News

The Alchemeon out-takes and blorts have finally been repaired amd re-uploaded to the appropriate page on our website. This bizarre collection of comical absurdities also has a presence on SoundCloud.

We are currently engaged in re-mastering the old recordings of Alchemeon from deep within the Wud Records vaults. These out-takes are simply a comedy taster of some truly epic progressive rock that all Alchemeon fans will be delighted to hear again, and a celebration of the forthcoming releases.

We are fairly confident of being able to upload the missing recordings in the coming days. Following on from the mastering process they are sounding even better than ever! These tracks have not been heard since our website’s previous mp3 player, the Flash-based Flamplayer, fell into terminal disrepair and we were forced to seek an alternative solution.

Initially the tracks will only be available to listen to on SoundCloud. However, we plan to release them for download later this year on Bandcamp as well, once we have the artwork for the albums finalised.

Any further updates regarding the Alchemeon recordings will be posted in our News service and on Twitter.

Alchemeon were a fantastic band whose existence was far too short. We are fortunate to be able to bring you the incredible pieces of music they crafted a decade ago with a new polish to them.

If you would like to hear the celebratory out-takes and blorts by Alchemeon here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

Should you prefer to listen over at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

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 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 July 2018 into one agreed playlist and published it at the end of the month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the time 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.

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 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 it too. At the very least you might end up making an indie musician’s day.

There is a vast amount of great music on SoundCloud if you have the time and inclination to filter through it. If you happen to be looking out for some great new music, we’ve already done that filtering for you!

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, 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 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.

Are you a member of SoundCloud? We always follow back if you have your own tracks and we always listen eventually, even if it takes a few weeks. So if you would like the opportunity of a bit of free publicity you could follow Wud Records on SoundCloud. It’s even free to join with a basic membership!

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 artiste.

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.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of July 2018 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 our previous months’ musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page, and remember that we publish a new playlist full of undiscovered gems every month!

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for July 2018 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 greater weight to likes and reposts than it does to comments and plays.

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 are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our August 2018 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during July 2018 by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms. SoundCloud‘s popularity seems to be waning following a rather uncertain time for the company, a downgrade in sound quality across the entire platform, a downgrade in customer service standards and the emergence of new blockchain-based music streaming platforms such as Musicoin.

Musicoin is currently offering what we believe is the best pay-per-stream deal on the internet and a far more credible deal than any of the established industry players.

The Musicoin currency itself is a rather turbulent form of currency and at present somewhat complex as well, so we will all have to see how these new Crypto services pan out in the coming months and years. However, we believe that these platforms may be the way ahead for many independent musicians and we definitely recommend trying them out and seeing which ones work best for you.

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

Congratulations to Dark Company, whose track Medicines from their amazing 1992 Rage In Heaven album, has topped our chart again. Medicines has been a massive track for Dark Company and for us all at Wud Records and is now available to be heard at Musicoin, as well as being downloadable from Bandcamp.

Also appearing on the July 2018 chart we see the fabulous Clonk!, whose only three tracks we have at present all appeared together in the same chart for the very first time. Wud and Now both saw one of their tracks hitting the charts in July 2018, but none of our other acts did.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in July 2018, 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 News service or homepage.

After just over two years, Dark Company have made a long-awaited return to the studio. It’s the first time they have done any significant recording work since Pete passed away just over two years ago. Since then we have all moved ourselves and our families and lives to another country, built a new studio, and everything is very different. Yet, somehow… the same. The energy, the focus, the sound, the feel. Sometimes things can stay the seem even when the odds seem overlwhelming.

The fact that this has happened at all seems like something of a miracle. It’s one thing to say, after the death of a close comrade following many years of successful creativity, “Oh yes, we’ll do some more of this one day”. It’s something completely different to actually do it.

The parts of the songs that have been recorded are some of the last ones that Dark Company were making before Pete’s passing. There was at least a triple-CD album in the making, provisionally titled A for Acronym. We have been developing those initial ideas with George, Zak, Maxx, Sven, Josh, and new addition Barry. Together we have developed a number of the demos that formed the ‘rock’ CD into alpha versions.

“It’s kinda weird, making music with a dead dude,” mused George during one session. All the raw sound from Pete’s vocal recordings remains on the machinery, including his comments and remarks and laughing and so on. It’s a bit creepy and sad in a way, yet his spirit is there with us as we work. His old chair from the uk studio is still there in our new studio and maybe his spirit sits there listening, giving encouragement or criticism. We tend to feel that he approves of our efforts.

For the time being we will not be releasing any of this new material until more of Dark Company’s earlier works have been completed and released. We are waiting on some repairs and some more acoustic treatment work in our studio before embarking along that particular journey. Of course, we will keep all of Dark Company‘s fans up to date in our News service and in our Twitter feed.

Dark Company have their own Twitter, which you can follow by clicking here. They are not the most prolific of tweeters, but like another of our bands, Flicker, they tend to show up at least once a month.

If you would like to hear any of Dark Company’s previous works, clicking here will take you to their homepage at Wud Records, where all of their albums (finished or work-in-progress) are arranged chronologically down the left-hand side of the page.

The Archives Sampler playlist has been refreshed following the latest addition to our Archives section, the mighty Dayglow. We felt it was about time as the Archives Sampler playlist has remained the same since its creation, more-or-less, apart from the occasional new addition when a new act was unearthed and uploaded.

As and when we upload new Archive material, we shall let you know in our News service and on Twitter. Should you happen to be in possession of any music from any of the acts mentioned on the Archives page, or any of the music from the bands we are already honouring, please contact archive@wudrecords.co.uk and we’ll try to work something out.

These are the fantastic tracks that used to be in the Archives Sampler playlist and which have now been replaced. Please, do give them a click and enjoy listening to these fantastic songs!

Andromeda — Nothingtime TV
The Chillun — Your Fault Not Mine
Goodstaff — Billie Holiday
Murdock — Box Shots
Prism — Amnesty
Pyg — Let’s Dance (Dulcimer Mix)
Recluse — We All Survive
Search Party — One Direction
Spacegoats — Castrol GTX Agogo
Watershed — Living in the Gap
Stephen Yates — Gorilla Tango

We have now selected different tracks from all of these artists as represention (for the time being) in the Archives Sampler playlist. We hope you enjoy our new selections as well.

The purpose of the Wud Records Archives is to pay some love and respect to the great bands that we have known, bands which are no longer heard any more. It’s always a shame when an original band folds and the songs you came to love are simply no longer heard.

Please note that the copyright of all of the Archive material is held by the respective writers and owners of the intellectual property of the songs and not ourselves. We will never make them download-enabled without permission from the copyright owners. These works are published here for posterity, historical reasons and so that everyone can enjoy this fantastic music that we have loved so much.

We very much hope that you will enjoy hearing these tracks too. All the band names and tracks above are clickable should you want to further investigate these amazing acts of days gone by.

If you would like to hear the updated Archives Sampler playlist here at Wud Records, clicking here will take you to the Archives homepage where it is the embedded player.

If you prefer to listen over at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

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 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 June 2018 into one agreed playlist and published it at the end of the month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the time 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.

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 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 it too. At the very least you might end up making an indie musician’s day.

There is a vast amount of great music on SoundCloud if you have the time and inclination to filter through it. If you happen to be looking out for some great new music, we’ve already done that filtering for you!

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, 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 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.

Are you a member of SoundCloud? We always follow back if you have your own tracks and we always listen eventually, even if it takes a few weeks. So if you would like the opportunity of a bit of free publicity you could follow Wud Records on SoundCloud. It’s even free to join with a basic membership!

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 artiste.

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.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of June 2018 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 our previous months’ musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page, and remember that we publish a new playlist full of undiscovered gems every month!