Ochre

A prototype 12″ of 2003′s ill-fated EAT001 EP has been added to the shop. More test pressing and compilation items to follow.

I shared this on Twitter last week, but I thought I’d leave a note about it on the blog too (given I don’t have a ton of other news right now). I recently got a one-off vinyl dubplate carved up for a certain designer who’s been helping me out a lot lately. Can’t say I’ve ever held or played one before, but it’s quite interesting—a bit different from your garden-variety vinyl. I don’t know how it compares to a lacquer dubplate, apart from being much more resilient, but it does resemble a slab of perspex quite a bit—certainly thicker and more transparent than any ‘clear’ vinyl I’ve seen before.

It’d be nice to be able to sell odd one-offs like this, as they really are quite unique. Maybe start a line of Ochre ‘Auratic Artefacts’…

Now that I’m back in the land of music-making after a summer of ridiculous humidity, pink flamingos and pastel-coloured houses (guess where?), I’ve re-opened my shop and resumed mastering. Current mastering rates: £12 per track (plus £12 for CD compilation). Current shop inventory: double AMND 12″ vinyl for £10 (CDs now sold out). As ever, if there’s anything you’d like to see in the shop (more CDs etc.), I’ll try and make plans for it.

I now have a new website for the mastering side of things, too: Melograf Mastering!

Also added a nice new album review from The Milk Factory.

Just a final reminder that I’ll be closing the mastering service and shop before the end of the week, until August, as I’ll be off to concentrate on my thesis work over the summer. I’ve got 7 Midsummer Nice Dream CDs left in stock, which would be nice to clear; considerably more vinyl is available, so don’t worry about that — plenty left. If you need any odd tracks mastered, please arrange to get them to me by Wednesday at the latest, just so I’ve got a couple of days to work on them and get them back to you.

I’ll still be online around here though and obviously contactable via email—not going to leave the face of the planet while I’ve got an impending album release.

I’ve decided to take advantage of one of Bandcamp’s latest feature additions, and have generated a few download codes for A Midsummer Nice Dream.

Anyone who buys a copy of the album on vinyl will receive a download code along with the album, so they may download a high-quality digital version of the release for their iPod, car, PC etc., at no extra cost. The codes are, as far as I can tell, good for one single download only, so choose your format wisely! mp3, flac, aac and ogg are all present and accounted for.

I haven’t yet decided how to present the codes — I could use stickers on the shrink-wrap, but risk buyers throwing this away with the packaging, or I could put paper slips in with the vinyl, and risk them being ignored at the bottom of the envelope. Could email them, but that’s more work for me and could still be ignored. Hmm. Any preferences?

I’ve just set up my own little shop selling odd stock of my past releases, such as A Midsummer Nice Dream on vinyl for just £6 plus P&P. I hope to get the odd limited release up there too, so please keep your eyes peeled for the odd one-off relic from the Ochre archives.

Due to the way the shopping cart works (in this case, the FatFreeCart) in not catering for multiple shipping fees, I’ve set out separate purchase buttons depending on the shipping destination, with P&P prices ranging from £3 in the UK to £4 for EU customers and £6 for US. Yes, shipping vinyl is rather steep, so I’ve kept the base unit price down to around half of the usual retail price.

I’ve also been toying with the idea of releasing some of my unreleased ‘Volumes’ or ‘AMD’ on CD—would this be of any interest to you? I’ll see how feasible a short run of CDs will be and possibly get some up if there’s suitable interest.

New Ochre vinyl! It’s been quite some time since I’ve had something out on vinyl, so I’m excited to announce the release of a new 12″ EP, released on Baselogic, on Monday (distributed by Veto). Here’s the tracklist:

A1. Petl
A2. Bass Recorder (a remix of Global Goon)
B1. Neoretro
B2. Chronon

Three of the four tracks have been available here on my site in the past, but I hope that won’t dissuade you from grabbing a copy; it’s been mastered at Alchemy to sound its best for its vinyl debut, so it ought to be no contest between mp3 and 12″.

It’s available to buy at the moment from Boomkat and Juno, to ship on Monday. No doubt it will filter through the retail channel over the course of the week, but if your favourite store doesn’t hold it, please ask them to order it in for you.

Edit: More stores: Tempest (Brum, UK), Phonica (London), Clone (Rotterdam, Netherlands), Fat Fenders (Dresden, Germany) etc.

Like all other Baselogic releases, it will also be available digitally in due course. My remix of Ed Chamberlain is now available on mp3 from Juno, Amazon, Beatport and Nuloop, with usual suspects Bleep and iTunes to follow.

Okay, with all that renovation kerfuffle out of the way, I’m happy to get the mastering underway once again; I’ll be chasing up those of you who’ve been in touch during the downtime, and have organised a schedule to catch up with this.

Meanwhile, I’m currently working on a remix for The Collectors (featuring Benet Walsh, co-writer of a few tunes of mine that made their way onto the Death of an Aura EP, with more to follow). It’ll be a digital-only release at some point in the first quarter of 2009, I think.

Also, watch this space for a new vinyl EP release, being manufactured as we speak. It’s been too long since I’ve had something out on vinyl, so I’m pretty giddy about getting my mits on it. I don’t even have a turntable at the moment… okay so I just want to lick the vinyl—what’s wrong with that?