage we are going to be posting over the next few months.
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Our good friends at Invada Records are have managed to secure the rights to release the soundtrack to amazing 'Valhalla Rising' on vinyl.
If you don't know the film, it is a stunning piece of work directed by Nicolas Winding Refn Who also did the great Bronson, Drive and Only God Forgives. And the soundtrack matches the Acid Trip of the film.
Apparently it is a really ltd pressing so they won't be around for long..
This is what the press release says:
VALHALLA RISING:
ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK RELEASED ON BLOOD RED VINYL LP
Sleeve notes by Nicolas Winding Refn
Composition by Peter Peter and Peter Kyed
A european LP edition of Valhalla Rising soundtrack by Peter Peter and Peter Kyed is now released for general sale direct from Invada on Blood Red vinyl. This version is not available anywhere else in Europe.
The soundtrack itself represents the dark and heavy nature of the film, and isn’t for the faint hearted. The vinyl contains the complete score, as well as unused cues and sections of the soundscapes which sound designers Giles Lamb and Douglas MacDougall created for the film.
Available to buy exclusively here : Invada Shop
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First online review of our forthcoming compilation that comes out two week today (if the manufacturers pull their finger out that is):
"If you’re a fan of any of the weird, freaky or obtuse elements permeating the musical landscape these days you owe Rocket Recordings, and you owe them big. In June this year Goat, the Swedish band in their roster, played the (large) West Holts stage at Glastonbury, illustrating the accessibility and excitement of music born out of experimental impulses, collective weirdness or psychic diversity. This wasn’t allowed to happen over night or in a vacuum but with the courageous otherness and excellent taste of the Bristol/London label, which with this compilation of original compositions celebrate 15 years of their ‘unlikely survival’ as a record label. The material here ranges from empty quirkiness to explorative profundity, but the result is always unique.
Teeth of the Sea get things off to a bleak start, their offering ‘Run Red’ coming on like what Julian Cope describes as ‘blackest ambient metal’, a cinematic tone poem of electronic drones, guitar squall and disembodied screams that can only be likened to something off of Sunn O)))’s Black One, or an alternative soundtrack to 80’s nuclear apocalypse flick Threads. The brittle, afrobeat-indebted post-punk of Blood Sport follows this contrastingly, their offering mixing nasal Lydon-esque vocals with complex rhythms, suggesting a modern take on This Heat.
Elsewhere Mancunian free-formers Gnod carry on their progression away from the blisteringly heavy repeater-rock of their album Chaudelande towards a sort of industrial kosmiche, with spacey VCS3-sounding synths swooping over primitive programmed beats. The sexy Swedes assert a strong presence here also, with the batshit motorik race of newcomers Uran seguing into countrymen Hills, whose tambura-heavy drone hymn looks to their national heritage of poncho-sporting forest folk like Parson Sound, International Harvester and Trad, Gras och Stenar. The studio jam by Goat has less of the wild vitality of the steaming cuts from their 2012 album World Music but introduces a sense of insistent subtle repetition similar to that of Can post-Tago Mago.
Rocket Recordings don’t want to make friends and they’re not going to hold your hand once you’ve been thrown into the psychedelic maelstrom..."
Read the rest of the review here: Cherry Coloured Funk
We still have some presale copies left to buy from our shop, and once they are gone, they will be gone. This isn't getting repressed: Rocket Shop
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A lot of you will be pleased to know that we have finally got round to doing a run of T-Shirts that feature our Rocket logo.
They come in 'white on black 'and 'black on grey marl' and are ltd to 75 of each style, and are available in these various sizes: S, M, L, XL.
These are being sold exclusively via our Rocket shop and you can pre-order your shirt now from here: merch
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ROBEDOOR from URSSS on Vimeo.
When friends of Rocket 'Robedoor' played the Corsica in London recently we were a bit blown away...so we thought we would share this footage of their full show in Milan on the same tour.
Watch this then go and buy their latest album Primal Sphere on Hand in the Dark records!!!
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Rocket Recordings are proud to announce a first public playback of the forthcoming Goat album 'Live Ballroom Ritual' on 15 November at 'Nothing is...' at The Alibi in Dalston, East London.
The album as previously announced is a double live LP of the mighty Goat captured in full swing at Camden Electric Ballroom in June this year.
"Nothing is..." is Alibi's longest running night and is the perfect place for this first airing of the album as it is run by Rocket's very own Rik Motor, Goat remixers Cherrystones (who is also celebrating his birthday the same night) and Cage and Aviary, plus someone they call Little Dirty.
The playback starts bang on 9pm and will be followed by the usual 'Nothing is...' monthly cosmic chaos with added birthday mayhem.
Nothing is...
Cage & Aviary (Internasjonal/DFA)
Cherrystones (Brutal)
Little Dirty (Hed Nod)
Rik Motor (Rocket Recordings)
The Alibi – Dalston/London
15 November
9-3
Free entry
Show your love: Nothing is
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ALSO:
We have 250 ltd green/white splatter colour vinyl versions of the Goat Live Ballroom double LP available for preorder now. These are a Rocket shop exclusive and can only be bought via our bandcamp. Once they are gone, they are gone.
Please note the picture below is a mock up.
Buy from here: Rocket Bandcamp
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Julian Cope who has always been a big advocate of Teeth of the Sea has said some words about their latest album MASTER:
NOVEMBER DRUDION
NOVEMBER 2013CE
I’ve also been enjoying the hell out of MASTER, the brash new release from London’s Teeth Of The Sea that floors listeners with its movie soundtrack massiveness. Themes and moods abound herein, the brutality of the drum programming and crassness of the sounds placing the record in the same post-Krautrock territory as Boney M’s classic title track ‘Night Flight To Venus’ and Tangerine Dream’s experimental post-STRATOSFEAR forays into ‘proper’ rock, but still featuring all those band’s typical elements – the souped-up Kling Klang crunch of their driving music, the hanging spoken commentaries over bleak urban dystopian musicscapes, the parched Spaghetti Western trumpet themes – then subsumes them into the kind of vast panoramic listening experience that makes you wanna go out and drive all night. Released on Bristol’s excellent Rocket Recordings, MASTER is a very intense listening experience and comes in a beautifully ornate digipak that only adds further weight to this band’s already weighty canon.
See more here: Head Heritage
Image by: Christian Zander
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John Calvert from The Quietus talks to Teeth Of The Sea about sex, violence and D.I.S.C.O.
In the back-room lounge of The Old Blue Last boozer sit ¾ of London four-piece, Teeth Of The Sea. And even if this is a fellowship of intrepid futurists - the enemies of nostalgia - and even if Jimmy Martin, with his bleach blonde hair and piercings has the aqualine look of a utopian android, there is something undeniably olde worlde about these musicians.
Teeth Of The Sea are part of a lineage of transgressive London eccentrics stretching back to Wilmot (John, not Gary). As I sit listening from across the table, conversation topics range from the lewd to the ever so lovely, from Lady Bumticklers Revels to the art of fine tea-making, with the repartee intimidating in erudition and exchanged in units of supersyllabic chicanery. These are what I'd like to call gentleman beasts; the kind of men who've loitered around the undercarriage of British culture since records began; the kind of men who'd give you first dibs on the clean-up towel then maybe read you a little Byron.
No mean feat in this day and age of endless reproduction, 2010's universally acclaimed Your Mercury offered a take on psychedelia unlike any other that proceeded it - a uniquely British, uniquely anxious form of psychedelia which, in a review of the album in 2010, this writer described like so: “Epileptic, infinite and disturbance-vexed, the Londoner's second LP sooner calls to mind the altered states of mental ill-heath: the band's sublime delusions ferrying you to constructed worlds of the mind - touched, tasted and played in from the comfort of a hospital bed. In this way Your Mercury is less psychedelic so much as it is psychological. What use is a clear night sky for stargazing when the amber pollution is amplifying the voices in your head?”...
Read the full and revealing interview here: The Quietus
Drawing by Michael DeLucia
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Rocket are thrilled to introduce our new irregular blog feature called 'Multiple Exposure'. This is where we ask various artists what their favourite pieces of 'repetitive' music are.
To kick off this feature we are delighted to have Craig from the mighty Shit & Shine to tell us his choices. And you can't argue, there is probably no better way to start:
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Multiple Exposure Vol: 1 – Shit & Shine
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Strangulated Beatoffs – Practicing To Be A Doctor (Forced Exposure 7”)
This is the song that started it all for me, this song and band are $hit and $hines greatest influence, their record covers were stupid and hilarious and just creepy. Ex members of Drunks with Guns from St Louis, odd fellows.
Drunks with Guns – Enemy (7”)
My favourite lyric ever: “music is my enemy”. Its all about the simple bad ass repeating riffs with Drunks with Guns and Strangulated Beatoffs. I never understood why Flipper got so much attention and these guys got none. Beatoffs and Drunks were so much better and so much more genuinely menacing, that’s important.
Drunks with Guns
Bullets for Pussy – Bullets for Pussy (LP)
From twisted minds come, compilation LP on Noiseville another Drunks with Guns offshoot, same routine-totally mean simple riffs and general bad vibes all around. Perfect.
The Gerogeriggegege – Life Documents (7” Forth Dimension records)
This is a very odd record indeed! The sounds of a badly recorded Techno loop, lots of scratchy noise and the sound of a middle aged Japanese man jerking off?! Weirdly good.
Gerogeriggegege
Donna Summer – Feel Love (12”)
The best song ever.
Donna Summer
Evol – Rave Slime (12”)
Brilliant. As stripped as it gets. Straight up essence.
Evol
Mark Fell / Peter Rehberg – Zikir/Kubu (12” Mego)
I love everything Mark Fell does. This record has some really beautiful drum sampling going on. Random but perfectly placed.
Mark Fell
NEU – Box (Gronland Records)
Well its totally obvious but I had to get it in.
NEU
Harmonia – Deluxe (LP Brain Records)
Its just so pretty! Simple repeating themes sprinkled with sparkling gold analogue synth melodies. So many crucial kraut releases that need to be mentioned but I wont bother. I’ll leave it to the other nerds in on this thing.
Harmonia
Rusted Shut – Dead (LP load)
Not pretty. Not pretty at all. Houston’s finest. Fuck Austin. I don’t know what happened here but the true grit is gone. Houston still has Rusted Shut. What does Austin have? Kids. Polite kids with denim fucking waist coats who play in bands that all sound like they belong in Samsung commercials. I’m not wrong. Where did it go wrong etc...
Shit And Shine – Le Grande Larance Prix (3XLP Rock is Hell records)
Yep. I did. Fuck it.
$&$
Frank Hebley – Tuinslangboogie (12”)
Great cocaine record!
Frank Hebley
Endless Boogie – Whatever
Fuck yeahhh!!!! ZZ Top style guitar repeated over and over??! Well DUH!! Fucking yes please!!! I really do not get people who don’t get this band.
Endless Boogie
Vol.2 of our Multiple Exposure feature will be appearing sometime soon...so watch this space
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