When I say ‘in a sense’, I suppose I mean ‘literally, but with caveats’ because this is very obviously a new release of new music by the OLO Worms.  It’s just that leaving it at that would be misleading by omission because they are releasing this new material of theirs on vinyl ..on 8-track ..on reel-to-reel ..on player piano ..as a limited edition run of five ‘Pots of Earth’. Yes, seriously.

For all that is a nice wee idea which genuinely brings a smile to the face, most people will experience this release as a multimedia project – much as I hate to use the term.  One of the bands on our label recently said to me that no-one really takes advantage of the facilities we have here to produce something other than the standard ‘I have recorded some music, now I will sell it to you in neatly assembled chunks’ model.

In the Twenty-first Century there is really no need to be so conventional, and the OLO Worms are, in a restlessly creative, DIY way, miles better than any band I can name off the top of my head at putting their music out into the world in clever ways which make the most of the opportunities new media and new technology have opened up.

This release, for example, besides the Pot of Earth, exists on the homepage of the OLOs’ website as a pair of videos, images and soundcloud embeds floating on a photo background.  The whole thing hangs together really well, as per usual, and the band describe the release as a Poloroid; a Poloroid being a snapshot of a work in progress as their work on their debut album.  I can tell you, it certainly beats the shite out of press release -> single -> press release -> single -> album, which is pretty much what the rest of us are doing.

The music suits the medium as well, being an odd combination of technological and organic, and of cold and approachable.  I have to confess I have taken my eye off the ball with the OLO Worms for a while now, but I am looking forward to hearing this album.

Ohhh what jolly fun it’s been this week.  Now I know why bands find it so hard to find booking agents: because it’s a shit job and no-one in their right mind would want to do it.

Then, just as I was hating promoters for all I was worth, I started into the organisation for all my own gigs that I had to book and suddenly developed a new-found sympathy for them too.  So WHO IS TO BLAME FOR MY SHIT WEEK, THEN?  I can’t think of anyone, it’s most frustrating.

Anyhow, I think I am now just about sorted for everything, so here are some announcements for you, so you can add all sorts of Toady nonsense to your calendars. Once again, I am putting all the label announcements into a Sunday Supplement so that the blog itself isn’t totally over-run with self-pimping during the week, which I am assuming would bore the shit out of everyone, myself included.

Inspector Tapehead Hooops Session was recorded by the lovely gentlemen from OLO Worms as part of their kind hospitality to our Tapeheady friends on their recent tour – thanks lads.

Cloud Sounds Song, by Toad Records Special seems, according to Ted, to have been purchased for the price of a pint when we were down in Manchester last weekend.  It’s one of my favourite podcasts, and if you want to be even nicer, you could buy the first and thus far only (I think) Cloud Sounds Split 7″ – the song by Onions is worth it all by itself.

Peenko’s Scottish DIY Labels series features Song, by Toad this week.  I am always impressed with quite how good I am at making myself sound like a total dickhead in so few words when it comes to these mini interview thingies.  Ah well, we all need a talent of some sort I suppose, I was just hoping mine might be martial arts or a snappy dress sense or something like that instead.

All those gigs in full (more or less):

Honeytrap launch their new album Petrushka (Toad review here, listen in full and buy here), this Saturday at Medina.  Jesus H. Foxx & Sebastian Dangerfield are also on the bill, and tickets can be purchased here. I was skeptical about Medina as a venue at first, but I was at an Acoustic Edinburgh show there during the Festival and really liked it – the atmosphere was ace, and I think this is going to be an excellent night.  Doors will be kinda early though, because there’s a club night on after us, so don’t be too late.

Savings and Loan House Gig will be pretty much everyone’s first chance to see Song, by Toad Records’ latest ‘signing’ (if you can really call it that, which you can’t, honestly) before their album Today I Need Light comes out on 6th December. As it’s at our house and tickets are going steadily I would ask you to buy one in advance just so we have a reasonable idea of numbers in advance.  You can get tickets here, and I have just confirmed a (very) stripped down set by The Last Battle will also be on the cards for the evening.

The Yusuf Azak Album Release Tour is being booked up slowly but surely.  Turn on the Long Wire is every bit as good as I would have expected from Yusuf, and is out on the 15th November.  There are album launch nights booked as part of a joint tour with Ethan Ash on the following nights:

Thursday November 25th, Cellar 35 in Aberdeen.
Friday November 26th, Gambetta in Glasgow, with Jonnie Common.
Saturday November 27th, The Roxy in Edinburgh, awaiting confirmation.

The first single from his album, Eastern Sun, will be out as a free download in a week’s time or so.

AND FINALLY, the Song, by Toad Records Christmas Party has been confirmed for Thursday 16th December at the Queen Charlotte Rooms in Leith.  We’re going to have an electric stage downstairs headlined by the Savings and Loan, for whom this will also be their album launch, and an acoustic stage upstairs.  I am working on the full lineup at the moment, so there will be more announcements to come about this soon enough.

The 28th Toadcast is all about the Fence Collective. People who read this site regularly must know them, I assume, but I’ve been intending to do this post for a while as they might be my favourite label in music at the moment.

After Kenny Anderson’s last band fell apart about ten years ago or more, he started releasing his own stuff on hand made CD-Rs under the name of King Creosote and between him and his brothers and some of the other local musicians he’d grown up with in Fife, a collective started to form which has grown and grown. Now, thanks to the spotlight cast their direction by Kenny’s brother Gordon’s involvement with The Beta Band and The Aliens, the success of King Creosote and James Yorkston, and the rising of KT Tunstall (also a Fence alumnus, believe it or not) Fence Records have turned into one of the most beloved record labels in the country.

And actually, I think their approach of building a community rather than just pimping product might just have the potential to make them one of the success stories of Music 2.0, although that’s another story. So this podcast is all about Fence Records and the bands I have discovered due to their hard work, and why I think they’re great. What an arse-kisser I’ve turned into.

(Warning: I’m drunker than I sound and there is way too much talking in this one.)

Toadcast #28 – The Fencecast

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01. Skuobhie Dubh Orchestra – Our Last Needle (03.17)
02. King Creosote – You’ve No Clue Do You (09.21)
03. James Yorkston & the Athletes – St. Patrick (16.33)
04. Art Pedro – Joanne (21.19)
05. MC Quake – It Feels Good to Be In Scotland (27.57)
06. Down the Tiny Steps – Handstand (36.44)
07. Adam Beattie – Bank Street (46.39)
08. Player Piano – Mercy (AC Mix) (49.35)
09. Candythief – A Good Day (56.47)
10. Rob St. John – Tipping In (60.06)
11. Adrian Crowley – Star of the Harbour (65.11)
12. Eagleowl – This is Not Your Lucky Day (67.47)
13. OLO Worms – Fingers & Thumbs (77.04)
14. HMS Ginafore – You Built a City Inside of Me (85.41)
15. Gummi Bako – She’s the Carrot & I’m the Stick (87.44)
16. The Pictish Trail – Words Fail Me Now (94.39)
17. Rich Amino – Chicken & Chips (99.02)
18. Sara Lowes – Uniform Days (104.22)
19. Magic Arm – Outdoor Games (108.11)
20. King Creosote – I’ll Fly By the Seat of My Pants (115.32)

< Day One
Day Three >

I awoke with a considerable hangover on Saturday, but a bloody great greasy breakfast saw to that. Tattie scones – anyone outside Scotland know them? Magic for mopping up the egg yolk and bacon grease from your plate as you swill the last of your coffee.

I did some husbandly things in the morning, traipsing into St. Andrews with Mrs. Toad to find a memory card for the camera, so we only caught The Pictish Trail in the morning. Johnny played a solo set which was, bar something of a deranged electro wig-out on the last song, a guitar based affair. He’s some set of lungs on him does Mr. Lynch, and has an album coming out very soon, on Fence Records. Given the amount of time he dedicates to the label itself and to playing in King Creosote’s band, it’s nothing short of a miracle he found the time.

The Pictish Trail – Words Fail Me Now

Bar brief excursions for OLO Worms and Player Piano, I spent pretty much the rest of the evening in the Hew Scott Hall at the Tracer Trails evening.

OLO Worms are really not my thing at all – a little bit too much experimentation going on there and not really enough straightforward tune-writing. Not that they don’t have some genuinely lovely bits of course, but there’s a lot of mentalism there that I struggle to quite come to terms with. But that, folks, is the beauty of the Fence Collective: nowhere are you more likely to be exposed to something new and peculiar that they have taken a chance on, and that is there just because someone has found something interesting in the music was enough to spark genuine interest. Fingers & Thumbs is about as straight-up a pop song as you’re likely to hear from them.

OLO Worms – Fingers & Thumbs

A little bit more traditional is Player Piano, a star of Homegame, erm, three I think. Mrs. Toad and I saw his excellent solo set in the Erskine Hall in 2006, and this was the only gig of all of Homegame that she insisted in coming to this year. Jeremy Radway plays an old-fashioned kind of music, part rock ‘n’ roll, part music hall in a sense, and with a little bit of soul in there as well. For this set he amped it up a bit and made some noise, bringing touches of 70s proto-metal to the evening, which was odd, but good. And if you like the sound of that, listen to this – just gorgeous:

Player Piano – Mercy (A.C. Mix)

As for the Tracer Trails stuff, well regular readers of this blog will be well familiar with most of the bands mentioned – Eagleowl, Rob St. John, Adrian Crowley, Rich Amino and Withered Hand all played – so there’s no need to go into the music too much, apart from pointing out that I pretty much enjoyed the lot. As much as any one act I actually enjoyed the atmosphere and the evening the most. A couple of the band members swapped around, there was a blinding reworking of Rich Amino’s Ribena song, making the subject of necrophilia the focus, and Mrs. Toad got a little mashed and insisted to me that we release virtually fucking everyone on Song, by Toad Records and get the lot round to record sessions.

This is the beauty of a small, friendly scene like this. I mentioned Song, by Toad Records to Johnny Lynch who pretty much runs Fence and he had all sorts of useful tips and advice and help. Hopefully he’ll be on the Toad Sessions pretty soon as well. Fence also invited Manchester’s Red Deer Club Records to take over an evening in one of the halls as well – small enterprises run by genuine enthusiasts and who see one another as potential sources of support and help and fun and not as adversaries.

So we sat there in that hall, people drifting in and out as they went to other things, half the people discussing their little personal projects with one another, chatting to the musicians and chatting to friends they largely know from the Fence forums, or the Beef Board, as it is known, and it was genuinely fucking brilliant. This is one of the things that is oddly contradictory about Web 2.0 and all this technological shite that so isolates us at our desks, using MySpace and email and blogs and discussion boards and Facebook and IM and anything else rather than actually having a conversation with anyone: I have made friends with more real, flesh and blood people by fannying about on the internet than I ever have by any other way.

And would Fence Records or the Edinburgh indie-folk scene or the Red Deer Club and all these disparate-yet-interrelated communities still exist without all this? Of course they would, I’m no deranged technology evangelist, but the slightly contradictory link between all these virtual friends and the easy, friendly, cosy atmosphere of the Hew Scott Hall on the Saturday makes me feel quite optimistic. And it also gave me a stinking fucking hangover. But virtual friendships clearly are actually real, they are not poor second-cousins to meeting people in the flesh, they are every bit as real and as meaningful.

Rob St. John – The Acid Test
Rich Amino – One Hundred & Blue
Adrian Crowley – Bless Our Tiny Hearts
Eagleowl – This is Not Your Lucky Day

Sorry a couple of these songs are re-posts, but I just don’t have that much stuff by Rob & Eagleowl in particular that I can share.