News

Alchemeon Live In Session Spring 2009 has been repaired, remastered and re-released. You can download it from Bandcamp and you can enjoy hearing it right here at the Wud Records website. You can also listen to it at SoundCloud, where we will be releasing the tracks one at a time over the course of several days.

Alchemeon Live In Session Spring 2009 was recorded between the end of February and the middle of April 2009 at the Sound Gallery in Exeter.

Everything is quite raw and lo-fi because it was all salvaged from cassette. The audio has been massively repaired and the ghastly cassette hum has been reduced considerably. After languishing in our vaults waiting for repair for some time following the demise of the previous in-site music player, we mastered the audio files and can now re-release them.

The cover illustration was created by Pok just a few days ago. We decided upon a more green and pink colour scheme for Spring, instead of Winter‘s colder blue and pale yellow, the colour of Pok‘s Ibanez Roadstar guitar Marsha.

There are all kinds of details we love in the cover art. Pok‘s fingers on the guitar, probably playing Am11 in Born (on the word “began”, or sometimes “belong”), the same chord that starts the song We Know You Well, such as the splendid version on Pok‘s Anthology album. George’s bare feet. He nearly always played with bare feet. The way Jim looks so like Jim. There’s no mistaking him. Iggy’s whizzy stick. All the wires. Wonderful!

The most observant of you will have noticed that the Winter cover art was also uploaded, just a few days after the album’s re-release on Bandcamp last week. The Alchemeon Live In Session Winter 2008-09 cover illustration is even newer. We love all the details of that drawing as well. The snow. Pok all set up and ready to play and seen through the window. Iggy carrying his percussion and cymbals and his big black motorbike. Jim‘s old sporty Hyundai car and his enormous collection of instruments. It captures the zeitgeist of those recordings beautifully.

There are a few more recordings of Alchemeon stored in our machines and they remain largely untreated. These are alternative versions of the songs we have released. They were recorded during the various Alchemeon live sessions. If you are particularly interested in adding any of these recordings to your collection, please get in touch by emailing info@wudrecords.co.uk and we will try to work something out for you.

Aside from that, as far as we can tell, that may be it for Alchemeon – unless any very surprising things occur in the future. Never say never. But it seems very unlikely.

To hear a continuation, further development and alternative versions of some of Alchemeon’s wonderful songs, you can check out Pok’s Anthology album by clicking here. Most of the Alchemeon songs are either finished and available to be enjoyed, or are in the works. All announcements regarding new releases will be made in our News service and on the Wud Records Twitter, so please keep a close eye on those pages.

To download Alchemeon Live In Session Spring 2009 from Bandcamp, please click here.

To listen right here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would like to listen to Alchemeon Live In Session Spring 2009 at SoundCloud, please click here.

Please note that for technical and logisstical reasons, we will be releasing the tracks to SoundCloud gradually over time, so you may not find the entire playlist there for a couple of weeks.

The Anthology cover art for Pok’s wonderful and growing Anthology album has finally been finished and uploaded. The old temporary artwork that has been in use since the first track – The Lecher – was released way back in 2012 has finally been upgraded and replaced. We are all very pleased with the new design. What do you think?

The Anthology cover art features the wonderful photography of Claudie Ferri and Cliff Smith. The photographs show three different images of Pok across the ages.

Claudie took the two more recent photos of Pok, as he is in the present. These represent the Pok of today, performing and recording the songs on the Anthology album.

Cliff took the other Anthology cover art photo of Pok. You see him as a teenage minstrel standing near the sink in the attic room at the old Wud HQ in Grosvenor Place, Exeter. This photo represents the younger Pok, hard at work creating and composing the wonderful songs that go to make up the Anthology album.

We have not yet decided on the final formats of the release when Anthology is finished. Digital formats are fairly easy, and we tend to release finished songs as and when they are ready. For physical products we are looking at CDs – either a multi-CD album or several volumes, or both – as well as vinyl and cassette. These final format decisions will be made when the recorded material is more-or-less finished.

At the time of publishing this news report, there are 13 songs on the Anthology album and about 25 to 30 others in varying stages of completion in the Wud Records studios. We shall continue to work on these as and when we can, as real life and day jobs and so on allow.

At this very moment, the song Born is nearing mixdown stage. It needs just the velvet fingers and twiddlesome magic of Josh on keys to be recorded. Hopefully the finished song will be released in the next couple of weeks.

If you join our Bandcamp community you will know about new releases first. We publish all new info regarding new releases there to the community before anywhere else. You can click here to join.

We also announce updates right here in our News sevice and on Twitter very soon after. We defintely recommend you bookmark our News page and follow us on Twitter, which you can easily do by clicking here.

The range of musical genres on Anthology is impressively large and includes progressive rock, space rock, psychedelia, alternative rock, classic rock, heavy rock, acoustic, singer-songwriter, blues, instrumentals, protest songs, poetry and more. It’s a wonderful album and we hope you love it as much as we do.

If you would like to listen to or download Anthology by Pok from Bandcamp as it stands right now, please click here.

Alchemeon Live In Session Winter 2008-09 has been added to Bandcamp. The individual tracks, and indeed the whole album, are now yours to download, should you so wish.

The songs on Alchemeon Live In Session Winter 2008-09 have been arranged into the same order that they were played in Alchemeon‘s live set, even though the recordings were made on three separate dates – the 12th and 17th December 2008, and 13th January 2009. All of the songs were recorded at Depot X in Exeter.

If you have never come across Alchemeon before, they were a magnificent psychedelic progressive space rock quartet. The players were Pok the Bard on guitar and voice, Jim Iz on keyboards and voice, Iggy on drums and George on bass. All four are tremendous virtuoso musicians in their own right and Alchemeon was something of a supergroup.

A lot of their songs came from previous bands, such as the Spacegoats and Laughing Sun. The songs had developed and grown over the years from having been played by various players. Pok was a mainstay of both Laughing Sun and Spacegoats. George was a co-founder of the former and a rare stand-in of the latter. Jim was also an occasional Spacegoat. Iggy was new to the whole thing and, being an absolute master of his craft, fitted in with no trouble at all.

The name Alchemeon was devised by Jim. It is an amalgamation of the words ‘alchemy’ and ‘chameleon’. Chameleon also happens to be the name of a play written by Pok. It has been performed by various casts on numerous stages over many years.

At the time of publishing this, we are still waiting on the finished artwork to arrive. Sometimes these things can take a very, very long time. However, we thought it was still worthwhile adding Alchemeon Live In Session Winter 2008-09 to our downloadables at Bandcamp, even with temporary artwork.

Also at the time of publishing this, we are busy repairing and remastering Alchemeon‘s sessions from Spring 2009. We hope to be able to bring you these wonderful recordings in the next few days. Please keep an eye on our News service and Twitter for further updates.

Several of these songs have been recorded in our studios and appear on Pok’s Anthology album. Several more are in the works.

You can download Pok’s Anthology album as it stands right now from Bandcamp by clicking here. Please note that we will be adding more tracks to the album as and when they are finished.

You can also enjoy listening to Pok’s Anthology album right here at the Wud Records website simply by clicking here.

By joining our community at Bandcamp (click here to join!) you will hear about all our new releases before anyone else.

If you would like to download Alchemeon Live In Session Winter 2008-09 from Bandcamp, please click here.

If you would prefer to just listen, you can do so right here at the Wud Records website by clicking here.

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for August 2020 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist. Tracks have been arranged from one to ten according to their popularity and take into account plays, comments, likes and reposts.

The algorithm we use gives greatest weight to reposts, then likes and comments over plays. This is because when somebody reposts a track it gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan, which is always a tremendous help to creative souls.

Tracks published at Musicoin and Bandcamp have been omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because we feel these results require separate treatment. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our September 2020 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it, leave a comment, repost it and share it to your social media feeds!

Having said all of that, we are very dissatisfied with the service we recieve from SoundCloud. We have found an alternative service provider and are looking to start migrating all of our music to there in the near future. It’s going to be a massive job and one which we are not looking forward to doing very much.

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during August 2020 by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms.

A special mention needs to go to Atom Collector Records. Their service continues to help us achieve consistently and significantly better activity and new fans. If you have tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, Musicoin, Spotify, ReverbNation, dSound, dTube or Peertracks, you too could see considerable growth in activity. It’s even free to join. Just click here to go to their site.

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on Twitter who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes all our endeavours here seem worthwhile.

Congratulations to Alchemeon, whose psychedelic rock / progressive rock epic Born of Stars smashed the charts in August 2020. It was by far and away the most popular track on SoundCloud for the month. With Alchemeon‘s Spring collection being repaired and remastered at this very moment, this bodes well for its forthcoming re-release.

Flicker achieved the most tracks on the August 2020 chart. All four of them come from Flicker’s wonderful 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

Their second album, HappySad, is under construction and you can listen to it as it stands right now by clicking here. Several more tracks are likely to be released in the coming weeks and months, so please keep an eye and an ear on our News service and Twitter.

Born of Stars was not the only psychedelic progressive rock epic to feature in this month’s chart. The beautiful Amanita Alice by Dark Company, a massive collective favourite of the Wud Records team, entered the chart for the first time at number three. Dark Company also had songs at number four (the eccentric One Heart with its incredible lyrics) and number six – the perennial favourite Medicines from their fabulous second album, Rage in Heaven.

The Ug Brothers were the only other act to make it into our latest chart, with two live lofi cassette salvage recordings. The Ugstrumental version of Paperchase from 1995 with its wonderful guitar, and Same Old Road Again from a session in 1986 were their two most popular tracks in August 2020, in what was another very good month for The Ug Brothers.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in August 2020, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen here at Wud Records, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, such as our Links collection or homepage.

A brand new playlist of all the favourite musical discoveries of the Wud Records team has been published at SoundCloud. All of the artists on it are amazing independent or unsigned artists who are making great music that simply aches to be heard.

These artists are not associated directly with Wud Records in any way. We simply accumulated songs that we all liked during August 2020 into one agreed playlist and published it on the first day of the next month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the exact moment of publishing, starting with the fewest. Tracks that are early in playlists tend to receive more plays than later tracks, and we feel that the ones with fewer plays need the best chance of exposure.

If you find some new favourites on there, why not shout about them on social media as well? We are sure the artistes responsible for creating the music will welcome such word-of-mouth exposure and your friends and followers would probably love to enjoy hearing the music too. At the very least you might end up making an independent musician’s day.

Can you complete the challenge of listening to every track?! If you manage it, tell us, tell some of the music makers involved, and tell the world on social media how you feel about what you heard. Everyone concerned would love to hear your thoughts.

If you are one of the bands from which we recently liked, shared or tweeted a track at SoundCloud, there is a chance that one of your tracks might be on this new playlist.

Towards the bottom of the page is a list of featured artists and tracks. The artist name is clickable and links to an external website where you can find out, hear and see more of the artist in question.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, or if we got something a bit wrong, please send an email to info@wudrecords.co.uk so we can fix it for you. Generally we try to use the artist’s own site where possible. We also tend to link to something a bit more future-proof than “Listen to our latest single!” as we hope these playlists will be around for a long time to come. We only linked to SoundCloud as a last resort when we were unable to find anything else, as users can already click the track and go to the artist’s SoundCloud page for themselves.

We hope that a lot more people will find and listen to the wonderful songs on this new playlist of musical discoveries. Each and every track has something that we felt was special or interesting in some way. In many cases it was a tough job to choose just one track from an artist.

The playlist is very eclectic, so there is probably something on there to suit every taste. If the track you are listening to isn’t quite doing it for you, skip to the next one and perhaps that will please your ears more. Sometimes similar tracks end up next to each other, and sometimes extremely different tracks do, so we recommend you just try it for yourself.

In addition to the latest compilation being our pinned tweet on Twitter, every week on Twitter we boost a previous Musical Discoveries playlist and a featured track from that playlist. The featured track is chosen by the Wud Records team and is one which is a real favourite amongst us.

We also encourage people to vote for the next featured track on Twitter. These votes are added to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily. Sometimes we have a day off, but we tweet most days.

All of the featured tracks can be found on a separate page at our website by clicking here, or on SoundCloud by clicking here.

If you would like the opportunity to be included in a future compilation, first you need to follow us on SoundCloud so we can follow you back. You can even enjoy hearing some of the music by our fabulous bands whilst you’re there. :)

We listen to everyone we follow at SoundCloud on a first-in-first-out basis. It may take a few weeks for us to reach the newest additions. We always have a massive amount of music to listen to, so please be patient and eventually you will be heard.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of August 2020 Musical Discoveries over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To enjoy this new playlist of great music here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would like easy access to all of the previous musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page. Remember that we publish a new playlist absolutely full of largely undiscovered musical treasures every month and who knows – one might even include you!

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for July 2020 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist. Tracks have been arranged from one to ten according to their popularity and take into account plays, comments, likes and reposts.

The algorithm we use gives greatest weight to reposts, then likes and comments over plays. This is because when somebody reposts a track it gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan, which is always a tremendous help to creative souls.

Tracks published at Musicoin and Bandcamp have been omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because we feel these results require separate treatment. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our August 2020 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it, leave a comment, repost it and share it to your social media feeds!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during July 2020 by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms.

A special mention needs to go to Atom Collector Records. Their service continues to help us achieve consistently and significantly better activity and new fans. If you have tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, Musicoin, Spotify, ReverbNation, dSound, dTube or Peertracks, you too could see considerable growth in activity. It’s even free to join. Just click here to go to their site.

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on Twitter who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes all our endeavours here seem worthwhile.

Congratulations to Flicker, who dominated our July 2020 chart with four entries, including the top three.

Welcome to the Family returned to the top of the chart having enjoyed a surge of popularity, and last month’s chart topper Oily Road Hideaway fell to number two. Blown Away, a perennially popular and particularly splendid rock instrumental, rose to the number three position, while the dark and dystopian Or Maybe Not…? landed at number six.

All four tracks come from Flicker’s wonderful 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

Their second album, HappySad, is under construction and you can listen to it as it stands right now by clicking here. Several more tracks are likely to be released in the coming weeks and months, so please keep an eye and an ear on our News service and Twitter.

July 2020 was an excellent month for The Ug Brothers, who occupy three of the positions, with several more tracks hovering just below the top ten. There are raw live lofi instrumental bootlegs (Ugstrumentals) of Paperchase and Drowning In Your Eyes, as well as another version of Drowning In Your Eyes with vocals from the original 1986 incarnation of The Ug Brothers.

Also appearing on the latest chart is the recently repaired Born Of Stars by Alchemeon, a live and unplugged version of Aeroplane by Dr Watson (the Flicker version of Aeroplane is much more widely known) and Jigsaw, the first track from Alien Heat‘s Red Rug Demo.

A lot of activity has been coming from new sources and new fans, which is obviously very pleasing for us all. Some very surprising tracks have suddenly become very popular!

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in July 2020, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen here at Wud Records, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, such as our Links collection or homepage.