Director Martin Hans Schmitt tells us that his non-verbal documentary film Robot World – a Meeting With Your Alternate Double is now available for online streaming. You can watch a trailer for the film on the same page.
The soundtrack is by Matt Howden (alias Sieben), who talked to us about his work, prior to recording this soundtrack, back in Phantom Circuit #34. Show #70 included some of the soundtrack, which you can buy on CD or as a download direct from Matt’s site.
Phantom Circuit #89 will be out soon. It will be the 30th and final edition of 2011, which has been rather a productive year for the show.
In addition to playing as much intriguing music as possible, Phantom Circuit carried exclusives (interviews, live sets or sessions) by musicians including AGF, Allie Moss, Black Forest Orchestra, Cousin Silas, Esben and the Witch, Gurdonark, Harrys Gym, Hiromichi Sakamoto, Islaja, Keith Seatman, Kirill Platonkin, Lee Gamble, Matmos, Moon Wiring Club, Mutate and Thee Moths, Origamibiro, People Like Us and Ergo Phizmiz, Peter Gregson, Philip Jeck, Pram, Sculpture, Spacedog (shows 66 and 88), Swallows, Tetsuo Kogawa, Z’ev and Mick Flower.
Phantom Circuit also brought you sounds and interviews with participants in three festivals during 2011: Flatpack Festival (shows 67, 68, 69, 70 and 71) Woodland Gathering (shows 79 and 80) and Full of Noises (shows 81 and 82).
Phew!
If you missed any of these features, follow the links above or see the full list of available shows.
Thanks for your support during the past year and we hope you’ll enjoy what Phantom Circuit brings you in 2012. Happy new year and happy listening.
If you enjoyed Black Forest Orchestra’s excellent debut set of improvised electroacoustic music at the Woodland Gathering festival, as featured in Phantom Circuit #80, you’ll be pleased to hear that you can now download the performance as Black Forest Orchestra’s first album. It’s been released on the Electronic Musik netlabel under the title The Elements Inside Two Circles and you can download it for free.
The ascent of Spacedog (featured in Phantom Circuit #66) continues with coverage in the August edition of Wired UK magazine, which interviews Spacedog’s Sarah Angliss, and BBC Radio 4′s repeat broadcast today of Sarah’s documentary ‘The Bird Fancyer’s Delight‘, which asks:-
“were birds ever used as primordial, feathered music recorders? Did we use them to bring popular music into our homes on command before the advent of the phonograph, the gramophone and radio? … This radio piece is packed with some of my favourite bird training ephemera, including 1700s dance tunes and some wonderful 1950s bird training records”.
The programme can also be heard via the BBC’s Listen Again service.
Dan Hayhurst (music) and Reuben Sutherland (animation) tell us how the hell they do such things as this…
Demonstration Reel from Sculpture on Vimeo.
![['From the Sea' album cover]](http://phantomcircuit.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/from-the-sea.jpg)
Phantom Circuit has just received its copy of From the Sea, the new solo album by cellist and composer Jo Quail, formerly of SonVer. Jo spoke to us about her work after her gig in Birmingham in April of last year, and you can still hear that interview in show 35. The highlight of her set on that occasion was the striking elegy ‘Rex Infractus’, which sets the agenda on the new CD with a mix of the melodic, atmospheric and subtly experimental, all handled with the sort of finesse that requires repeated listening in order to be fully appreciated. Also included on the CD is ‘The Falconer’, the video for which you may already have seen.
Expect to hear tracks from the CD on Phantom Circuit soon, but if you trust our taste you can just head over to Jo’s site and buy a copy direct from the artist.
Here from the Phantom Circuit record vault are two examples of what seems to be called “splatter vinyl” records: a psychedelic mix of hues in the vinyl adds more than a splash of colour to these 78 rpm children’s records made in 1962.
These two examples are labelled as being on the “Happy Time Records” label, an imprint of Pickwick International. They came with a toy gramophone, which gouged the records with a vicious-looking needle attached to a simple speaker.
Google image search shows many other examples of splatter vinyl, mostly aimed at the older record buyer.
News has belatedly reached Phantom Circuit of the passing away of Brian Rust, at the age of 88, on 5th January. He was a revered discographer of jazz and popular music and the presenter of the wonderfully crackly vintage music programme Mardi Gras on Capital Radio in the ’70s and ’80s.
Via YouTube, here’s the music he used as the theme to Mardi Gras.
If you enjoyed the collaboration between Mutate and Thee Moths in Phantom Circuit #59 – which of course you did – you will want to hear the duo’s brand new MP3 release Frosty Morning. It includes the session for Phantom Circuit and you can download the whole album for free.
A subject that was touched on in Phantom Circuit #51 (and which is alluded to in some of the music which has cropped up in other shows) was numbers stations, those mysterious shortwave radio broadcasts consisting of lists of numbers being read out for unknown purposes (although espionage is the standard explanation). These transmissions are not heard as readily now as they were in the 1980s, but have sustained currency in electronic music.
Here’s a short report on numbers stations. Notwithstanding the silly preamble in the studio before the report itself starts, it’s a concise introduction to the subject at just over three minutes.
Examples of numbers stations abound. Most famously the Conet Project compiled many such recordings, which can now also be downloaded for free.
Most previous editions of Phantom Circuit can still be heard. See the full list of available shows.
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