Political activism zine ctrl.alt.shift have collaborated with a exciting assortment of writers, artists and other prominent British creatives to create a really amazing comic book, featuring a true stories about the horrors of corruption wordwide. I’ve read it. It’s wicked.

I spoke to British writer and comic artist Woodrow Phoenix about his involvement in the project.

Is confronting serious issues in your work something you personally feel passionate about?

I treat everything I do seriously, in the sense that I am passionate about doing good work that speaks for itself and doesn’t waste the readers’ time; work that has something to say and says it elegantly, energetically, in an interesting way. I don’t feel everything I do has to be “issue” based – I like lots of goofy things and a lot of my work is cartoony, silly, unreal jokey material. But I don’t feel I have to choose between being funny and being serious. I think you can be entertaining and also ask questions that mean something to you. You can use humour as effectively as drama to examine the world we live in. I like both kinds of material equally. What the message is decides how I’m going to work with it. [Read more →]

Memory Tapes is the latest project from Dayve Hawk, combining his work on previous projects, Memory Cassettes and Weird Tapes. A full length Memory Tapes LP called Seek Magic is out via Something In Construction this week. I asked Dayve a little bit about Memory Tapes and if we can expect a visit from him and his own brand of intelligent, super-smooth dance any time soon.

So Memory Tapes is a combination of previous projects to make one new, shiny one. When did you decide that marrying the two together would work for a whole new project?

Well I was bored of using samples (Weird Tapes) and pitch-shifting my voice (Memory Cassette) so was ready to change what I was doing anyhow, especially when I started getting approached by labels. Dealing with peoples’ confusion about the different projects was getting a bit much so I just dropped both and combined the names. I thought that would make it simple but now people just say I have 3 projects. It never ends!

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Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know, a new album from Icelandic experimental pop collective Múm is due out on the 24th of August. I was keen for a few hot tips on Icelandic music and curious about how the Múm project was developing. Örvar Þóreyjarson Smárason kindly answered a few of these queries for me.

Congratulations on the new album.  From your own perspective, how would you say it’s different from your previous works?

Well, it’s lucid and straightforward…. not that our other albums haven’t been that, but maybe this one is spoken in a simpler language. Go go smear the poison ivy and Summer make good were quite complicated affairs. Even though it might not seem like it. Hmmmm… to tell you the truth, I don’t know the answer to this question and I’m just pretending. It’s calm, that much I know, but it’s still on different level and layers and dimensions.

How have things changed creatively as people have come in and out of the Múm collective?

We thrive on that, we come from a big group of friends of musicians in Reykjavík where the biggest influence on everyone is each other. This might sound incestuous, but it is a great situation. Everyone is always trying to entertain and surprise each other and this is mostly the base for what happens in our múm musician collective, we all feed of each other and it’s a creatively dynamic relationship.

Múm  always seem to have interesting ideas and projects on the go, what kinds of things have you been up to between Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy and Sing Along to Songs You Don’t Know?

We did some radio theater, which we enjoy very much. It’s a dying form of art and we enjoy working in it, because it fits very well to the way we do things. We also recorded some old múm songs with a mixed choir called Balsis in Riga, Latvia. We recorded at the National Radio and it was a magnificent project and now we are pretty much waiting to see what we do with the recordings. We would also like to do this live with a big choir at some point, so we are waiting for the perfect opportunity to do it.

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After taking a lengthy break, Engineers have finally released their new album Three Fact Fader. I met Mark from the band one warm summer afternoon as they were gearing up to support the release by playing their first concerts in two years. Oh btw, the album will blow your useless brain to bits, so go find it.

It’s been a fair old while since you last had a record out. What’ve you been up to?

Well we finished this album or kind of nearly finished it at the end of 2006 early 2007 but then the record company we were with – Echo, stopped being a record company and became just a publishing house. So rather than wait around for another label to come on board we decided just to have a break.

A few labels approached us in the meantime but we just decided to wait until the right one came along, which happened last year, Kscope approached us and it seemed right, the right ethos, the right attitude.

The conversations that we had were more about us as a band as opposed the album as a product. They didn’t even know that there was another album when they approached us, they’d just heard the first album and thought that we would be a good act to have on the label.

So you’ve avoided that feeling that perhaps you could sign to a label, release the album and then find yourselves out in the cold a bit?

Ha, well there’s always a potential for that, I mean the business is what it is these days, so I’m not living under any illusions of being babied for the rest of my life, but…

Sure, but at least Kscope seemed to be interested in the act itself on the whole.

Yeah and also I think what the act means from an artistic perspective instead of just… y’know number crunching.

Sure, sure. So what’s happening on the gigging front?

Well we’ve been rehearsing but we haven’t actually played a gig yet. We’re playing on the 10th of July to follow the release on the 6th.

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