Search Results for:

CHALK

Chalk

Conditions III

    With the release of their debut EP 'Conditions', the band interweave their industrial noise/techno hybrid soundscape and monochromatic gothic visuals. On their second, ‘Conditions II’, they explored themes of nostalgia, love, pressure and loss on a four-track EP that combines techno with industrial post-punk and indie-rock. Their upcoming third EP, aptly named 'Conditions III', ends the trilogy that launched their career, fusing elements of heavy guitar music, electronica and breakbeat into a euphoric and frightening finished project. Recorded against the backdrop of bleak landscapes and Nordic vistas in remote northern Iceland, Chalk have shown another evolution in their already confrontational sound.

    Winners of the ‘Best Live Act’ at the NI Music Prize in late 2023, Chalk have proved worthy of this title with sold-out headlines in Ireland, the UK, Netherlands and France, festival appearances stretching from the west coast of Ireland to Vienna and Sicily (as the second most booked band of ESNS 2024) and support slots for IDLES, SPRINTS and PVA under their belt.


    TRACK LISTING

    1. Leipzig 87
    2. Afraid
    3. Tell Me
    4. Pool Scene

    Chalk

    Death Knocks And He Shall Die

      “Death Knocks And He Shall Die” is an instrumental hip-hop album inspired by Italian ‘Giallo’ movies and Film Noir. It's a movie for your ears or rather a soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist. Using film dialogue sampled and arranged across 16 tracks, it tells a story of seduction, infidelity and murder over boom-bap styled jazzy grooves and horror soundscapes that are layered with seductive and haunting female singing. This album is a journey best listened to from start to end and should appeal to fans of DJ Shadow and some of the instrumental hip-hop LPs we get in from over in the US. A nice concept well executed! Check!

      STAFF COMMENTS

      Matt says: Local beatsmith Chalk gets all Giallo on our backsides and drops a killer soundtrack to an imaginary film Noir. Perfect for hot boxing the Beemer, throwing down some freestyle bars or utilizing in your next cutting and scratching sesh!

      TRACK LISTING

      A1 The Seduction
      A2 And Now You're Here
      A3 Stay With Me
      A4 Last Hope
      A5 Maker Of Evil
      A6 He Shall Die
      A7 Death Knocks
      B1 Worries
      B2 Missing Person
      B3 The Crime Scene
      B4 Coroner's Office
      B5 Nightmares
      B6 The Other Woman
      B7 Sirens
      B8 Shadow's In The Dark
      B9 The Confession

      Chalk

      Conditions II

        Fresh from winning ‘Best Live Act’ at NI Music Prize 2023, Chalk relentless ascent continues to gather thrilling pace, with EP lead single ‘The Gate’ landing on the BBC 6 Music playlist (alongside PJ Harvey, IDLES, Sampha) to kick off 2024, whilst widespread praise throughout the press community (The Independent, NME, DIY, Dork, So Young, The New Cue, Rough Trade, Consequence of Sound) has certainly positioned the trio at the very forefront of the emerging indie elite.

        TRACK LISTING

        1. The Gate
        2. Claw
        3. Kevlar
        4. Bliss

        PJ Harvey

        White Chalk - Reissue

          Reissue on vinyl of the seventh PJ Harvey studio album White Chalk. The album was produced by PJ Harvey, Flood and John Parish and originally released in September 2007. White Chalk features the singles ‘When Under Ether’, ‘The Piano’ and ‘The Devil’. Reissue is faithful to the original recording and package, with cutting by Jason Mitchell at Loud Mastering under the guidance of original co-producer John Parish.

          TRACK LISTING

          Side A
          The Devil
          Dear Darkness
          Grow Grow Grow
          When Under Ether
          White Chalk

          Side B
          Broken Harp
          Silence
          To Talk To You
          The Piano
          Before Departure
          The Mountain

          PJ Harvey

          White Chalk - Demos

            Collection of unreleased demos written for the seventh PJ Harvey studio album White Chalk, including demos of ‘When Under Ether’, ‘The Piano’ and ‘The Devil’. Features brand new artwork with previously unseen photos by Maria Mochnacz. Artwork is overseen by Maria with Rob Crane. Mastering by Jason Mitchell at Loud Mastering, under the guidance of long time PJ Harvey producer John Parish.

            TRACK LISTING

            1LP
            Side A
            The Devil - Demo
            Dear Darkness - Demo
            Grow Grow Grow - Demo
            When Under Ether - Demo
            White Chalk - Demo
            Side B
            Broken Harp - Demo
            Silence - Demo
            To Talk To You - Demo
            The Piano - Demo
            Before Departure - Demo
            The Mountain - Demo

            CD
            The Devil - Demo
            Dear Darkness - Grow Grow Grow - Demo
            When Under Ether - Demo
            White Chalk - Demo
            Broken Harp - Demo
            Silence - Demo
            To Talk To You - Demo
            The Piano - Demo
            Before Departure - Demo
            The Mountain – Demo

            Will Burns & Hannah Peel

            Chalk Hill Blue - Deluxe Edition

              ‘Chalk Hill Blue’ is the first album by poet Will Burns and musician and composer Hannah Peel: a record of electronic ruralism channelling lives threaded through the chalk landscapes of Southern England.

              Existing and reacting off each word and sounds in the studio together; with the words of poet Will Burns, the analogue electronic compositions of Hannah Peel and the overarching eye of producer Erland Cooper, all tracks were produced and recorded in their entirety within 12 hours.

              The spoken words and sound worlds often seem to emerge from subliminal processes of call and answer; a fertile blurring of collective inspiration and intention circling this abstracted chalk landscape.

              This deluxe edition of ‘Chalk Hill Blue’ also includes a 7” single featuring a pair of new pieces from Hannah Peel and Will Burns, combining the same evocative, powerful sonic palette and plainspoken poetry as their acclaimed album.

              A commission to create a new collaborative work for the BBC resulted in ‘Moth Book’, an elegiac mediation on loss which flowers into a driving, hypnotic synth workout, perfectly offset by the haunting flipside track, ‘Wendover, Bucks’.

              TRACK LISTING

              ‘Chalk Hill Blue’ LP
              Out Of Doors
              The Night Life
              Afterwards
              Spring Dawn On Mad Mile
              Change
              Chalk Hill Blue
              May 9th
              Swallowing
              Ridgeway
              Summer Blues
              February

              ‘Pale Tussock’ 7”
              Moth Book
              Wendover, Bucks

              Will Burns & Hannah Peel

              Chalk Hill Blue

                Along the hills that cradle this village, that throw their shadow on us, that hold themselves above the houses (on a day like today half-wreathed in fog) there is a path. Some people say it is the oldest path there is, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it is an old path. Worn out of the scarp in places, in others cut deliberately to mark the way. The way where, though? One answer is that once, it was the way across the country from East to West, from farm to market. The way of the drover. Another is that now, it is the way across a line of hills that run through what people call the ‘home’ counties. As if there are counties that are not home.

                Sometimes these places that rub up against the hills and its path are strangely dull. The towns and villages can look alike, they have been predated on by the high street chains and the supermarkets and they have suffered the decay of pubs and the reluctance of themselves to demand more from the changes that come with time, which is, after all, inevitable and which should, in the end, be progressive. But if we look beyond the intensive farms, the lookalike market towns, the money, the golf courses and the expensive four-wheel drive cars, there is, still, a real place to see. A place with its own tang, as a wise man I know once described it. There are fishermen and builders and window cleaners who get round their drink-driving bans by going to work on a horse and cart.

                There are Italian farmers whose legendary boys run the football club, there are old gypsy families that own garden centres, feuding tree surgeons, ex-hedonist-local-playboys who you wouldn’t believe did what they did when they owned a pub just outside of the village where they thought they could get away with anything (and for a while did), tiny cricket clubs where the treasurer ran off with the money and last anyone heard was running a burger van in Northamptonshire. There are still a few good pubs too, where people rub along like they do. More decently than it sometimes feels we’re capable of anymore. All that as well as affairs and heartbreak, death, illness, love. Of course, love.

                And beyond the people, there is that other life. Not as much as there should be, no, we must say that. Not enough butterflies, not enough lizards or water voles or fish, certainly not enough birds. But what there is is. And if you take that path out of the village, and up into the hills it is there. It’s broken in many ways, and it’s changed and it’s changing. And we’re causing the changes. But what’s sad about the degradation of our times is that we can still see the potential nature of real places when we come up against them. These old paths, these old stories, these old buildings. We don’t need them for nostalgia, or for some artificial sentimental reverie, we need them to function as engines for our own epochal story-making. That’s what the blandness of a global market economy will put a stop to. The real tang of each person, as well as each place. All deserving of their stories. Here’s some fragments of some I heard along the path.

                Will Burns, 2018

                Will Burns is Caught by the River poet-in-residence, and Hannah Peel is a frequent fixture of Caught by the River festival stages – both with the ‘cosmic colliery’ electronica of her solo work, and with orchestral place-rock band The Magnetic North (of which Chalk Hill Blue producer Erland Cooper is also a member.)

                As part of their collaboration, Burns, Peel and Cooper walked the landscapes around Burns’s Wendover house together: their chalk-heeled boots tracing shared routes through the rhythms and repetitions of the place. What emerges in Chalk Hill Blue is a site-specific-non-specific record of creative place portraiture; an album that traces elements of a living landscape, and reworks them into something that is as sensitive and finely-observed as it is visionary.

                TRACK LISTING

                1 Out Of Doors
                2 The Night Life
                3 Afterwards
                4 Spring Dawn On Mad Mile
                5 Change
                6 Chalk Hill Blue
                7 May 9th
                8 Swallowing
                9 Ridgeway
                10 Summer Blues
                11 February

                Releases by Stephen Cracknell and his acclaimed project The Memory Band have always lent themselves to journeys and landscape: dream-like stumbles through stony megaliths, wintry climbs along snow-covered hills, drunken dashes through sun-splashed fields with a summer love. Their records have always been more pre-occupied with external narratives than internal emotions. But perhaps never before quite as literally as on adventurous new album On The Chalk (Our Navigation of the Line of the Downs), a beguiling musical tribute to a mythical ancient pathway crossing a Southern England shrouded in mystery and withered by time.

                Made of eleven songs spread across haunting horn noises, crackles, drones, blissed-out beats and tender piano melodies, this fourth studio album marks the tenth anniversary of one the most invigorating and much loved folk acts around, a group described by NME as “a disorientating, drugged-up soundtrack for the 21st Century… genuinely beautiful.” And speaking of monumental journeys, it’s been quite a road to this moment for Cracknell and his ever evolving cast of collaborators.“I’ve had a decade of marginal poverty, nice trips and the company of wonderful dreamers,” laughs the mercurial composer, formerly seen fronting much loved outfits The Accidental and Balearic Folk Orchestra. “The idea with this record was it to be sort of a road trip along a mythical track way, an irreverent and episodic journey across a landscape inundated with history and the marks of change and transformation, some striking and immediate, others slow and imperceptible.”

                He may as well be describing his own sounds to be found in On The Chalk… – for every jaw-dropping shimmer of harp or arresting moment of reed organ, there’s an avalanche of clever quiet detail to be unearthed, with cinematic overtones that recall his Wicker Man touring soundtrack that Cracknell has taken to fields everywhere from Glastonbury, Green Man to a castle in Jersey.Cracknell says: “There’s been a real revival of interest lately in old roads and green lanes, in literature, art and film. This has run parallel to so much of the renewed interest in folklore and folk music. One supposedly ancient trackway that I'd hear referenced again and again was the Harrow Way, which stretched from the Straits Of Dover all the way to the west country by an overland route on chalk ridgeways. I grew up in a place supposedly along its route.”What followed was a period of extensive research, digging deep into his own past and the World around him, listening to a strange combination of traditional folk-songs and seminal British landscape music such as Chill Out by acid house pranksters the KLF, tracing old roads and creating ambient recordings on site for use on the album. ”It was all a lot of fun, running round the country playing at psycho-geography,” recalls Cracknell. “Like the landscape that inspired it, it’s an album that at times is dark and imposing and at others more peaceful and serene.”Recorded in the songwriter’s home studio in East London (“an empty schoolroom overlooking a park… quite a peaceful place for London, really”), this is an album by a group who, like their subject matter, have changed and grown over time, but remain every bit as vital as ever.


                Latest Pre-Sales

                203 NEW ITEMS

                E-newsletter —
                Sign up
                Back to top