Geoff Farina

Chris Brokaw

Our very own Geoff Farina, formerly of Karate and currently of Glorytellers, who have recently released their second album, Atone, on Southern, is touring the UK this week with Chris Brokaw (Codeine/Come and many others).  The tour is to launch the release of their first album together - The Angel’s Message To Me out on Damnably on 18th March - coincidentally the same day the tour starts!  Nice how things work like that, isn't it?

Geoff and Chris recorded The Angel's Message... as a duo which is coming out on Brokaw’s own (Capitan) label in the States and on Damnably in the UK. The songs are all pre-WWII blues/folk/ragtime songs that they do in their own weird way. You can pre-order the album from Damnably now.

Chris and Geoff will play two sets featuring a magnificent journey through their back catalogues, culminating in their new material for this combined harvest of guitar genius and incredible talent.  We are really looking forward to this and highly recommend you grab the rare opportunity to see these two here in the UK.

Brokaw/Farina March tour dates

18th Barden's Boudoir, London

19th Rosy's Tea Room, Nottingham

20th Zanzibar, Liverpool

22nd The Portland Arms, Oxford

23rd The Library Pub, Leeds

24th Hare and Hounds, Birmingham

25th Firebug, Leicester

26th Luminaire, London

27th Buffalo Bar, Cardiff

28th Freebutt, Brighton, UK

Glorytellers and Karate releases are available from the Southern Web Shop.

Thanks for reading!

Some of you might have noticed that we've got a new design for our blog. We hope you find it not only aesthetically pleasing, but also easier to read and to navigate. The design is the work of Andy at Nonimage, using a fully fluid layout that should look best at screen widths above 1000 pixels, and look nice and be completely readable at just about any (reasonable) size.

We're still adding bits and pieces, so watch this space!

In other news, we have made it possible to post comments (moderated ones) without registering on our blog.

For those of you who like your/a picture to appear next to your posts, you can sign up with Gravatar for free. You can configure multiple avatars that "follow... you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog."

We are very pleased indeed to receive word from Chrome Hoof that their return to our galaxy is imminent. After nearly three years of exploration they are preparing for re-entry, and they are ready to tell the tales of the last few years spent wandering.

We have received the following missive....

Chrome Hoof prepare to launch. (photo by Steve Bliss)

"I, a lone ship's biscuit, was the only witness of sound enough mind to relay the following events…

Our malfunctioned vessel drifted downwards in the briney ooze while the groaning super-structure straddled Crush Depth - instantaneous pulverization. In these moments pregnant with doom and collective madness, personnel had elected to arm all thirteen torpedos and fire them simultaneously into the black void that cradled their chromium craft. These probes of destruction were equipped with untested launch programs: Crystalline, Labyrinth and the Core Delusion, so no-one aboard knew what abominations were about to be unleashed. Then, Deadly Pressure crackled in the air whilst our spirits were temporarily lifted with tales of Bunker's Paradise - the legendary domain whereby one can reside for evermore if able to propel themselves forward, beyond the twin guardians of the Anorexic Cyclops and the ever-ravenous Vapourise unit.

The audio platter, known as Crush Depth, serves as a document to the hour that followed." - M.

The message was accompanied by the audio below.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Dear Sir/Madam

I wish to strenuously protest the proposed closure of 6 Music.  Just two weeks ago, the BBC Trust published a review of 6 Music which described the digital station as "distinctive and well-liked by its listeners", so it does boggle the mind why the Trust would permit its closure.  When one compares the cost of running the station to the extraordinary salaries paid to "celebrities" like Chris Moyles, it becomes even more incomprehensible.   If the BBC's remit is to provide quality programming which would otherwise not exist in a purely commercial environment, how can this be justified?

6 Music plays a wide range of music not heard elsewhere and introduces many listeners to music that is new to them - with a particularly strong emphasis on British talent.   As a UK based independent label, such outlets are vital to our continued existence.  We are operating in a niche which is not well served by other BBC stations or your commercial counterparts.  The closure of the station would deprive many labels such of ourselves, and the talent they are struggling to develop,  of any hope of reaching our audience - and would in my view be a staggering blow to the the health of the UK music industry.  The UK has always been seen as an innovator and a proving ground for new music talent and trends and the effect on it is certainly something that the Trust must consider when contemplating the closure of 6 Music.

I am counting on the Trust to exhaust all other alternatives (such as reducing the salaries of Radio 1 "celebrity talent") before concluding that the closure of 6 Music would benefit its license payers.

Yours sincerely,
Allison Schnackenberg

------

Write to the BBC Trust: trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk

and also make a complaint direct to the BBC here www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

Sign a petition

Hot off the press, a new video from Tartufi with stills from their 2009 tour of the US!

We are very excited to announce Steve Ignorant's plans for a tour he is calling The Last Supper.  Please see the full announcement below for all the details!

The Last Supper tour announcement

The dates are

SEP 24 bristol academy

SEP 25 birmingham academy

OCT 1 manchester academy

OCT 2 edinburgh liquid rooms

Tickets available now from www.gigbox.co.uk and the usual venue outlets.

Exile On Mainstream number forty-five!

We got our delivery late but they are finally here!  The first run of 1000 copies of the very wonderful WIVE cd (Exile On Mainstream) come in sweet little hand-printed cotton bags.

Featuring  drummer/programmer Matt Irwin and violinist Hannah Murray from A Whisper in the Noise, we've been spinning this beautiful album in the Southern office quite a bit.

Difficult to classify, the music of Wive blends a lot of different styles - usually a warning light goes on here for us - but the fusion is truly organic and it's only when you begin to try to describe it that you end up sounding like a genre nerd on acid.  Part eletronic/glitch, semi-classical, new folk, nostalgic pop.. it's all there.  A band that, were they from Montreal, surely would be hanging around Hotel2Tango with the Constellation mob.

WIVE gets the very highest recommendation from the web shop elves, and we advise you to snap up one of the limited edition copies now!  Meanwhile, check out the track "Lazarvs And Dives" which is Dawn's favourite.

Lazarvs And Dives

Some of you, probably all of you, may have noticed that we've had a couple of hiccups lately. The big firewall router hardware failure wasn't really my fault, unless you're a real stickler and say I should have had two backup devices for it, not just the one we installed after racing over to Telehouse, just to find that it too had crapped out during my drive back to Southern Studios. I could have avoided the downtime today if I had only had the time to test all of the devices in the new configuration, but I didn't, and I don't.

We need some help here, from geeky people who doesn't shy away from technologies like pf and CARP, traffic shaping, Bind and RIP. We can't pay much, but we're flexible and the work is interesting. We also have lots of records here, which we might be able to sell to the right person at an interesting discount. I'll even give you a tour of the studio and our computer museum (otherwise known as our data centre), which is very, very geeky.

The first order of business is a new OpenBSD server I'd like to take to Telehouse to increase our DNS redundancy. The DNS downtime really hurts us the most because it even makes this blog inaccessible, despite it being hosted outside of our network.

I have a number of odd jobs that could be completed over several weekends. You could telecommute for the most part, I think. We're also happy to have people come in and have some space for you to work, amongst the piles of vintage hardware.

I'd really like to work with people who are fans of Southern and our partner labels, hence this post in our label blog.

If you think you might be able to help, give me a call on 020 8888 8949 from 10am to 5pm, Monday through Friday. I would really like to have someone ready to start by the end of next week.

Southern Records is very pleased to be invited to host a venue at this year's Camden Crawl.  If you don't know the Crawl, it's an "urban festival" in London, spanning two days, 40 venues, and 200 bands, with a focus on new, cutting-edge music.  And they have some "heritage acts" too (that means folks who are old enough to be your parents but still know how to rock out).

We'll be hosting the Blues Kitchen on Sunday 2nd May.  We don't know what bands will be playing yet.  The way it works is all of the venue hosts (fancy pants label folks and journalists mostly - but only the cool ones) get to nominate all their favourite bands.  A HUGE LIST (like 400 pages long)(ok maybe only 6 pages long) is then compiled and all the hosts vote for the bands they want to go through.  The bands with the most votes go to the top of the list and the Crawl starts phoning em!   Eventually they end up with a list of bands that have been nominated, voted in, and who are available to play.  Once that list is finalised, they lock all us hosts in a room with no food and water and we fight to the death for the bands we want to play our venue.

We'll keep you posted on the progress, but for now you can mosey on over to the Crawl site where you can see the confirmed daytime schedule.

Deadline

Rain

In the process of closing our warehouse and moving the shop late last year, we dug up some boxes of stuff that we'll gradually be adding to the shop.  Our first box is a real find - copies of two now out-of-print CDs issued in 2007 on Guy Piccotto's Peterbilt label.

Back in 1990, Peterbilt issued limited 12 inch pressings of two previously unreleased tapes by early Washington DC hardcore bands Rain and Deadline.   Both singles have long been high on the want lists of collectors of rare DCHC.  In 2007 Peterbilt pressed up CDs of the two releases - as far as we can tell only 1000 of each were pressed.  We found 23 copies of each CD and you can buy them while they last in the shop.