I forgot to post last week about show no.3 which had Johnny Lynch, aka The Pictish Trail as a guest and Kid Canaveral being hobnobbed. It was a very good laugh on the day and not a bad listen considering how many technical screw ups we managed to squeeze in!

Then last week Posh Oli hobnobbed eagleowl and we had an exclusive jingle from King Creosote. Plus we did an extra 10 minute aftershow recording called ‘the backwash’. So there’s a lot to catch up on before our next show on Saturday morning!

MIXCLOUD OR SOUNDCLOUD OR ITUNES OR..

Now we’ve posted all this up on MixCloud which is a pretty good platform for podcasts as there are no limits on how many you can post up, however it does have limitations, namely that you need to download the iPhone app to listen on iOS and it isn’t quite as nice to access as Soundcloud.

But then Soundcloud isn’t really for music podcasts and is expensive once you start uploading a lot of audio files. We are using it for the most recent episodes if you prefer to listen that way.

Neither link up with iTunes either and at least two people requested a proper podcast feed (you know who you are).

DRUMROLL PLEASE..

Which is why we now have a Tumblr blog which you can follow in a vast variety of ways, listen to all the shows so far on any mobile device (well half-decent smartphones and tablets at any rate), and which also allows for subscribing in iTunes via Feedburner.

The podcast has also been submitted to the iTunes directory so should appear soon.

So if you’re interested please go to www.livefromthelatinquarter.com and follow in whatever way you prefer – you can’t say we haven’t made an effort!

Posh Oli & Martin from The Savings & Loan - photo by Dylan Matthews

It was a bit of a shambles as expected, but hopefully the custom made jingles from Found and Posh Oli’s interview with Martin from The Savings & Loan more than made up for the questionable production skills…

Tracklisting:

1. The Only Ones – Another Girl Another Planet
2. FOUND – Anti Climb Paint
3. Connan Mockasin – It’s Choade My Dear
4. Eddie Floyd – Bring It On Home To Me
5. Midlake – Roscoe
6. King Creosote – No Cigarettes (Withered Hand cover)
7. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow
8. Beck – Gamma Ray
9. The Savings & Loan – Catholic Boys In The Rain
10. Black Grape – The Reverend Black Grape

Some responses to the first show:

“Bangin’ show”

“I love Posh Oli”

“Enjoying listening to the show and watching squirrels”

“I hope this doesn’t clash with Saturday kitchen”

“That Creosote cover was sooo good it made my eyes hear and my ears see!”

LATLC Listen Again 20111029 by milomclaughlin

We’re back on tomorrow (Saturday) at midday with *even more* awesome jingles from the Found lads, Posh Oli interviews another big name on the local scene (clue: his name is Neil and he is in an Edinburgh band) and we have another Sexy Lady Song. Plus if we have time and can work the equipment we might even play the Savings & Loan’s cover of Steps, inspired by their chat with Posh Oli last week!

Visit the Latin Quarter on Facebook

Once upon a time I presented a radio show on Edinburgh’s student radio station. Then it became a podcast and monthly column for the Skinny. Then I got busy with other stuff and had to stop.

But now, I’m joining my pals Dylan and Colin for ‘Live from the Latin Quarter’ which will basically just be us playing some favourite tunes and engaging in “witty banter” (the latter will probably be courtesy of the other two).

Matthew “weird old” Toad has already described the line up fairly accurately as “three fuckwits and a microphone”.  Should be fun… You can listen on iTunes (under radio – college/university – Fresh Air – The Alternative) or at the Fresh Air website.

See the brand spanking new Facebook page for more info!

Of course a couple of years ago we had both Indian Summer and Connect to choose from for excellent festival line-ups in Scotland but they’re both gone now – and with T in the Park slipping further into the commercial shit-swamp, my pal Stu who writes the Tidal Wave of Indifference blog decided FECK IT and went to (gulp) an English festival instead – Suffolk’s Latitude, last month.

It took me a while to get it online but better late than never, here’s a wee interview I did with him about why he ditched Scotland’s biggest festival for something with a decent line-up.

Artists featured: THE NATIONAL THE ANTLERS MITCHELL MUSEUM STEVE MASON JOHN GRANT (FEATURING MIDLAKE), THE DIVINE COMEDY

Ok this takes shambolic to new disastrous proportions in terms of the excuse for links I recorded, but it has to be said the music is damn good. I didn’t have time to either edit or re-record it so my only hope is that the fuck-ups will amuse you. After all shambolic is pretty much internationally recognised as my middle name by now.

Playlist: (buy links included for Scottish bands, no time to do them all!)

1. Chilly Gonzales & Boys Noize – Never Stop

2. Gil Scott Heron – NY is killing me

3. New Ruin – Meursault (buy from www.songbytoadrecords.com)

4. The Wave Pictures – I Thought of You Again

5. Jacob Yates & The Pearly Gate Lock Pickers – You Left Me (buy from  www.luckynumbernine.co.uk)

6. The Bundles – Pirates Declare War

7. Swimmer One – You Have Fallen Way Short of Our Expectations (buy from swimmerone.co.uk from 31st May)

8. Meursault – One Day All of This’ll Be Fields

April’s slightly belated podcast features:

1. Bury Parts 1 & 3 from The Fall’s superb new album Your Future, Our Clutter, out today on Domino Records

2. Lemonade by CocoRosie plus the chance to win two tickets to their gig in Glasgow on May 12th at the Classic Grand (listen for instructions on how to enter (it’s really easy)!)

3. The King of Doublespeak by Debutant (check out their Ltd double A-side 7″ with Conquering Animal Sounds via Gerry Loves Records)

4. No Conjunction by the fabulous eagleowl (pre-order their new EP Into The Fold here and buy tickets for their launch gig on Friday in Edinburgh here)

Subscribe in iTunes

Tracklisting:

1. Paul Vickers & The Leg – Horse Hoof in the Soup (new single out now)

2. The Japanese War Effort – Usain Bolt (from the new album released tomorrow)

3. North Atlantic Oscillation – Hollywood Has Ended (from the new album released March 22nd)

4. King Post Kitsch – Fante’s Last Stand (from free EP out now)

5. Paul Vickers & The Leg – If I Could Turn Back Time (General Pumpkin mix) (b-side to current single)

 So seeing as I’m trying to be as productive as possible as part of this whole ’100 Days to Get My Shit Together’ thing (no I hadn’t forgotten about it!) I thought it was about time I brought the podcasts back.

This first, rather hurried one is mainly here to promote the Ten Tracks bundle and issue 1 of the zine, so apologies to those of you who’ll be sick of my constant self-promotion, but I hope the choice of some BLOODY BRILLIANT tracks is enough to make up for it. And hopefully future podcasts will have a bit more structure to them and a bit more production polish – this was recorded live with no preparation so imagine what it could be like with a little forward planning! (and apologies for over modulation and varying sound levels in places..)

Tracklisting:

1. My Latest Novel – The Greatest Shakedown

2. King Creosote – No Cigarettes (written by Withered Hand)

3. Musée Mécanique – Like Home

4. David Tattersall (of The Wave Pictures) – Happy For a While

5. Paper Planes – Doris Day

6.  Broken Social Scene - Anthem for a 17 Year Old Girl

p.s. I’m delighted to report that there’s a wee interview with me on Peenko’s blog, which was just voted top music site in the ScotBlogs Awards.

It’s the first in his new ‘Community Service’ series about people who are active in the Scottish music scene, and he asked me some very good questions about the motivations behind this blog and putting out a fanzine which took quite a lot of thought to answer.

Personally I reckon his original title ‘Care in the Community’ might be more appropriate in my case!

 

So this is Christmas, and I hope you have a very merry one indeed

If you’re in need of a soundtrack to the festivities or for your iPod while you trek through the snow/sludge to pick up that last-minute gift, the Christmas Clanger is here (slightly later than originally planned) with the first ever I Hear a New World Ten Tracks bundle!

In case you don’t know, Ten Tracks is a Scottish-based music download service where music fans can get ten tasty audio treats for the extraordinarily cheap price of a pound, whilst making sure the musicians involved get something back.

That’s right, for the price of a box of Maltesers (admittedly also an excellent purchase), you get to download ten of the best tracks which have featured on previous I Hear a New World podcasts, a number of which aren’t available anywhere else. See below for what I wrote about them in my column for The Skinny Magazine. 

Above: IHANW ten tracks bundle

Wounded Knee – Anthem for the Call-Centre Worker

Edinburgh’s Wounded Knee takes the corporate-speak of the robot voices that greet us on the other end of the line and reclaims them as a call to arms for all downtrodden customer service representatives. Using his sublime skills with repeating vocal loops, he transforms a common depression into a perversely uplifting anthem.

Employee of the Month – Brainwave – Corrupt

Call it jazz or post-rock if you like, and it’s true that Employee of the Month bear comparison to the likes of Boards of Canada and Tortoise, but their hyper-modern aesthetic is all their own.

Withered Hand – Religious Songs (early EP version)

“Not many religious songs contain the line “I beat myself off when I sleep on your futon” but the title track from Withered Hand’s new EP combines themes of faith, doubt, sex and inexplicably uncomfortable furniture without blinking an eye.

Kazoo Funk Orchestra – Robots in Your Eyes

All songs about robots are brilliant – FACT. This 1:12 minutes of mechanical mayhem is even better than that one from the Flight of the Conchords and will probably single-handedly hasten the onset of the singularity, when machine intelligence finally overtakes our own (if that hasn’t happened already).

Les Enfant Bastard – Michael Jackson

Lo-fi genius Les Enfant Bastard is trying to convince us that although he appears to be a skinny white bloke, he is in fact the facially-challenged post-black moonwalking nutjob who refers to himself as the King of Pop.

 Ambulances – Raasay

 Get your tie-die dress on and skip bare-foot down to the river, light up a giant spliff (if you like that sort of thing – or a nice cup of camomile tea if you don’t). Raasaay is a laid-back love-in that will make dreamers out of over-achievers.

Gummi Bako – I’m Depressed

Here, Gummi seems to have the bakery-related blues (“too much hot-cross loving”), but then things take an abrupt turn for the positive and you realise he has the ability to free himself from adversity through sheer, glorious absurdity.

Men Diamler – Black as a Cat in the Morning

Men Diamler is pure mental, he sings about cats and suicide and screams “one of these days you’ll feel much better”. He gets up and runs about like his arse is on fire. He makes us all sing along. Thing is, we feel better right away.

Meursault – William Henry Miller Part 1 (acoustic version from the Nothing Broke EP)

Meursault are perhaps better known for their blistering electronica-based live sets but here they excel in the acoustic realm with impassioned vocals, banjo, handclaps and harmonies.

White Heath – When the Watchmen Leave Their Stations

You know you’re in for a treat right away when a big feckin’ tuba kicks in, but just wait for the chorus when it all comes together in a swinging, serenading New Orleans-march-through-the-streets-then-onto-a-boat-down-the Mississippi-river of lovestruck majesty.

 Grab these ten musical gems for the barely noticeable price of one single quid courtesy of www.tentracks.co.uk 

Related post:

I Hear a New Gramophone - an interview with Sean Michaels

This is an interview from November’s issue of The Skinny Magazine which can also be found on their website here. It was loosely timed to coincide with the release of a wee bundle I’ve put together for www.tentracks.co.uk which will be available in late November – more info on that will be coming soon. The artwork was specially commissioned from Eleanor Meredith 

To mark the 50th issue of The Skinny, music columnists Milo McLaughlin and Sean Michaels got on the blower (well, Skype) for a transatlantic chinwag about the Scottish music scene and how it’s all changed since the magazine began in 2005.

The Easy Gramophone was a monthly column written by Sean Michaels which ran in The Skinny from 2006 to early 2008. As the title suggests it was intended as a companion to his hugely popular mp3 blog Said The Gramophone – deemed one of Time Magazine’s 25 best blogs this year.

For each column Sean handpicked a selection of tracks he loved which were available free to download somewhere on the net. In line with The Skinny’s eclectic, cutting-edge music coverage, these were songs from a dizzying array of styles, based on their quality rather than any fixed genre – and he was one of the first people in the UK to write about bands such as Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear, Beirut and Final Fantasy. When Michaels returned to his home city of Montreal, he passed on the baton to me, and the column morphed into I Hear a New World, with an accompanying podcast of ‘original and innovative songs from Scotland and beyond’. This included such cult heroes as Bonnie Prince Billy, Jeffrey Lewis, James Yorkston and Herman Dune as well as established and underground local acts such as Errors, eagleowl, King Creosote, The Pictish Trail, The Phantom Band, and The Japanese War Effort.

Now that he has the perspective of time and distance, I ask Sean how he feels about the Scottish music scene and how he sees his development since those formative issues of The Skinny. From where he’s standing, the east coast has seen the biggest change. “The thing that I sorrowfully tell people when they ask about music in Scotland is that between the time I arrived to when I left, I didn’t discover a single great Edinburgh band that I hadn’t heard before I arrived. It gives me great pleasure and envy that after I left things have really come out of the woodwork, and it feels like it’s reached some kind of velocity.”

Despite his physical distance, Michaels continues to scour the web in search of great Scottish acts, having featured some of the new breed of Edinburgh artists such as Withered Hand and Meursault on his blog, even before many local commentators had caught on to their undoubted charms. However, whilst he believes that it’s important to be supportive of Scottish artists, it can also be counterproductive to lavish blanket praise based on geography alone.

Some have suggested that this is at risk of happening with the recent explosion of predominantly positive coverage in the local blogosphere, but Sean is optimistic about the internal barometer of the genuine Scottish music fan. “Scots are great musicians, it’s a great place for music, and they also don’t put up with crap. In the case of bands like Uncle John & Whitelock people were responding to something that was very good, and that’s the crucial element.”

The ethos Michaels has brought to both the Said the Gramophone blog and the Easy Gramophone column is perfectly simple – to celebrate the magical synchronicity that leads an artist or band to come up with that one, amazing, addictive, essential tune. “Your column led on from mine, where you’re highlighting great songs. And that’s what I’ve done with Said The Gramophone all this time – I think you can be enthusiastic much more honestly when you don’t need to say ‘this band is clearly the greatest band ever’ or ‘this album is a masterpiece’. Our small aspiration is to everyday give you three minutes that are wonderful.”

With the prodigious Sufjan Stevens recently questioning what the point of a song actually is, I ask Michaels if he too ever gets tired of the hunt for the next hidden gem. “Sometimes you have to sit down at your computer, take off your ears, and knock them against the desk and ask ‘how are you feeling today?’” Nothing hones that internal barometer better than a bit of perspective. “Sometimes you feel like hearing that hot new CD that came in the post or that new mp3 you downloaded from that cutting edge blog, and sometimes you’re like, ‘okay, time to throw on the Neil Young; time to throw on the Bach.’ Reminding yourself and other people about great old songs is a really nice thing to do – I mean it’s what we do with friends, right?”

Sean Michaels writes for The Guardian, blogs at www.saidthegramophone.com and is currently starting work on his second novel.

The I Hear a New World channel – featuring tracks from Withered Hand, Gummi Bako, Meursault and Ambulances – is launched on Ten Tracks in November – in the meantime check out the podcasts.

Some other stuff I’ve written for The Skinny recently:

• Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard @ Cabaret Voltaire, 31 Aug
• Retreat! @ Bristo Hall, 16 Aug
• Withered Hand – You’re Not Alone
• Meursault – Nothing Broke EP