January 18, 2014Great documentary this, brilliantly shot with a quality story behind it. The Great Hip Hop Hoax is the story of Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, Scottish rappers who, after being laughed out of A&R offices and struggling to find gigs in London, reinvented themselves as a Californian hip-hop duo named Silibil N’ Brains. Almost instantly the industry was suddenly willing…
January 16, 2014Bit of an odd release this, and utterly fascinating. Jamie Stewart’s four-piece band Xiu Xiu have produced countless flashes of brilliance since Knife Play in 2002, but none as overly enjoyable as this full-length tribute to Nina Simone. The Nina Simone songbook is, for the best part, reduced to Tom Waits style funeral marches, home recordings accompanied by what sounds…
January 15, 2014Still catching up on last year’s releases for whatever reason, and proper surprised by how many bits passed us by until now, or, as is this case here, were purchased and sat in the “to-listen-to” pile for way too long. While January slowly gets back to the normal record schedules expect a few of these posts to surface as we…
January 13, 2014There’s been a couple of email threads this week around past London nights, with some of the Awkward Movements cohorts weighing in on a few favourite venues and most memorable parties. Alongside tales of spinning in defunct locations, queing for parties only to see the best or worst night of the season and memorable moments on the decks, the crew…
January 10, 2014There’s not much better than when house music takes on a life of it’s own, and though others are entitled to disagree, Deepblak for me is a house music label, consistently churning out chin-stroke music that can equally move the floor. Along with Mathematics, it’s got to be one of the best curated wax labels around, defining it’s own distinct…
January 8, 2014Archive now up for the two hour radio broadcast that was the first Awkward Movements show on NTS Radio for 2014, the first in fact for our new time slot starting Wednesday nights UK time. Instead of a countdown of our most played joints, we normally use this time of year to clean house, dropping in records that we didn’t…
January 7, 2014The first episode of Jimmy Monsta Funk’s ‘Welcome To The B‘ series dropped just before the holidays, sound tracking our festive season in the best possible way. And with perfect timing once again – to help us through the first week back to work – comes Awkward Movements Sessions #54 – ‘Welcome To The B’ Part 2. Out of all the…
January 6, 2014Going back a bit for a nice piece of archive here, the last Awkward Movements show of 2013 that went out via NTS Radio on the 23rd of last month. Some proper dub vibes from Suns of Arqa being flipped by Youth Dub and a cut from the amazing Sheriff Lindo and the Hammer LP, Illum Sphere tapping in to…
January 5, 2014Fairly recently a friend put me on to a series run by ABC’s Radio National titled Into The Music. The features program is exploration down pretty much any avenue of music you can imagine; where opera singers go when the curtain closes, the lives of Australian jazz musicians, the roots and journey of Switzerland’s musical culture, ‘That Doctor Who Sound‘…
January 2, 2014The seasonal break brought me time to dig out the old delay pedal, which in turn gave reason to put fresh batteries in to the dub siren which I – aided by those more technically proficient – built about eight months ago. For those with a desire to play a sound system there’s no doubting the importance of a dub…