uncarved.org blog

These are now re-listed on the sidebar.

Twitter - waffle, interesting links, records I have played whilst doing the ironing

Youtube - videos I’ve uploaded to illustrate blog posts

This Is My Jam – one tune a week

Mixcloud - stream (some of) my mixes online

Shop – various bits I am selling on amazon, discogs and ebay

I’m not on Facebook, but I’ve added Facebook “share” buttons to the blog anyway.

The Shimmy Shimmy crew have just published their 3rd fanzine. Labour of love: by the fans, for the fans style.

I’ve not had time to write anything for it this time and am kicking myself, because I could have been in there alongside:

- Exclusive interviews with

• Stylo G
• Popcaan
• Mungo’s Hifi
• Young Warrior

- A day in the life of Curtis Lynch (Necessary Mayhem)
- Exclusive chart from Poirier
- Illustration from Smutlee & design from Al Fingers
- Doubles recipe from Hipsters Don’t Dance
- Soundsystem special: how to build your own, and a timeline
- Erin Macleod talks to Alric & Boyd about house in Jamaica
- Feature on India’s first soundsystem, the Reggae Rajahs

50 pages, 300 copies only. All back issues sold out.

Order from here while stocks last – I have!

Proof you can’t keep a good nerd down

All of the websites I host got seriously hacked last week.

I’m not entirely sure how it happened but all of my wordpress installations got messed up and people who looked at them were redirected to an amazing variety of scam and porn sites.

Apologies if you were affected.

The Woofah and Babylon sites are now back up.

This one is now nearly there. I’m just having some problems with my ftp connection crapping out, and the size of the backcatalogue.

Thanks to Droid, Zone Styx and Alex for their practical assistance, and to everyone who expressed sympathy or asked what was going on.

I’ve not been prolific with the posts recently for various reasons, but it’s nice to know people care!

It’s been a learning process, I might write a bit more on that soon.

Really looking forward to conquering the January blues with this great event next weekend. The skint people of London can reach early for a 3 quid deal, so no excuses!

Split loyalties for me though – who to cheer for?

Here is the blurb and video:

TIGHTEN UP + SHIMMY SHIMMY + EXTRA CLASSIC present:

CHAMPION SOUND

SATURDAY 7 JANUARY 2012

@ The Silver Bullet

5 Station Place

London N4 2DH

Tel: 020 7619 3639

Doors: 8.30pm – 3.30pm

Gate Pressure: free till 10pm / £3 till 11pm / £4 After

We kick off the new year in fine style with an ultra-special, one-away, party-clash-type-sumting we’re calling… CHAMPION SOUND!!!

CHAMPION SOUND brings together three of the tuffest crews on the UK Reggae scene – SHIMMY SHIMMY, EXTRA CLASSIC & TIGHTEN UP – in a head-to-head, toe-to-toe, tune-for-tune Three-Way 45 Clash!!! All crews will be on rotation all night long spinning the hottest Jamdown sounds to keep the people dem dancing! Expect Scorchin’ Ska, Rugged Roots, Raw Bone Rub-A-Dub, Dangerous Dancehall, Booty-Shakin’ Bashment and beyond!!!

Representing on the night will be some of the finest selectors and MCs to ever drop a tune or bless a mic:

For SHIMMY SHIMMY up step tip-top selectors THE LARGE & ILLANJA with the mighty SEROCEE pon di mic!!!

For EXTRA CLASSIC taking to the decks will be the crucial combination of AL FINGERS & DISORDA with the ever-versatile SEANIE T rocking the microphone!!!

For TIGHTEN UP at the control tower will be resident rude bwoy selectas MISTAH BROWN & TIM P with the dynamic dual deejay talents of DADDY RANKS & RAS JAHNY (aka JOHNNY DOLLAR) dealing with mic duties.

We’ll be kicking up rumpus all night til daylight! Come and join the party!! Reach early!!!

Apparently some of you ignored my advice earlier this year to get to the Showtime event. It was one of those legendary evenings that I can now taunt you about for the rest of your lives. But all is not lost – you can now shock out to its ridiculous line up in the privacy of your own home.

The footage of hype MCs is interspersed with some great interviews.

Rollo Jackson has excelled himself this year with this and Tape Crackers (also now available on DVD from TTT) – both films documenting UK soundsystem / ‘ardkore continumm music in their own sweet way.

Showtime is a fantastic calling card for The Heatwave, who have taken things to another level in 2011. Check the trailer and then order from here.

‘The Heatwave presents… SHOWTIME’ (trailer) from Rollo Jackson on Vimeo.

Some festive fun from my sparring partner last week, Cool Hand Luke and crew. This has got to be a good antidote to the office party…

Also keep Saturday Jan 7th free in your diary for some “3 big sounds on one big lawn” action.

Madd Raff was a blast the other night. It was an absolute pleasure to play an eighties revival set with Cool Hand Luke, alongside Benjamin Heatwave on mic duties. The venue was a little basement bar off Great Portland Street, very close to my first ever DJ gigs at the students’ union of the Polytechnic of Central London in the late eighties.

Twenty years later and I’m there playing records to people twenty years younger than me. Which means that some of my tunes came out before they were born. I’ve laid it on a bit thick about being the oldest raver in town this year, but I’m quite relaxed about that. I go to ska and rocksteady nights where music from the early sixties get played, often by people old enough to be my parents.

As Steve Barrow points out in the Dub Echoes DVD – capitalism always promotes the new thing as being the best thing, and tries to divide the young and the old. There’s a resurgence of “generational resentment” at the moment in the UK. One reading of the UK riots was old peoples’ fear of “feral youth”, which is the latest instalment of a long line of subcultural moral panics starting with teddy boys and going right through to hoodies.

I think what’s new is young peoples’ resentment of the old, though. For the first time living memory, this generation of school/college leavers will be significantly worse off than the previous one. Lower incomes, longer working lives, less secure jobs and little prospect of owning property look like being the norm.

Music can’t really patch up these economic differences, but I guess it can show that people have more in common than they thought. Each new generation finds a way to briefly escape hardship in darkened rooms as the bassline drops. Each new wave of dancehall builds on the foundation of the music. But sometimes dancehall mutations become so radioactive that more mature heads find it difficult to recognise them.

I guess it’s obvious that over the last few years I’ve been less and less obsessed by current grime, (post)dubstep and even dancehall. Hence all the reviews on here of weird electronic stuff made by men of a certain age, and the retro mixes.

Unlike some of my contemporaries, I have no vested interest in remaining an “expert” on dance (or any) music - as all this has been a hobby rather than a career. So I can be relaxed about it and enjoy the ride. On Wednesday night Luke and I were followed by Heatwave’s Dan Bean, who flung down some 2011 bashment anthems. At least I assumed they were anthems, as everyone went mental. I had no idea what most of the tunes were, and had a chuckle to myself about my lack of desire to find out. It felt quite liberating just enjoying being a room full of people going mad to JA music without mentally filing every tune away in my Bumper Trainspotter’s Book of Music.

Photo courtesy of The Heatwave

I remember trying to sneak a few current bashment riddims into reggae sets in the early noughties. It never worked - I even managed to clear the floor on a couple of occasions. Now it seems like a corner has been turned – for clubbers, my old man’s music has been restored to its rightful place as a warm up or chill out selection. What people really come out for is the new fangled music, which is how it should be really. I saw a girl running down the stairs at Dancehall Jamboree a few weeks back, so she could get on the floor and skank out to the Liquid riddim.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that there’s a bit of hype about bashment at the moment when you consider the alternatives. JA music has all the colour, character and vibes that are missing from most dance music right now. But it’s also testament to the sheer hard graft put in by people like The Heatwave and newer crews like the bewildering nexus of Hipsters Don’t Dance / Physically Fit / Shimmy Shimmy / Style and Swagger.

All this intrigues me. I like having a broad overview of Jamaican music since the 1950s, although if truth be told you’ll mainly find me listening to stuff from the last century. But unlike some of the old guard, you won’t find me wringing my hands about the terrible state of JA tunes nowadays.

I like Steve Barrow’s ideas about unifying the young and old under one b-line. But I’m also quite pleased that bashment ravers can still annoy the old gits and purists.

Agit Disco has just been published by Mute Books, compiled by Stefan Szczelkun, edited by Anthony Iles  The launch takes place on 8th December 2011, 6.30pm – 9.00pm at The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London, NW8 8PQ.

‘Agit Disco collects the playlists of its 23 writers to tell the story of how music has politically influenced and inspired them. The book provides a multi-genre survey of political musics, from a wide range of viewpoints, that goes beyond protest songs into the darker hinterlands of musical meaning. Each playlist is annotated and illustrated.

The collection grew organically with an exchange of homemade CDs and images. These images, with their DIY graphics, are used to give the playlists a visual materiality. Almost everyone makes selections of music to play to themselves and friends. Agit Disco intends to show the importance of this creative activity and its place in our formation as political beings. This activity is at odds with to the usual process of selection by the mainstream media – in which the most potent musical agents of change are, whenever possible, erased from the public airwaves. Agit Disco Selectors: Sian Addicott, Louise Carolin, Peter Conlin, Mel Croucher, Martin Dixon, John Eden, Sarah Falloon, Simon Ford, Peter Haining, Stewart Home, Tom Jennings, DJ Krautpleaser, Roger McKinley, Micheline Mason, Tracey Moberly, Luca Paci, Room 13 – Lochyside Scotland, Howard Slater, Johnny Spencer, Stefan Szczelkun, Andy T, Neil Transpontine, Tom Vague’.

You can now order the book direct from Mute Books.

The audio for my contribution is now available here:

John Eden - Agit Disco Mix #22 [ 1:08:00 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

TRACKLIST

1. X/O/Dus – English Black Boys (Factory Records, 1980)
2. Audrey – English Girl (Ariwa, 1982)
3. Lion Youth – Three Million On The Dole (Virgo Stomach, 1982)
4. Steel Pulse – Handsworth Revolution (Island, 1978)
5. Maxi Priest – Love In The Ghetto (Level Vibes, 1984)
6. Papa Levi – In A Mi Yard (Level Vibes, 1984)
7. Papa Benjie – Fare Dodger (Fashion, 1985)
8. Laurel and Hardy – Video Traffickin’ (Upright, 1983)
9. Macka B – Bean and Egg (Ariwa, 1986)
10. Pato Banton – Gwarn (Ariwa, 1985)
11. Leslie Lyrics – Pull Back Your Truncheon (UK Bubblers, 1985)
12. Ranking Ann – Kill The Police Bill (GLC, 1984)
13. Raymond Naptali – On My Way (Fatman)
14. Lorna Gee – Three Week Gone (Ariwa, 1985)
15. Horseman – Horsemove (Raiders, 1985)
16. Daddy Colonel – Take A Tip From Me (UK Bubblers, 1985)
17. Tippa Irie – Complain Neighbour (UK Bubblers, 1985)
18. Demon Rocka – Hard Drugs (Unity, 1988)