5 years. It feels like a long time. It feels like it went by fast. It feels pretty good, all in all, to have got this far without someone insisting we stop. Either that, or we just didn’t listen to their callow cries.
On the 24th of July we’ll be celebrating this and it wont cost you a penny. Details just below. Between then and now, we’ll be posting some exclusive and long lost songs from the Tough Love archive, as well as previewing the bands to play the party. Keep checking back over the coming weeks for more stuff.
TOUGH LOVE IS 5 – ALL DAYER
Saturday 24th July @ The Stag’s Head, Dalston
As you all know, Seams is celebrating the release of his now-sold-out debut 12″ Nightcycles with a free show at Puregroove on Monday 3rd May.
We can now announce that not only will he be joined by friends Shells (live) and Becoming Real (DJ), but also by very ‘special guest’ and recent touring partner Gold Panda, whom you may remember from Tough Love Is 4 last year.
It’s free entry and starts at 18:30. Stage times will be posted nearer the day. Follow this link to the Facebook event.
It’s with pleasure that we’re able to announce the release of TLV036: Seams – Nightcycles + RMXS, on 26th April 2010. Issued as a 12″ white label, containing the near-8 minute original track “Nightcycles” and four accompanying remixes, it’s hand-printed and limited to just 100 copies. If you pre-order through our site, we’ll email you a code to download the songs as MP3s. As with the Becoming Real 12″, the short run means these will not be available for long.
Coinciding with the record release, Seams will be going out on tour with Gold Panda (he of BBC Sound 2010 and our 4th birthday party fame) in April, the dates listed below. For those unaware of their work, I’ve also provided some biog and links for the remixers, so you can acquaint yourself with their excellent jams.
LIVE DATES / TOUR WITH GOLD PANDA:
March:
16 – The Social – London
April:
13 – Bungalows and Bears – Sheffield w/Gold Panda & Dam Mantle
14 – Stereo – Glasgow w/Gold Panda & Dam Mantle
15 – Kings Manor – Newcastle w/Gold Panda & Dam Mantle
16 – Spanky Van Dykes – Nottingham w/Gold Panda & Dam Mantle
17 – Start The Bus – Bristol w/Gold Panda & Dam Mantle
“Glasgow based Dam Mantle is as much Machine as it is Animal. It often finds itself stuck in a loop, where various points in time and various cultures meet and refract each other. This forms a regurgitation of ‘now’.”
“Becoming Real is half human, half vampire, one whole something else. Becoming Real is ghost step, on the haunted dancefloor, where footsteps remind him, baby, of you. Becoming Real is always on his way. Becoming Real is never quite there.”
“d’Eon is a producer and singer. He started recording his experiments with keyboards and sequencing onto cassette starting at the age of four. After spending his early childhood learning theory, harmony and counterpoint, d’Eon later quit academic music to learn traditional Iranian, Arabic, Turkish and Central Asian music. He spent some months in a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas while studying the Tibetan lute. He now lives in Montreal and makes electronic dance music.”
Where The XX went at this song with corrosive acid to leave just a skeleton of melody, Becoming Real takes the opposite approach, compressing, cutting and crushing “Teardrops” until it becomes so many different things at once it’s almost everything but itself.
But for all the alien crystalline synths and boiling bass, it’s the vocal line that dominates, grounding it like the pole in Swingball, the ball batted into an orbit that can never escape itself fully. As with The XX, the melody is not only the remaining tell-tale sign of its genesis, but the base around which everything else revolves and eventually returns.
I think that, in essence, even if unconsciously, this is what Toby (AKA BR) was describing when he wrote “Ghost Step”, the opening track on the 12″ white label we issued late last year.* This is that same haunted dancefloor, ghosts of a billion different memories and moments flirting with one another until you can’t hear the seams, because there probably aren’t any seams anyway.
It’s not knowing where W&W end and something else – somebody else – begins, because they’re one and the same thing all of the time anyway. You can’t separate these things apart. I guess that’s what the teardrops here really remind us of.
Earlier this year I started writing for Platform, for the most part about music, in one form or another. It’s still not a real job, but it’s a start, and stop judging me. Tory.
Below I’ve copied in links to various articles I hope may be of interest (I also wrote about a lot of things relating to girls too, but you can find those articles using your own initiative). There’s a host of free music to download, in keeping with the saintly spirit of the festive period.
