Christmas edges inexorably closer, which means that New Years Eve is just around the corner – but you still just about have time to get in on our two room takeover of Amsterdam’s Melkweg this December 31st (tickets still available for 40 Euros from Ticketmaster):

Leave the festive frenzy where it belongs in 2011, and start 2012 as you mean to go on in the company of none other than: master of Shamanic ceremonies James Holden! DJ-come-lately Apparat! Norfolk knob-twiddler Nathan Fake! Rave Buffalo Luke Abbott! Synth-and-sax synergist Etienne Jaumet! Weird wonder Kate Wax! Welsh mystic Wesley Matsell! And last but by no means least, man-about-Amsterdam-town Jorn Liefdeshuis!

Of course, the hardest part will be choosing between the two competing rooms of music-for-dancing-to, not to mention the BC-approved film selections showing in the Melkweg’s in-house cinema area. So perhaps a few set times would help you plan your New Years Eve manoeuvres down to the letter:

The Max:
22:00 Wesley Matsell
00:00 Apparat
02:00 Nathan Fake
03:00 James Holden

Old Hall:
00:15 Jorn Liefdeshuis
01:30 Etienne Jaumet
02:30 Luke Abbott
03:30 Kate Wax

Or better still, in the spirit of our roaming party mentor An’Unexpectacle, make no plans, and wander aimlessly through the Melkweg complex taking delight wherever you may find it.

In the meantime, how about some prescribed listening to fill your between days festive downtime until the big event? Apparat’s 2010 DJ-Kicks patchwork provides the perfect preparation for one of his rare DJ outings, jostling for a place in your Spotify queue alongside more recent releases from brothers-in-synth Luke Abbott (the invigorating Brazil) and Etienne Jaumet (the brooding Satori). Miss Kate Wax meanwhile will also be stepping out of her usual Dust Collision live orbit to don her DJ cloak of danceability, whose delights might best be previewed in her latest podcast outing for the mighty Drowned In Sound – the grandiosely titled influence-spanning Monolith For The Blues:

Over the considerable months since the release of Luke Abbott’s Holkham Drones debut album, Luke has amassed quite a collection of celebrity fans.

Mr Gold Panda of course recently lent his remix support to the Brazil incursion, but the Lucky Shiner was actually one of the first Abbott-maniacs to come out of the woodwork, proclaiming his early allegiance to the ‘Holkham Drones’ cause via one of his erratic Twitter incarnations before cementing that commitment by putting Luke forward as his own personal tip in The Guardian’s collection of fantasy Mercury Music Prize nominations. Said same Guardian article saw the Celeb-stakes somewhat raised, when lead singer of Domino’s Cumbrian ambassadors Wild Beasts Hayden Thorpe matched the Panda’s Mercury tip with their own Abbott-endorsement: “Abbott is a wizard with noise. If Britain had a Pitchfork then surely he would be its darling.”

But now the bar has been set to record-breaking heights as none other than Elijah Wood himself has stepped into the fray, as Luke explained yesterday on his blog: “Elijah Wood of cinematic fame has made his bid in the race to become my most high profile fan”. Elijah spoke out on his love for ‘Holkham Drones’ in this video posted on the blog of America’s Fuse.TV with an on-the-button summary: “warm, analogue-sounding bedroom electronica. I love it. It’s so good.”

Curiously, loyal readers may remember that this isn’t the first appearance that Elijah has made on this blog, previously popping up as an addendum to one of Luke Abbott’s hobbit jokes with his opinions on The MFA’s The Difference It Makes, a track which he was rather less keen on…

The digital files sneaked out a while ago now, but the all-important hard vinyl currency of Luke Abbott’s awesome Brazil single package is set to hit your shops this Monday 19th December (just in time for Christmas!), complete with new even more danceable Slow Version, typically top drawer remixes from Gold Panda and Etienne Jaumet, and bombastic bonus Luke Abbott original Grumble.

But as if that wasn’t goodness enough to kick off the festive season, to top it all off we have just unleashed this accompanying multimedia video gem, a suitably lyrical collaboration between Luke himself, his artist-photographer girlfriend Katherine Mager and their poet friend Sam Riviere. Filmed in Norfolk, Norwich, Brighton and London, the video superimposes Sam’s words as subtitles to subtly-moving snapshots of the British seaside in its “attempt to investigate the invisible connections between people and objects”, to curiously uplifting effect:

Brazil from Luke Abbott on Vimeo.

Brazil is Katherine Mager’s first ever music video outing, but you may already be familiar with her previous Border Community / Luke Abbott related work for the floral cover of Luke’s Whitebox Stereo EP:

She also provided Luke’s current set of special press photos, of which this shot has proved to be particularly iconic:

Particularly observant Norfolkers may even have stumbled across her previous solo exhibitions at Art in the Underbelly and the Norwich Art Centre, the latter of which went so far as to name her ‘Norfolk Photographer of the Year’ in 2008. For more information on Katherine Mager’s previous and future projects, head on over to her occasionally updated blog.

Sam Riviere meanwhile is a name that may be new to anyone who isn’t a regular on the burgeoning young British poet scene, but now is as good a time as any for your induction into his world. Based between London and Norwich, Sam has previously had his poems published in The Guardian and The Spectator, as well as starring in his own New Poets pamphlet for Faber + Faber in 2010. Sam also co-edits the poetry and illustraion anthology Stop Sharpening Your Knives, and is currently occupied on a series of poems entitled 81 Austerities, to be gradually unveiled via his own thoroughly modern Tumblr blog.

Those Border Community get-togethers have been coming thick and fast of late, and you know there is nothing we like more than collecting up our nearest, dearest, latest and greatest all in one place for a night of goodwill-to-all-men happy clappy hedonism. The latest outlet has been provided by Hamburg’s Popmondial promoters, who have secured the services of recent Luke Abbott rearranger Gold Panda to top off a decidedly Border Community-themed line-up that includes master of shamanic ceremonies James Holden, electronic buffalo Luke Abbott (whose Brazil just hit the mp3 stands, with the vinyl soon to follow) and the equal parts haunting and haunted Kate Wax (whose Dust Collision is now all around us on vinyl, CD and mp3), with the eager and most able support of young, British and electronic Seams thrown in for good measure:

Indeed, so bursting with goodness is this line-up that it has now spilled over into a second club floor, the neighbouring Neidklub, where the early doors live shows of Seams and Kate Wax will be running from 11pm, with the Panda taking over on the main Baalsaal dancefloor from 1pm. Entrance to both zones is of course included in your original Play.Me ticket price in true Reeperbahn crawl-friendly fashion (and if you haven’t got your ticket yet, then you had better snap one up here pronto). And the full programme runs something like this:

Floor 1 (Baalsaal):
22:00 We Are Alaska
23:00 Krger
00:00 Dependance
01:00 Gold Panda
02:00 Luke Abbott
03:00 James Holden

Floor 2 (Neidklub):
23:00 Seams
00:00 Kate Wax

Music-for-dancing-to doesn’t come much better than this little lot. And rumour has it that a certain Mr Nathan Fake has already been booked in for Popmondial’s next Play.Me club session – those lucky Hamburgers…

It is important to plan ahead if you are going to fill in that post-Christmas void that comes with the onset of cold, dark January, but those dependable veteran party people Bugged Out! (15 years and counting!) have just the thing to stave off the SAD: Butlins‘ Bognor Regis outpost has been duly reserved over the weekend of 20th-22nd of January for the inaugural Bugged Out Weekender takeover, boasting a line-up of truly ravetastic proportions.

Our boy James Holden brings his own personal free-wheeling hyper-arppegiated take on hedonism to the Friday night kick-off, joining Simian Mobile Disco, Casper C and Matt Walsh on one of the Bugged Out floors. Elsewhere across the holiday camp complex guest hosts like Numbers & Night Slugs, Bristol’s In:Motion, Dalston Superstore and Union have extended their invitations to pet favourites like Hudson Mohawke, L-Vis 1990, Ms Dynamite, Zinc, Shy FX and Joker, with plenty of the usual Bugged Out suspects popping up inbetween: Ivan Smagghe, Andrew Weatherall, Green Velvet, Erol Alkan, Inner City, Martyn, Joy Orbison, Sbtrkt, The 2 Bears, 2ManyDJs, Kevin Saunderson, Justin Robertson, Claude VonStroke, Maya Jane Coles, Eats Everything, James Holroyd and Stopmakingme. Click here for the full line-up.

Tickets can be secured for a deposit of just £50, with chalets ranging from 2 to 7 people denominations starting at £139 per person, as well as a VIP package option which houses you in a full-blown hotel for £199: click here for the full breakdown. Rally the troops and wrap up warm, because Bognor Regis in January doesn’t sound like the warmest location on earth!

Our Bristol rendezvous with the good people from the BLOC Weekend at the Bristol InMotion skatepark is fast approaching, and to celebrate we have teamed up with the Bristol InMotion crew for a special giveaway of Border Community rarities. As you may have already heard, our entire stock of back catalogue was destroyed in the Sony warehouse fire which was started during the London riots back in August. All that remains is a small – and rather random – assortment of records that were held here in our office, and it is these archives that we have raided to put together a very special prize package for the occasion of the Bristol InMotion giveaway, to include such rarities as: long out-of-print vinyl of Mr Holden’s The Idiots Are Winning and Nathan Fake’s Hard Islands albums as well as Mr Fake’s infamous The Sky Was Pink; Fairmont’s Velora EP and Luke Abbott’s Trans Forest Alignment, which both became limited editions of around 400 when the final remaining vinyl copies were destroyed in the fire; and CDs of Fairmont’s Coloured In Memory album (unfortunately unlikely to be repressed any time soon) and the still very much active Holkham Drones by Luke Abbott. With a T-shirt, badges and non-BC CDs from Martyn and Jamie Woon also thrown in, this is shaping up to be quite the goodie bag:

To enter, all you need to do is buy a ticket to the forthcoming BLOC / Bristol InMotion / Border Community threeway which takes place on 25th November at Bristol’s Motion club-come-skatepark, with the four man dream team of James Holden, Nathan Fake, Fairmont and Luke Abbott representing the Border Community in our own area, and luminaries like Martyn, Joker, Luke Vibert, Illum Sphere and 2562 popping up elsewhere across the complex. Tickets are available now here priced at just £16.50, and the lucky winner will be selected from the ticket list on the evening of the event. For further information about the competition see the Bristol InMotion blog; check the flyer below for the full massive event line-up.

Good luck! But even if you don’t win, treasure whatever Border Community vinyl collection you have: there is no more where that came from, because sadly in most cases we won’t be able to repress.

Kick off this dark November week with a podcast goodie from lovely French audio-visual site The Drone, who dispatched one of their representatives to record the arpeggiated wonder of italo-techno cuties Margot’s live+DJ hybrid set at our Amsterdam Dance Event Melkweg showcase a few weeks back, complete with live vocal demi-operatics from the big man Giaga Robot. A full blown English conversation may still be a bit of a stretch for the quiet giant Giaga, but strangely he doesn’t seem to have a problem with singing in English!

Over in their Italian outpost of Riccione, Margot have currently got it all going on: their remix of Caribou main-man Dan Snaith’s new Daphni alter-ego has recently been released into the wild on limited edition YELLOW vinyl by the amazing Amazing Sounds, and for their next trick they have just finished a rework of the next single from our resident one-woman Dust Collision Kate Wax. Daphni’s ‘Ahora’ 12″ predictably seems to be flying out of the shops, but at the time of writing there were still a few copies available from the likes of Amazon and Kompakt, or head directly to faithful friends Boomkat for your instant hit of mp3s.

Daphni “Ahora” Margot Remix (cut) by margot

Meanwhile, a selection of Margot originals have been singled out for imminent release on reformed Lazy Fat Person Ripperton’s own Perspectiv Records and homegrown Italian label stable Hell Yeah Recordings, whilst their own eponymous Margot Records imprint is currently building up to unleash offerings from fellow Italian new waver Vaghe Stelle (with Young British Electronica’s Lukid drafted in on remix duties) and Giaga Robot’s solo project. Phew.

Margot’s next live+DJ outing happens in a couple of weeks time for another Border Community get-together, this time in Paris on 18th November at the Showcase venue, featuring a sterling selection of our nearest and dearest: dramatic button-pusher James Holden, one-man-indie-electronic-band Fairmont, bewitching boxroom-production heroine Kate Wax and of course those intrepid Italian arpeggiators Margot to further blur the boundaries between live show and DJ set as evidenced in the afore-mentioned dronecast. Grab your advance tickets now from Digitick for a night of the finest in music-for-dancing-to.

Late last night I booked my last-minute ticket on the London-Berlin express, meaning that on Saturday night I can join our intrepid DJ adventurer James Holden in Technopolis Berlin for the annual BerMuDa music-fest. After four days of workshops, panels and parties across the city’s clubs, the festival culminates in one almighty mega-rave amongst the imposing surroundings of the old Tempelhof airport, featuring just about everyone who is anyone in the Berlin techno stakes: Plastikman, Ricardo Villalobos, Ellen Allien, Ame, Magda, Sven Väth, Tiefschwarz, M.A.N.D.Y., Loco Dice and of course that charming English gent James Holden, to name but a few. See the Fly Bermuda website for the full line-up run down and ticket information, then ensure that your luggage is safely stowed and fasten your seatbelts for a night of epic proportions.

Meanwhile, across town at the MoonFloor in the Soda Club / Kulturbrauerei complex Border Community’s own humble contribution to the BerMuDa cause will be simultaneously kicking off, with the enviable key-matching skills of Miss Kate Wax continuing the MoonFloor club’s successful run of weekly Labelnight showcases:

The full evening programme runs something like this, passing the baton on to the safe live hands of that old pro Jake Fairmont Fairley, then on to a mysterious special guest who drops in at 3am for a surprise DJ set, before our Border Booking comrade Harald Bjork takes us on into the early hours with a breakfast soundtrack of Scandi-house:

23:00 Kate Wax (DJ set)
2:00 Fairmont (Live)
3:00 Special guest
6:00 Harald Bjork (Dj set)

That feral beast An’Unexpectacle and his cast of imaginary friends and fairytale creatures is also apparently in town, a-rotating and a-meddling, so it promises to be quite the party!

A new flyer and a quick heads-up to lock down your tickets for our upcoming Border Community outing in Bristol on 25th November, as part of the annual In:Motion three month takeover of the city’s Motion skatepark complex.

Our hosts for the evening are the lovely folks from the Bloc Weekender, who have entrusted one room of their curation to the care of Border Community and our four man dream team comprising James Holden, Nathan Fake, Fairmont (rare UK appearance!) and Luke Abbott, who I trust will do us proud. But as if our four horsemen of the post-apocalypse weren’t enticement enough, elsewhere across the compound the Bloc crew have secured a special guest appearance from Mr Luke Vibert to supplement the cast of Bloc DJs and local residents, as well as placing a further room in the hands of indigenous dubstep people Subloaded, whose companions for the evening include the suave Martyn, Illum Sphere, Joker and 2562. Phew.

Tickets are on sale here now, priced at £16.50: get them while they are hot. Stay tuned to the In:Motion website for further updates…

As our Amsterdam Dance Event Border Community showcase at the Melkweg this Saturday (18th October) edges ever closer, a few set times would I am sure be appreciated. Alstublieft:

21:30 James Holden
22:30 Kate Wax (Live)
23:30 Margot (Live+DJ)
01:00 Fairmont (Live)
02:00 Luke Abbott (Live)
03:00 James Holden
05:00 curfew

You would clearly do well to get there early doors and strap in for the whole ride, because our dancefloor alchemist James Holden has signed up for one of his beloved weird and wonderful bonus warm-up journeys in advance of his 3am main event. Currently building up to the big bang of her ‘Dust Collision’ album release, high priestess Kate Wax then takes over and ushers us into the magical, mystical universe of light and shadow that is her entrancing live set and complementary otherworldly projections, as witnessed in this brand new trailer:

Our Italian stallions Margot will also be revealing their own peculiar take on the live performance brief, fusing the ten year DJ pedigree of Pepe with Giaga’s live electronics and incongrously high-pitched vocals, before giving way to another fix of electronic pop from our resident old romantic Fairmont’s full stage show. Putting the feelings and emotions back to one side for a moment, the Norfolk buffalo Luke Abbott then drives us in an altogether bolshier direction with his rough and tough new all-hardware live set up, before the very capable hands of Mr Holden steer us through to the 5am curfew in a flurry of arpeggios and pagan drumming.

Just one catch: our ADE showcase sold out over a month ago! But if you didn’t manage to get a ticket, I am not just telling you all of this to rub it in about what you’re missing: for if you head over to our Facebook and Twitter profiles right away, there you will discover your last-minute chance to win a pair of guestlist places in return for a simple painless click on the ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ button. GO!

Eyes on your favourite record shop, as any minute now the vinyl-only release of our in-house remixer extraordinaire James Holden’s double-dose of decidedly epic Kate Wax re-edits is set to surface. After mixing the self-producing Swiss autocrat’s twelve-track album together in his London studio, soon after her departure James seized upon the parts stashed on his hard drive to string out two of the most club-friendly album cuts – ‘Holy Beast’ and ‘Echoes and the Light’ – into the type of dancefloor-optimised hedonistic symphonies that we have come to expect from him. The race is on: Juno currently offers a pair of tantalising clip streams but has yet to reveal a price; Amazon will let you pay for a copy, although their stock is yet to land; whilst poor old Phonica seems to have come down with some kind of malware disease… Get well soon chaps!

But if the suspense is simply killing you, if you head over to Pitchfork today, you are sure of a pleasant surprise: namely, an mp3 of the ‘Holden Woolly Beast edit’ of Kate Wax’s ‘Holy Beast’ for your immediate downloading gratification. And for an even more instantaneous hit of gratification, simply click on the play button on the Soundcloud player below:

33BCE: B1 – Kate Wax – Holy Beast (Holden’s Woolly Beast Edit) by Border Community

The all-important ‘Dust Collision’ album main-event meanwhile is scheduled for November 14th, when the secrets of the Kate Wax musical universe are finally opened up to the outside world, expanding to reveal her own magically realistic cosmology of witches, demons, dreams and ghosts as she guides us like a disco Sherpa through the peaks and valleys of human experience. But whilst we wait patiently for the big bang, the Kate Wax live experience (as well as her new sideline in key-matched DJing) has already begun to be rolled out across Europe: free-range soprano meets laptop digi-grit as the figure of Kate Wax herself becomes the canvas for a slick set of complementary light projections, collectively making for a fully-immersive work of performance art that is worthy of a grand stage. Book yourself in at one of the dates below for the full voodoo:

Kate Wax ‘Dust Collision’ Tour Dates
23rd September: Marie Laveau, Stockholm, Sweden
24th September: Haute Culture Festival, Norrkoping, Sweden
1st October: Bugged Out & Border Community Warehouse Party, London, UK
22nd October: Border Community ADE showcase, Melkweg, Amsterdam, Netherlands
18th November: Nuits Capitals Festival, Culture Hall, Paris, France
19th November: Klubd, Nicosia, Cyprus
3rd December: Baalsall, Hamburg, Germany
21st January: Nitsa, Barcelona, Spain

The news that the mighty Death In Vegas was on the verge of a triumphant return in the form of fifth studio album Trans Love Energies prompted a most uncharacteristic hunting down of the press officer by our own James Holden, so desperate was he to add present-perfect and future-continuous dancefloor anthem Your Loft My Acid (out this week!) to his Traktor files:

Your Loft by Death In Vegas

The rest of the album, not to mention the cover and title, proved to be equally up our (and Mr Luke Abbott’s) respective streets, as you will be able to hear for yourselves from next Monday 26th September:

Knocking up a quick list of his top Death In Vegas moments for the Fabric blog was the least James could do in return, although choosing favourites from the bulging Death In Vegas back catalogue is certainly harder than it sounds. Dyed-in-the-wool Border Commies should remember Death In Vegas’ Anita Berber from its pop-up appearance on Mr Holden’s At The Controls mix CD of a few years back, spearheading the migration of a sizeable chunk of the Satan’s Circus album into his digital DJ virtual record box, where it would eventually be joined by generous helpings of ‘Trans Love Energies’ seven years on.

The Fabric connection in all of this hinges around said album’s live launch in a special Thursday night edition of Fabric Live later this week (September 22nd), where Death In Vegas-mainman Richard Fearless will be present and correct on both live and DJ duties, joined by none other than Andrew Weatherall and Stopmakingme in his residential capacity. Tickets are naturally on sale now in individual and Fabric-archive-CD-bundle form, starting from £13.00.

You’d be right in thinking that it has been quite some time since our last Corsica Studios shindig: almost a year to the day, to be precise! Of course we still have plenty of love for the Corsica Studios crew, and plan on returning as soon as a suitable occasion presents itself. It’s just that we keep on being invited to an assortment of pop-up warehouse engagements over in East London – and well, it would be rude not to!

The latest embossed gold-leaf invitation comes from veterans of the London party scene Bugged Out! (17 years and counting!), who will be setting up in a secret Shoreditch location of the warehouse variety for our mutual benefit on 1st October. There is nothing our man James Holden likes more than stretching his DJ legs in the type of rough and ready setting that really suits his untameable dirty analogue musical perversions, so he is in for sure:

Fellow lord of the dark analogue arts Luke Abbott has also recently beefed up his live presence (and used it as a good excuse for copious new equipment purchases) in grand style – as recently showcased in this Red Bull Music Academy broadcast from Russia’s Ferma Festival – and will be giving his new hardware-heavy haul of toys a metropolitan airing for the Bugged Out! massive. And finally, from one luscious longplayer to the next, our next album activist Kate Wax will also be nipping over from Switzerland to showcase her impeccable taste and highly-attuned dancefloor sensibilities with one of her rock-solid DJ sets: may I refer you to her Allez-Allez podcast of last year for further evidence?

Tickets are available now from Ticketweb for the eminently reasonable sum of just £10. Don’t be a stranger!

As news of the last week’s brutal riots in London circulated the world, this enduring image of the gigantic fire at the Sony distribution warehouse in Enfield, North London, was used to head up many a TV and newspaper report. But what may not have been instantly obvious to the extended Border Community family around the world is that, as well as the Playstation booty that sits near the top of a looter’s wishlist, the Sony warehouse was also home to the vinyl and CD back catalogues of a host of the UK’s finest independent record labels via their distribution deals with PIAS UK, including the good ship Border Community. We first heard the news from the BBC’s rolling news coverage, where upon the announcement that the giant fire currently filling the screen was believed to be a “Sony distribution centre in Enfield”, our jaws simultaneously dropped. The next morning we awoke to confirmation that – as the fire was clearly still smouldering on – our entire stock of vinyl and CDs had indeed been destroyed.

That was ten days ago now, and our silence on the subject so far can be attributed to the fact that this happened just two days before we were due to leave for a Spanish mini-tour, but also to a degree of sensitivity to the losses of other PIAS-distributed labels, as this certainly hasn’t hit us as badly as some. Most of our recent releases had already pretty much sold out (just a hundred or so copies each of Luke Abbott’s Trans Forest Alignment and Fairmont’s Velora EP remained), and thankfully we weren’t in the truly gutting position of just having shipped a load of fresh stock into the warehouse ready for imminent release. Unfortunately, we feel like we have been here once before, when we faced the double bankruptcy of our then-distributor Amato and then-label-management-company 3Beat a few years ago, and that was definitely worse, eating up thousands of pounds that were owed to us as well as threatening to swallow up our back catalogue. Ever since then, we have consistently avoided any overheads which would also tip us over into bankruptcy in the event of any other unexpected disruptions to the money stream: we work from a small office in our own home, and the wages of myself and our assistant Rosana are all covered by Mr Holden’s DJ activities. All of which means that once again this time we will weather the storm: we certainly aren’t folding, and nor or we about to “go digital”.

But it is nonetheless the end of an era: many of the vinyl releases which were destroyed are unlikely to ever be repressed, although we are already in the process of restocking our most recent CD album releases. To those looking to complete their vinyl collection, this list of webstores is the best pointer I can give you to tracking down any remaining stragglers that have escaped the flames. Otherwise, after a comprehensive stocktake the small number of copies that we have hoarded here will eventually make it onto our merchandise store, beyond which the opportunity to pre-order our most highly sought after releases via a Kickstarter-type funding pledge scheme may eventually enable represses of selected items. Your Border Community vinyl collection just got that extra bit more collectible.

As we wait for the insurance claims process to run its course, in the interim there is an overwhelming stream of goodwill flowing in the direction of PIAS-distributed labels from the wider music industry: an official label loan fund has already been established, whilst the blogger-run Label Love project seeks to make a bad thing good by organising live events and collecting up paypal donations and their nerdier counterpart Record Label Love enlists the help of hackers to guide people towards PIAS label purchases. Websites like The Quietus meanwhile have sought to drive their readers towards legitimate music purchases through a guide to their top 20 PIAS-distributed releases, including our own Mr Holden’s The Idiots Are Winning debut album, and the lovely Boomkat have collected together a list of all of the PIAS-distributed labels both big and small that are worthy of your support.

Personally, we aren’t looking for handouts or charity. But we do want you to buy our music, not just now, but all year round; and because you really love it, not because you feel sorry for us. So if you were in the habit of “looting” our music via the likes of Rapidshare, today is certainly the day to change your ways. Some have sought to drive purchases towards labels’ own personal websites, but, whilst our own mp3 shop remains ever at your service, we think that now more than ever it is important to oil the wheels of the music industry. Our manufacturing costs should eventually be covered by the insurance payout, but PIAS themselves and the network of independent record stores that rely on PIAS-distributed releases for a large proportion of their stock are also facing a serious reduction in turnover. These companies also have overheads – rent, staff – to cover, and without them we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. So the best way to help is by paying for the music that you love, whether by tracking down those elusive remaining physical copies or stuffing your hard drive with digital goodies care of sterling (and largely independent) music outlets like the ones in this list. And we, in return, pledge to keep bringing you plenty more cockle-warming music where that came from, and to keep on pressing the black stuff.

The stage times for tomorrow’s Field Day festival in London’s Victoria Park were released into the wild this week, so in true music nerd fashion I have crunched the numbers to work out just how much of that awesome line-up we will or won’t see.

One essential port of call for anyone reading this is of course the Holden / Hebden back-to-back showdown which takes place on the Bugged Out! stage at 19:15, with the whole stage line-up looking something like this:

Bugged Out! Stage in association with Resident Advisor:
21.45 Carl Craig presents 69
20.30 Michael Mayer
19.15 Kieran Hebden B2B James Holden
18.00 Erol Alkan
17.00 Benga & Youngman
16.00 L-Vis 1990
15.00 James Blake DJ
14.00 Roska
13.00 Pearson Sound
12.00 Matt Walsh

The observant amongst you may have noticed that that leaves a mere 75 minutes for Kieran and James to dish up their latest greatest, but if that just leaves you hungry for more then you can always head on over to the Bugged Out official Field Day after party in the Hearn Street Car Park once you get kicked out of Victoria Park, where extended solo sets from each of the DJ battle buddies will be your reward in what looks like turning into a bit of an unofficial End reunion. Advance tickets are still available here, although I’m not sure for how much longer; otherwise, an early doors stakeout of the venue may be your best bet…

But I am getting ahead of myself here: what sense is all this talk of after parties, when we haven’t even begun to engage with the multi-faceted joys of the main event? Here follows an extremely optimistic plan of how we will be spending our day, providing that we manage to drag ourselves over to the site in time for the 12pm kick off (unlikely, I know).

But 12pm it is when Faust make their noble bid to rouse the Kraut massive from their beds, getting things going over on the Quietus‘ Village Mentality stage. Dolphin lover (forever) Connan Mockasin also goes head-to-head with your lunch plans on the Laneway stage at 13:50, before the psychedelic callings of Sun Ra Arkestra beckon us to the main stage at 14:20. Come 15:45 it is time to take our place next to our own budding synth prophet Luke Abbott to worship at the altar of Oneohtrix Point Never, followed by the Congotronic explosion of Konono No. 1 back over in the Village Mentality area at 16:55. Then it is back to the home base of the Bugged Out! tent for James’ personal rendezvous with the dashing Kieran Hebden, with only The Horrors threatening to tempt us back out into the wild at 20:50, making sure to head back under the safe cover of our tent for Carl Craig’s highly-venerated closing 69 presentation. Not forgetting of course to save a little back for those after party warehouse shenanigans!