What it says… The label is coming soon and here’s the guys having fun at their monthly World Unknown night.
[Apiento]
New Release(s): The World Unknown Label (Naum Gabo / Franz Underwear / Neville Watson / Apiento)
June 22, 2011
World Unknown is a night run by Andy Blake of Cave Paintings/Dissident and Joe Hart of Bodyhammer and Bloc. It is now also a record label coming your way soon and we are on the second release (our does do more than what you hear honest). They have a way with words so I am going to pass this over to them so you can read what it’s all about. For more information on the label click here.
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World Unknown is a monthly underground party held in a railway arch in Brixton, South London.
It’s a post-industrial pleasure dome full of strange and often exotic music that pumps and throbs and shimmers and shakes. The 60s and 70s vintage projector-based lighting and roomful of disco-fog adds to the otherworldliness of the night which is totally unlike any other club in London, and quite possibly the world.
Noting a distinct shortage of contemporary record labels releasing the kind of music that they play at the parties, organisers and resident DJ’s Andy Blake (Cave Paintings, Dissident) and Joe Hart (Bodyhammer, Bloc) decided World Unknown should have it’s own 12” only label.
Each World Unknown release will be a split-artist 12” and there will be six coming out in the first year of it’s life. Here are details of the first two, due to hit the shops in the first week of July 2011.
WORLD UNKNOWN 1
Release date – early July 2011
Format – limited edition 12” only – no digital release
Side W: Naum Gabo – Whop! (Excerpt)
The first World Unknown 12” kicks off with a slamming piece of prototype house from Glasgow’s Naum Gabo aka Jonnie Wilkes from Optimo and his production partner James Savage. Showing that a relatively low pace doesn’t mean any drop in energy levels and dancefloor pump power, Whop! cracks along like something from an alternate reality version of 1980’s Chicago. It’s as easy to imagine it rocking the house at Medusa’s or the Box as it is to envision it in the present day soundtracking some kind of bizarro fetish party or a particularly intense session at Berghain’s Lab-oratory. This is jacking in the true sense of the word.
Side U: Franz Underwear – Grauzone (Excerpt)
On the flip side Italian born Berlin resident Franz Underwear ups the tempo with a stunning piece of slamming European musclebeat. Shades of Ibiza 88-89 pervade here; the kind of pumping, chunky synth action, Teutonic vocal exhortations and vaguely menacing but ultimately benign vibe that sent thousands of potty European kids totally round the bend and changed the world of dance music forever. Fuse together ideas of glamorous open air Mediterranean nightclubs full of sex-crazed hedonistic Eurotrash, sweaty, strobey, smoky South London acid-house basements with walls of bassbins at one end, and your first decent E – that one so strong and clean that your brain nearly popped out of your head and ended up on Mars, and you’re getting somewhere near what this record sounds like. Savage, joyous and teetering on the edge of sanity.
WORLD UNKNOWN 2
Release date – early july 2011
Format – limited edition 12” only – no digital release
Side W: Neville Watson – One Four Green (Excerpt)
If you were to cut Neville Watson he would bleed acid house, he’d also quite likely knock you flat on your arse for having the temerity to wave a knife at him, but that’s a whole other story. For his first WU contribution he ventures down the ethereal proto-house boulevard. Jacking 707 patterns, a bouncing Juno bassline and outer-space synth lines take you into the upper atmosphere for a glorious airborne joyride. As ever, Neville manages to evoke those 85-89 feelings without ever sounding merely retro or like some kind of pastiche, something that many attempt but very few manage to pull off.
Side U: Apiento – The Orange Place (Excerpt)
Over on side u Apiento, the force behind the magisterially brilliant Test Pressing website (paid him for that one – Ed), chips in with a heartfelt homage to the new beat sound. Another testimony to the fact that a lower tempo doesn’t have to mean diminished energy levels, The Orange Place simply oozes class from top to bottom. Like some lost Ancienne Belgique classic it pounds and pumps along, building up the tension all the while until the quasi- Eastern refrain lets loose half way thru and all of a sudden a mystic portal opens up in the space-time continuum that leads all the way to Southwark Street in late 87.
For label and other World Unknown info email Andy and Joe here and for distribution enquiries mail here.
World Unknown are also having a launch party in Brixton on Friday 8th July. It won’t be the usual record launch party though. Just the usual WU faces, two bags of records, a smoke-filled room and a big black wall of speakers pounding out the pressure. DJs on the night are Andy Blake and Joe Hart of World Unknown playing throbbing electronic music for dancing™ from 11pm -6am. Email the chaps here for £5 list all night (ltd to first 50).
Our regular Brixton Venue, a railway arch far far away from the tyranny. It’s easy to get to by tube (Brixton 10 mins walk), overground (Loughborough Junct 30 seconds) and bus. The 35/N35 stops right outside and runs all night and day. Address will be sent closer to the time.
[Apiento]
Party: World Unknown
February 28, 2011
Quick post to say that World Unknown is happening this Friday in Brixton with Joe Hart and Mr Andy Blake. If you are interested head over to their website and if you fancy the party email them here and they’ll sort you with the location. It’s always fun in a ‘lets get heads down and have some fun and do what you like along the way’ kind of fashion and they’ve gone even more hippy on the lights (think a Pink Floyd light show from the 60s crossed with some nu-beat strobe business).
[Apiento]
Mix: Andy Blake – Strange Days
January 31, 2011
Have to hold my hands up here and say I really didn’t know how to describe this mix as I hadn’t heard a single thing on here (this seems to be happening a lot as people dig deeper and deeper) so I asked Andy what it was all about and he replied, “it’s a bunch of early and mid 70s psych 7″s, almost entirely from France and Turkey with a some reinforcements from California and Libya about half way through. The original idea was to put together some relatively mellow but interesting things and then, pretty much as always, my mind wandered and i couldn’t resist spiking the drinks a little bit.” Hope that helps. Drink up now…
[Apiento]
Mix: Andy Blake – Nuclear Ritual
December 6, 2010
Andy Blake’s back with some more balearic nu-beat hip hop business. This one hits a groove and stays in it with a lot of it sounding like that early early druggy hip hop (think ‘Beat Bop’). Good sound. As you may know Mr Blake is resident DJ alongside Joe ‘the Body Hammer’ Hart at World Unknown in London’s Brixton. It’s a great party and the next one is happening on the 17th of this month. Click here for more information and mixes in a similar vein.
[Apiento]
Mix: Andy Blake – That’s The Night
April 22, 2010
Nice mix from Andy Blake of Dissident, and now Test Pressing, for you all. This one is put together from his collection of 7 inches and first appeared in a short form on the recent Red Bull Radio but we liked it so here it is in full.
[Apiento]
Party: World Unknown
April 8, 2010
We’ve been chatting to Andy Blake of Dissident for a while so we are happy to say that he is going to be on board as a writer with us, posting pieces from his vault of magazines and books, creating mixes and updating us with news on the parties he is working on, playing at and generally whats making his world spin.
If you don’t know Andy things to know are that Dissident was a label doing the right things, World Unknown is his night focusing on the harder end of the balearic spectrum and he is as happy at home playing house and techno as he is exploring obscure US or European disco and cosmic funk oddities in a smaller space. playing reggae and dub sets at his Dubco nights or simply playing straight-up proper disco and afro grooves anywhere.
He has a new label starting soon going by the name of Cave Paintings, the first release that we heard was the sound of machines. Real live machines. No edits, no fx in Logic or Pro-tools, just straight up keyboards and drum machines. Sounded fresh.
Finally, Andy’s one of the vinyl over digital people. He believes in a ‘kind of sonic voodoo in the grooves of a record cut at the time that the music was actually made’ and thus will only play 12s and 7s. This we like. As for choosing vinyl over digital, it’s that choice that many people involved with the site have made in the realisation that its far more fun, intuitive and engaging to work with a big pile of records than wallets full of CDs or software, laptops and midi controllers.
Anyway, enough from us and over to Andy. Welcome.
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So then, how do i describe my party to you in my first post on test pressing without coming across like some shameless self promoting tool?
World Unknown is a little do that me and my mates, Joe Hart and Duncan Clark, put on every month in a boss little railway arch in Brixton with a nice big old fashioned mis-matched reggae sound system. Although our flyers say stuff like synth wave, ebm, new beat, acid, the music we play includes a lot more than that and could loosely be described as the darker, edgier end of balearic.
Friday 16th of April is our 6th installment and we’ve got a live set from well known techno fast food outlet Subway. In all seriousness this is going to be really rather smart indeed. We’ve already got a very nice vibe going and a genuinely great crowd ranging from wide-eyed teenies to seen it, done it 30 and 40-something veterans of the acid house wars and it seems to get better and better at each one.
We’re also in the process of putting together a pretty tasty optikinetics projector-based psychedelic light show. We’ll have a fair chunk of it ready for the 16th and it should be in it’s full stroboscopic swing by the may edition. Guests so far have included Alex Patterson from The Orb, Ali Renault, Radical Majik, Gold Blood and Con Mun Gos, and future live sets will include Cage & Aviary, Gatto Fritto/Hungry Ghost, Neville Watson and Kink, Snuff Crew and more.
If you are interested in what we are up to we have website with various mixes from Joe and myself, photos from the parties and links to other people and stuff that we like at the World Unknown website and if you fancy coming to the party just email us here and we’ll furnish you with the location details.
All the best then and hopefully see some of you at the party one day,
Andy.
[Andy Blake]
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