WELCOME TO THE NEW LOOK SHARKBATTER.com

BLOGGER: shark batter records
LOCATION: scottish borders & brooklyn, new york
WEBSITE: sharkbatter.com
MYSPACE: myspace.com/sharkbatterrecords

It's still a work in progress, as I'm writing this, but for your delight and wonderment we now present to you, dear friends, the new look sharkbatter.com. I particularly like the fact that the jukebox carries on playing while you explore the site.

2008 has been a busy year for the label. We had six releases in the space of six months by: The Stone Ghost Collective, The Stark Palace, Vacuum Spasm Babies and Kono Michi. We got quite a bit of UK radio play for each of those. Vic Galloway has played all four acts on his Radio 1 in Scotland show and Tom Robinson and Nemone at BBC 6Music have been keen supporters of the label. Mr Robinson has even been using The Stark Palace's "CroMagnon Man" as an "audio bed" on his Introducing... show, after the band were invited to record a session in the hub.

With the release of Kono Michi's Living Room Disappearance EP we were invited into the refined chambers of Radio 3, in our fanciest tuxes and evening frocks (metaphorically speaking) when Lopa Kothari played "When I Don't Come Back" on her World on 3 show. Yum!

Plans are afoot for a couple of more releases before the year's out. Gigs too: Kono Michi will be playing her first solo UK dates from the end of November and there should be a few Vacuum Spasm Babies shows too in the months ahead.

roger (the stark palace)

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF FLAGWOMAN

BLOGGER: paul vickers
LOCATION: edinburgh
PAUL'S BANDS: paul vickers and the leg, dawn of the replicants
LABEL: sl records

VACUUM SPASM BLOG June 08

BLOGGER: charles s bravo
LOCATION: scottish borders
BAND: vacuum spasm babies
LABEL: shark batter records

Drummer Wanted?

This week I have been in Liverpool, London and Glasgow for work, so not a lot of time or energy for VSB related maters, although I find sleep deprivation and the hypnotic flash of the passing countryside from a train window a great catalysts for the creative process.

Liverpool is a brilliant city to visit, and we’re still hugely impressed that two presenters at BBC Radio Merseyside have played a track each from our Thin Man E.P. Dave Monks does a show called ‘The Pool’ on a Sunday night where he plays a lot of local bands (and us) and that’s followed on by their alternative music show ‘Pure Musical Sensations’ with Roger Hill. Liverpool has been voted England's most musical city in a national campaign set up by the Arts Council and part of that has to be down to the local BBC station getting behind new music.

London still stinks..

Although the E.P has been out for a while now, we’re still finding great reviews like this from Penny Black Music popping up, which is just brilliant.

http://www.pennyblackmusic.co.uk/MagSitePages/Review.aspx?id=5913

Stoneghost Mike is in New York recoding with Michi Wiancko for their Mike & Michi project, and developing the interests of the Sharkbatter label over there. Roger Simian is in Orkney after working hard to get the Kimo Michi E.P on the radio and in the press, so it’s a quiet time for Vacuum Spasm Babies.

We’re taking this opportunity to plan how we’re going to manage to play the album plus some of the new tracks we’re working on live. I’m hugely proud of the way the album sounds. It’s down to my brothers’ ability to manipulate me and our recording technology to produce something that’s not too awful or offensive to the ear. The main difficulty is that although we’ve got what I think are some great songs, when it comes down to it I’m a terrible musician and at best can only just get by as a singer. Having been sacked from one band and not played in front of anyone for about 15 years, we’re going to need some very fine people playing live with us.

So we’re lucky (and honoured) that Roger Simian and Cameron Jack (otherwise known as Sharkbatter Records stars The Stark Palace) are going to help out. Hopefully then between us we can knock a set together, play some gigs and get the money together for our next release. Somewhere in the contract there’s a line that says something about Vacuum Spasm Babies returning the favour, I imagine playing Stark Palace songs live would a riot and in terms of things to do before I’m 40 comes in quite near the top, just after arranging a lock-in with Lords Summerisle & Byron, Mrs Bravo and me.

Drummer wanted? It looks like this. Our album was never meant to be played live. I’m 35 and live in a house in the country, I’ve got responsibilities and have no business playing on a stage, and if previous experience has anything to go by, very little chance of facing an audience without the best part of a bottle of reasonably good red wine inside me. I’m not set up for that kind of trauma. But if we need to do it, we’ll do it. So as we get the four of us into a soundproofed room and start to hammer guitars in time with the drum tracks lifted off the album, hopefully it will all come together.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF FLAGWOMAN

BLOGGER: paul vickers
LOCATION: edinburgh
PAUL'S BANDS: paul vickers and the leg, dawn of the replicants
LABEL: sl records

THE ADMIRAL'S JUNKBOX May 08

BLOGGER: cameron jack
LOCATION: scottish borders
BAND: the stark palace
LABEL: shark batter records

I've noticed (courtesy of The Times obituary column) that this past few weeks has seen the demise of two pioneers of electronic music.

Tristram Cary (son of novelist Joyce Cary) helped develop the VCS3 synthesizer, which was used on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon and by Brian Eno, amongst many others. It was seen as the only serious competitor to the better known Moog. He also scored the first episode of Dr. Who to feature the Daleks,The Dead Planet, and contributed to further episodes and series, including The Daleks Masterplan. His music, along with that of Delia Derbyshire and the rest of the B.B.C. Radiophonic Workshop more than made up for any shortcomings in the prop department!

Also the recently departed Bebe Barron, who is credited, along with her husband Louis with composing the first ever music on tape. I was impressed to discover that they wrote the score for Forbidden Planet, the first for Hollywood to be completely electronic. I wonder what Shakespeare would have made of it! They had previously set up their own studio in Greenwich Village, where they would frequently record for the likes of Henry Miller, Tennessee Williams and Aldous Huxley, and were approached by M.G.M. after their production chief discovered them by chance at a Beatnik club.

You can find out more about Tristram Cary at tristramcary.com, and Bebe Barron at, wait for it, wikipedia, amongst many others whose addresses are too convoluted to reproduce here!

VACUUM SPASM BLOG May 08

BLOGGER: charles s bravo
LOCATION: scottish borders
BAND: vacuum spasm babies
LABEL: shark batter records

"Blimey Charlie!" my brother in rock Malcolm said to me as I brought him the news that within 24 hours the title track from our new E.P. had been played on BBC Radio 1 and had a review in The List. ‘Punch in the Face’ is taken from The Thin Man E.P - Vacuum Spasm Babies four track release from our friends at Shark Batter Records, home of The Stark Palace, The Stone Ghost Collective and Mike and Michi amongst others.

So that means that Vacuum Spasm Babies have been played on the radio, and had a mention in the press. Even if nothing else happens, I’m happy with that. The Radio 1 play came from Vic Galloway on his show he does from Scotland. I’ve known Vic a while, he was a plugger for Human Condition records in Edinburgh and in a band called Huckleberry, so I played his records when I did a new music show for Radio Borders. We’re telling people South of the border that The List is the equivalent of Time Out for Glasgow and Edinburgh.

We’ve made a video for this single release. Although, it’s probably going to take some sort of prize for being the cheapest, shortest and fastest put together video on youtube this week. The song is only just over a minute anyway, and the video is made of stills of scribbles done in an afternoon, photographed, loaded into some kind of free movie software and made to fit around the song.



This week I’m reading The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, watching the Spaced box set, drinking cinzano on ice and staying clear of the new Coldplay single.

KONO MICHI BLOG April 2008

BLOGGER: kono michi
LOCATION: brooklyn, new york (currently on tour)
MICHI's MUSIC: kono michi
LABEL: shark batter records
WEBSITE: myspace.com/konomichi

Greetings from the window seat of an airplane somewhere over Utah, heading to San Francisco from Washington D.C. I’m with ECCO and all 17 of us just spent a week in Virginia, where Jan Lodal, a former Bill Clinton aide, generously gave us the keys to his vacation property, a beautiful and secluded place surrounded by miles and miles of farmland. He and his wife are big music and art fans and have offered to help out us starving musicians. Lucky for us, they’ve given us an open invitation to the “farm” so about once a year we all get to leave our hectic lives and live like a bunch of rich kids for a few days and run amok.



Actually, we operate very well when left to our own devices… we really just turn into a bunch of hippies. We rehearsed for hours each day, cooked huge feasts, danced, discussed, drank…



Yesterday we drove from the farm to D.C. to play a house concert at Jan Lodals’ home. To an audience full of politicians, ambassadors, scientists and generally wealthy and powerful Democrats, we played Grieg, Biber, a Piazzola Tango, Bartok Divertimento, and my arrangement of La Follia. After the concert somebody referred to us as “rock stars of the classical world” which I of course considered the highest compliment. “Balls to the wall” is a term that was actually used on one of our rehearsals… by a girl!



That was last night, and today we’re flying to San Francisco where we give a concert tomorrow night.



2 days later… Our trip to San Francisco was tons of fun, and the concert went well. I had some friends and family in the audience, so they joined us and we stormed an Ethiopian restaurant on Haight Ashbury afterward where we all got drunk and ate with our hands (not because we were drunk).



It’s Monday and I’ve just arrived in Orange County from San Francisco, to my parents’ house where I will embark on 3 days of intense violin practicing and laying low with my family as I get ready for the concert I’ve been most excited about and terrified of for a few months.



I’ll be playing Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy and Zigeunerweisen with the Victoria Symphony in Texas on Saturday. Carmen is considered one of the most difficult pieces (technically speaking) in the violin repertoire, and somehow I managed to avoid learning it when I was a student, so I’m doing the nitty gritty work now. Now that I have most of the technical stuff down, it’s getting more and more fun since I get to channel my inner gypsy. I’m really looking forward to doing my laundry today.



Before this ECCO tour I had a couple of concerts with the LAPQ – one in Connecticut and one in Palm Springs (where we drove down streets with names like “Sammy Davis Jr. Blvd” and “Frank Sinatra Way”) Then I played 2 California concerts with a new music group called Antares. The program included Messaien’s Quartet For the End of Time, which is one of my all-time favorite compositions. Messaien wrote it in a concentration camp during WWII for the random instruments the people around him happened to have – violin, clarinet, cello, and piano. The piece is full off misery, struggle, pain, beauty, hope, and an eventual ascent to heaven which will leave your face red and tear-streaked whether you believe in heaven or not. When Thom Yorke announced that Messaien was one of Radiohead’s sources of artistic inspiration, and it made me love them even more.



After I return to New York from Texas, I have a few days to get ready for a week of concerts in Cleveland, and then come mid-May, I’m officially free for TWO MONTHS. I can’t wait! I’m dreaming of vacation. I’ve had tons of song ideas that I’ve been forced to neglect since being on the road, but I’ve been obsessed with the rhythm of bouncing balls and birdcalls. I have to try not to get too excited about that right now, though, and focus on the task at hand, which is to get my fucking fingers to move at the speed of light. Wish me luck!







michi wiancko