News

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for June 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 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 July 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 June 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 June 2020 chart with half of the entries. Flicker‘s wonderful catchy tune Oily Road Hideaway remained at the top of our charts. Oily Road Hideaway has been in and out of the charts since we first joined SoundCloud.

There is not just an extraordinary backstory to Oily Road Hideaway. It features two unison bass guitars, and steel and nylon string acoustic guitars, including one that had only two strings when it was recorded. Should you ever find an old broken neglected guitar with only the two top strings attached at a party, you can pick it up and play this tune on it.

Additionally there is an instrument called a string fish, which was built by Martyn from Pyg. It is a bit like two small hammered dulcimers joined together.

Oily Road Hideaway is the only track on Flicker‘s At Least 1000 Words album to have programmed, rather than played, drums.

This month’s chart features five pieces of music in total from Flicker’s 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.

Dark Company‘s work-in-progress Bad Habits album also had four songs in our latest chart. This is largely due to the recent upturn in activity on Atom Collector Records.

Most of the songs on Bad Habits are at beta stage so will not require such a massive amount of work to finish. How we envy those poor people with nothing to do during the lockdown, arranging their socks in alphabetical order and separating the oregano out of their pot of mixed herbs from sheer boredom.

The only other act to be represented in the chart for June 2020 was The Bastard Sons of Dennis. Their song The Furniture (part 1: overture) from their truly extraordinary creation The Furniture / Los Muebles is still in our latest chart.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in June 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 June 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, 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 and these votes add to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily.

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 June 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!

Minack by Flicker is a brand new release that has been added to Flicker’s HappySad album at Bandcamp. Minack is epic, fragile, beautiful, gothic, dystopian and extraordinary. It’s a truly mind-blowing piece of music that we have worked on for some time to make it sound right.

Composer George said that the seeds of this piece came to him whilst he was watching a rehearsal of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, at the Minack Theatre in Cornwall, in June 1999 – hence the title. He particularly remembers that the actor playing The Cobbler was a proper Cockney comedian and very, very funny. It was a beautiful warm summer morning and the sea was a slightly odd shade of turquoise.

Despite these apparently happy memories and associations, Minack is a heartbreakingly sad and occasionally bleak piece of music. That is because it is also about knowing that somebody one is becoming more and more deeply involved with will eventually become terribly bad news. All the evidence points to an investment of time leading to inevitable pain and suffering in the longer term, whilst wanting to enjoy the joy and the thrill of the ride in the short term, to mitigate the current unbearable pain and suffering of a slowly dying loved one.

A lot of different, conflicting, confused emotions in turmoil are expressed here, from the uplifting to outright despair. Minack is a piece about cognitive dissonance.

In its original form, Minack was created and played at a higher tempo, somewhere around 80 BPM. Due to a happy accident with a tape speed knob, a demo version was mixed much slower than the tempo at which it had been recorded. It also appeared in a rather mournful lower key. Somehow the slower tempo seemed to work so much better, despite the increased length.

The actual tempo for this version of Minack is 58.33333 BPM. It was recorded at 175 BPM in a 12/8 feel.

The key is E minor. The source of the piece is in the guitar in the left channel with all the harmonics in the chords. All of the guitar parts were recorded using the Ice Maiden.

Maxx played the bass parts on his Plank. It is tuned B-E-A-D and if you are able to listen to Minack loud on big speakers you will enjoy the power of the low end even more.

Sven played the drums using his vintage spangletastic Slingerland jazz kit along with his wooden piccolo Ludwig snare. He also programmed the drum parts in the places where Flicker felt programmed drums would work better than real drums.

George’s daughter’s glockenspiel (a bing-bing) adds a little twinkliness to the last notes in each phrase of the lead guitar lines towards the end of the piece.

Every single sonic element of this track required a great deal of precision, patience and effort to sculpt into the right shape.

As you can imagine, it is a great relief to finally finish and release another Flicker track. So far each of the three tracks have taken four years to release. At this rate it will take another 64 years to finish the album. We are fairly confident of being able to speed that up a little!

We shall of course let Flicker fans know of any further releases through our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to download Minack from Bandcamp, or just listen, you can do so by clicking here.

To download or listen to the entire HappySad album from Bandcamp as it stand right now, please click here.

Should you decide you’d like to listen to HappySad by Flicker here at the Wud Records website, please click here instead.

Dedicated to the loving memory of Susannah Rowe 22/2/1980 – 20/5/2020. RIP.

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for May 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 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 June 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 May 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. 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.

It must be said that May 2020 was a terrific month for Wud Records at SoundCloud, with very little separating the top 15 or 20 tracks. A like here, a repost there, a couple more plays elsewhere and the shape of the May 2020 chart could have been very different. The Ug Brothers, The Subterraineans and Dr Watson were all unlucky to have missed out.

Congratulations to Flicker, whose tune Oily Road Hideaway reached the top of our charts for the first time. Oily Road Hideaway has been in and out of the charts since we first joined SoundCloud.

There is not just an extraordinary backstory to Oily Road Hideaway. It features two unison bass guitars, and steel and nylon string acoustic guitars, including one that had only two strings when it was recorded. Should you ever find an old broken neglected guitar with only the two top strings attached at a party, you can pick it up and play this tune on it.

Additionally there is an instrument called a string fish, which was built by Martyn from Pyg. It is a bit like two small hammered dulcimers joined together.

Oily Road Hideaway is the only track on Flicker‘s At Least 1000 Words album to have programmed, rather than played, drums.

This month’s chart features four pieces of music in total from Flicker’s 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.

Dark Company‘s work-in-progress Bad Habits album also had four songs in our latest chart. This is largely due to the recent upturn in activity on Atom Collector Records.

Most of the songs on Bad Habits are at beta stage so will not require such a massive amount of work to finish. How we envy those poor people with nothing to do, arranging their socks in alphabetical order and separating the oregano out of their pot of mixed herbs from sheer boredom.

There was also an appearance for Mister Dream, from Dark Company‘s Alien Heat album. Alien Heat will be the next Dark Company album we shall finish and release, and this will be prioritised in the coming weeks.

The only other act to be represented in the chart for May 2020 was The Bastard Sons of Dennis. Their song The Furniture (part 1: overture) from their truly extraordinary creation The Furniture / Los Muebles is still in our latest chart.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in May 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 May 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, 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.

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 and these votes add to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily.

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 May 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!

Wud Records has a new Instagram account! You can follow us on Instagram by clicking on this link: https://www.instagram.com/wudrecords/

Instagram posts are likely to be somewhat random in their nature. There will be all manner of old photos of our bands and various wudpeople. We will even add new photos as well. There will be occasional artworks and even short films. There is a lot of material to choose from!

A great majority of our bands’ photos live in various gallery pages that belong to the different bands. We intend to include images from our many wonderful Archive bands. Instagram will allow us to mix them all together, like a big glorious one-pot stew.

As we only joined Instagram very recently, there are only fifteen posts to see right now.

We hope you will join us on this new epic pictorial journey. We aim to add more posts at least twice every week. Additions may occur more frequently, with twice weekly being the minimum.

In other news, there has been plenty of studio action during the rockdown. Progress has been made to songs by Dark Company, Flicker, The Bastard Sons of Dennis, Pok the Bard and some of our Archive bands as well.

This all adds up to mean that there will be new music for you to enjoy coming soon! We shall be announcing this in our News service and on Twitter.