Okay, due to seriously popular demand, and cos technical gremlins interrupted some people’s listening at the time, here’s the mix from the plinth. It’s a bit ragged, as my controllers were playing up a bit (not their fault!) and I’ve hacked off the last tune, as it was an afterthought to leave something running while I packed away and left, but apart from that… here it is – warts and all.

If you really want the full experience you can go here and try to synch it up from around 9 minutes in, although I’ve not managed it!

All K-tunes (including quite a few new album ones) apart from the last track, which is the Chase & Status mix of Nneka’s “Heartbeat” and is an absolute bomb that I only heard that day for the first time. I couldn’t get out of my head and it became my anthem for the day, so I played it!

Thanks again to all who tuned in, or tried to and failed. If so, hope this makes up for it. What an intense experience! It’s given me a taste for Extreme DJing though, so I wonder where next…?

The final part of HC8, and the final word from me on 2008 (maybe ;). Looking back on this there’s some things that really should have gone in (Squarepusher, Byrne & Eno, “Shackler’s Revenge”, Busta’s “Don’t Touch Me”, Wiley etc…) but they didn’t quite seem to fit anywhere while I was mixing, so it goes… Hope you’ve enjoyed the selection anyways, and a very Happy New Year to you all.

Only thing that remains is to ask if you think there’s anything obvious I’ve missed out on? – let me know if so – I’m all ears as usual :)

The Kleptones – Hectic City 8e: Burned In A Feathering Pyre (Best Of 2008 Part Five)

Pacific UV – Alarmist
Shearwater – Rooks
Bon Iver – Blindsided
Evangelista – The Blue Room
Thomas Brinkmann – Words
Portishead – The Rip
Peter Broderick – Stopping On The Broadway Bridge
James Blackshaw – Echo And Abyss
The Caretaker – Long Term (Remote)

Right – Let’s get on with 2009!

The Kleptones – Hectic City 8d (Best Of 2008 Mix Part Four)

Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Dig, Lazarus, Dig
Mrr-Adm – Track 04 (from unmarked 12″ EP)
Clinic – Corpus Christi
El Guincho – Antillas
Neon Neon – I Told Her On Alderaan
Mountain Goats – Lovecraft In Brooklyn
Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened
The Fall – Can Can Summer
The Dodos – Fools
Elbow – The Fix
Durutti Column – Glimpses
James Yuill – This Sweet Love (Prins Thomas sneaky edit)

Professor Pork says : “It’s a fine line, I know. Oink. But as house music continues it’s return journey from innovation back into pure functionality (discuss somewhere else, pls), it’s been left to the online production world to come up with the goods – Unfortunately their tendancy to promote and duplicate musical memes as quickly as possible for fear of seeming out of touch has left them with five hundred remakes of every half-realised idea, and no one that has the time nor the inclination to sift and sort through. Snort. You could make your own variation in the time it takes to listen to everyone else’s. See what you’ve done, Kleptone? Underground, overground, now everyone’s wombling free, you dig?”

Eric says: “Good for them, I say. Kudos to Fake Blood though, for having the decency to avoid repeating the same sounds across every tune he makes, and to Duke Dumont and Funkanomics for their persistance of vision in the face of fashion.”

Hectic City 8c : La blouse piscine (Best of 2008 part three)

Mystery Jets – Two Doors Down (Duke Dumont remix)
Gregor Tresher – A Thousand Nights (Dubfire Quiet Storm remix)
Letroset – Skillex
Kriss Kross – Jump (Funkonomics Planet Cross remix)
Alex Gopher – Belmondo (Just A Band remix)
South Rakkas Crew – Mad Again (Fake Blood remix)
Underworld – Ring Road (Fake Blood remix)
Shinichi Osawa – Electro411 (Lies In Disguise Remix)
Trip – Who’s That (Jack Beats remix – Kleptones sharp end edit ;)

P.S. Apologies for the language skills. And thanks for the comments – very welcome as always :)

The Advisory Circle – Civil Defence Is Common Sense
The Bug – Freak Freak
Karl Hector & The Malcouns – Psycles
Q-Tip – Dance On Glass
Wayne And Max – Boston Jerk
These New Puritans – Numerology (Kleptones Quick Cumbia Over Dub)
Chancha Via Circuito – Cumbia Murguera
Drums Of Death – Ozzzy!
The Bug ft. Killer P & Flowdan – Skeng
Benga & Coki – Night
Caspa – Born To Do It
Vex’d – 3rd Choice (Loefah remix)
Matty G – 50,000 Watts (VIP mix)
Matty G – The 808 Bass
Rusko – Love Is Real
Sunship ft. Warrior Queen – Quita (Kaibata remix)
Skream – 2D
Rusko – Cockney Thug
The Advisory Circle – A Clear Yarn Warning

The Kleptones – Hectic City 8b: Best Of 2008 (Part Two)

Enjoy some bass with your hangovers…

Still, in a year dominated by Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, Elbow, Portishead and the like, the three albums that got the most plays from me are as follows:

The Advisory Circle – “Other Channels” (Ghost Box) : Jim ATT100 tipped me to this on our now sadly defunct radio show, which was quite a surprise. I’d been keeping an eye and ear on Ghost Box’s releases, but had thought till now that they hadn’t quite found the sound to match their splendid eye for design (check their website to see) – “Other Channels” is the record to rectify that – a deranged collage of music concrete, lost 70s educational TV soundtracks and fragments of vintage Public Service films that blend into the perfect backing track to one of your strangest “Back To School” dreams/nightmares.

The Mountain Goats – “Heretic Pride” (4AD) : There’s almost nothing more satisfying than discovering a band and then finding they have a lengthy and impressive back catalogue to dig into – once you’ve got over the “how the hell did I miss this lot before?” stage, of course. John Darnielle has been recording as The Mountain Goats since 1991, and has gradually updated his sound and style from lo-fi cassette recordings to recent full blown studio experiences, courtesy of a 4AD bankroll. The sound may have got clearer and tighter, but there’s no denying the man’s exceptional ability to write fine tunes.

These New Puritans – “Beat Pyramid” (Angular) : I genuinely expected this to be a smash hit this year, but that shows you how much of a fashion barometer I am… Why not? I don’t know – Too arch and knowing? That chestplate? No marketing budget? All I know is this is the sound of two very current worlds colliding with excellent consequences – grime-y tech-step beats rub shoulders with Wire-y guitars and chanted vocals to fine effect. The frantic pace makes it a great “music to work to” album too which is probably why it got the most plays from me this year :)

So here’s part one of the five mixes. Five? Yes! Rather than bundle stuff into CD sized chunks, things seemed to sound nicer in smaller sections, so I’ve rolled with it. Hope that’s okay with you? Good.

Plenty fine stuff in part one, from Breakbot’s French House-meets-Hill Street Blues take on Pnau, DJ Downfall’s poptastic down-home distorted charm (and winner of the Mr Kleptone Award for best Genesis sample of the year) , Pearson & Usher’s symphonic deconstruction of Kelley Polar and yes, three Aeroplane remixes. It’s been another fine year for our cosmic Belgians, and my fingers are firmly crossed for their debut album, which should be landing sometime next year!

The Kleptones – Hectic City 8a – Best Of 2008 (Part One)

Pnau – Baby (Breakbot remix)
DJ Downfall ft. Gene Serene – Seven Dials
The Shortwave Set – Now Til’ 69 (Aeroplane remix)
Ricardo Villalobos – Enfants (Olin fix – Kleptones edit)
Samos – Alpha Storm (An-2 remix)
Lovelock – Maybe Tonight (Kleptones Quick Instrumental edit)
Lullabies In The Dark – Song For Marie & Elise (Aeroplane remix)
Kelley Polar – Entropy Reigns (Pearson & Usher’s Second Law instrumental)
Ajello & Daniele Baldelli – Magic Feet
Nomumbah – Like A Rainbow (Dub mix)
Kelpe – Yippee Space Ghost (SID version – Kleptones edit)
Grace Jones – Williams Blood (Aeroplane vocal remix)

Hope you enjoy! Next part to follow very, very, shortly!

Firstly, Very sad to bid bye-bye and good fortune to my fine friend and erstwhile Radio sparring partner Jim of All Time Top 100 as he moves up to that London to try his luck as an apprentice underling in the Corridors of Power. Yes, I know it’s not that far, but it does render rather impossible the continuation of Eric & Jim’s Look-In. Shame really, just as we were getting our speed back up after the first sacking hiatus.

But Lo!, being as the ratio of clouds-to-silver-linings is equivalent at the moment, the sad ending of the Look-In gives forth more time with which to improve and continue the Hectic City podcasts. Oh Yes!

So here, without any further delay (ha!), is HC7 – A mix made initially to soundtrack a hazy afternoon garden party or simple cocktail on the terrace in May, although it’s sure to keep for a while and be an equally fine dinner companion for the rest of the summer.

The tracklisting may look slightly unusual, and it did indeed surprise me whilst digging for appropriate tunes to suitably bookend the fine grooves of Al Usher and Aeroplane, but the end result is, I think, quite piquant:

As I haven’t dropped one of these for a while, there may be a brief but immediate period of digging around in the back with plugin updates and wiggling bits of wire to get it to fire up satisfactorally, so if the linky is dodgy, let me know in the comments and we’ll have someone round in a jiffy with some molegrips to sort you out.

Tracklisting:

Al Usher - Here Today
Aeroplane – Aeroplane
Force Of Nature – Liberate
Chris Rea – Josephine (Vista & Meyland Rain Edit)
Brian Briggs – AEO (Parts 1 & 2)
Timmy Thomas – Why Can’t We Live Together (Pressure Drop Remix)
Aeroplane – Above The Clouds
Can – Vitamin C (Eli Escobar Re-Edit)
Mugwump – Boutade
Frankie Goes To Hollywood – Rage Hard (Young Person’s Guide To The 12-Inch Mix)
Pimps Of Joytime – San Francisco Bound
Paul Simon – Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes (Todd Terje Edit)
Coyote – Too Hard (Aeroplane Remix)

Till next time… (sooner than you think :)

Tracklist:

The Birds – Leaving Here
The Creation – Biff Bang Pow!
The Easybeats – Friday On My Mind
The Beat Merchants – Pretty Face
The Koobas – Face
The Boys Blue – You Got What I Want
The Clique – We Didn’t Kiss, We Didn’t Love, But Now We Do
The Attack – We Don’t Know
The Lancasters – Satan’s Holiday
Fire – Father’s Name Is Dad
Davy Jones & The Lower Third – You’ve Got A Habit Of Leaving
The Creation – Making Time
The Haunted – 125
Them – I Can Only Give You Everything
The Primitives – You Said
The Outer Limits – Help Me Please
The Movement – Tell Her
Cuby & The Blizzards – Your Body Not Your Soul
The Chasers – Inspiration
The Mickey Finn – Garden Of My Mind
Paul & Ritchie & The Cryin’ Shames – Come On Back
The Poets – That’s The Way It’s Got To Be
The 5AM Event – Hungry
The Beat Merchants – Messin’ With The Man
Ipissmus – Hold On
The Blue Stars – Social End Product
The Birds – No Good Without You Baby

Since you ask, if we had to pick out a couple of albums and say they were the best of the year, it would fall to a close tie between these three, we reckon:

The Joe Beats Experiment – Indie Rock Blues

Guillemots – Through The Window Pane

Spank Rock – Yoyoyoyoyo

Brains, balls and soul all present and correct in the highest of levels within all three of those, which is just the way we like it. You really should listen to them from start to finish, if you haven’t already. Well worth it.

Anyhoo, tracklist for HC5 is:

Brightblack Morning Light – Everybody Daylight (from their eponymous album)
Scritti Politti – The Boom Boom Bap (from the album “White Bread, Black Beer”)
Guillemots – Through The Window Pane (from the album of the same name)
Lupe Fiasco – The Instrumental (from the album “Food & Liquor”)
Ty – Don’t Watch That (from the album “Closer”)
Cunnilinguists – Hellfire [Joey Beats Mix] (unreleased)
M.Ward – Sad, Sad Song (Joe Beats Experiment Mix) (from the album “Indie Rock Blues”)
The Grates – Rock Boys (from the album “Gravity Won’t Get You High”)
Subtle – Midas Gutz (from the album “For Hero For Fool”)
Union Of Knives – Opposite Direction (from the album “Violence And Birdsong”)
Scuba – Twista (single)
Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Phenomena (from the album “Show Your Bones”)
Mew – The Zookeeper’s Boy (from the album “And The Glass Handed Kites”)
Cynic Guru – Drugs (single)
Extra Golden – OK-Oyot System (from the album of the same name)
Eliot Lipp – Rap Tight (from the album “Tacoma Mockingbird”)
Trentemoller – While The Cold Winter Waiting (from the album “The Last Resort”)
Matthew’s Celebrity Pixies Tribute – Wave Of Mutilation (website)
Jarvis - Running The World (from the album “Jarvis”)

That’s yer lot for ‘06 – Hope you enjoy!

So to raise the spirit of the times, and to enable mental preparation for the coming New Year celebrations, here’s part two of our skip through the records that made our switches click in 2006. Hope you enjoy.

Tracklist:

Hollertronix – Gold Digger [Diplo Remix] (single)
Spank Rock – Bump [Switch Remix] (single)
Motor – Black Powder (from the album “Klunk”)
The Come-Ons – I Feel Love [Michael Ivins Flaming Lips Remix] (single)
Wolfmother – Woman [mstrkrft remix] (single)
Superqueens – Per Ardua Ad Strangeways (from the album “Royal Shit”)
The Rapture – Whoo Alright Yah Uh Huh (from the album “Pieces Of The People We Love”)
Cansei De Ser Sexy – Alala [Bondo De Role Remix] (single)
Peaches – Do Ya (from the album “Impeach My Bush”)
Peter, Bjorn & John – Young Folks (from the album “Writer’s Block”)
Grandaddy – Elevate Myself (from the album “Just Like The Fambly Cat”)
The Emperor Machine – Bodilizer Bodilizer (from the album “Vertical Tones And Horizontal Noise”)
Distance – Traffic (single)
Amy Winehouse – Rehab (from the album “Back To Black”)
DJ Farrapo & Yanez – Baiano Vem Baiano Vai (single)
Eagles Of Death Metal – I Want You So Hard (from the album “Death By Sexy”)
Dev2.0 – Boy U Want (from the album “Dev2.0″)
Ali Love – K Hole (single)
Kelis – Bossy [Cavemen Remix] (single)