News

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 March 2020 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.

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. 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 March 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!

Silver Ships on the Sea by Pok the Bard has been released to coincide with the Spring Equinox 2020. It has been added to Pok’s Anthology album.

Silver Ships on the Sea was composed by Pok in the summer of 1984. It is a wonderful whimsical wistful tale with a drop-D in the guitar. ‘Drower tuning’.

We all loved this extraordinary song from the very first hearing and are extremely happy to be able to finally release this version. We feel it is both authentic to the original, as well as capturing the full spectrum of sounds as imagined and conceived back in the 80s. We invite the listener to feel the closeness of the festival crowd, and sense the dry ice and lighting on stage as the performers writhe and invoke under the moon.

What started out as a pretty little acoustic number about the Elves leaving Middle Earth turned into the most uncompromisingly relentless piece of hardcore psychedlia one could possibly imagine.

We had two attempts at recording the sea at Jacob’s Ladder beach in Sidmouth, but sadly both were thwarted. Firstly by strong winds which rendered the recordings horrible. The second visit was thwarted by somebody’s wretched dog, which barked and barked and barked for the entire time that we were there. It was unbelievable. It’s probably still barking now. Eventually we downloaded somebody else’s recording of the sea. It was a shame but it did the job. We had always imagined the flotilla of silvery elven boats waiting at the water’s edge at Jacob’s Ladder beach.

Originally the acoustic guitars were played on a borrowed Ovation-style instrument, but due to technical reasons we had to re-record them all. The re-recorded acoustic guitar was performed by Pok on his Tanglewood. There is some video footage of the recording which we hope to publish someday.

In amongst all of the layers of sound are two bass guitars and a cello, which contribute a lot to the atmosphere of the groaning of wooden planks meeting the tides and the rattles ond clanks of the rigging on an old ship. Maxx’s cello has a delightfully ‘wooden’ sound.

One of the elements in this recording that we especially like is the brutally fierce bass drum. It sounds as if a hortator is commanding the galley slaves, chained to their oars, to speed up, slow down or maintain a constant tempo. The numerous tempo changes and big open spaces made this song a fascinating technical challenge to engineer.

There remain a number of Pok’s great works in our machines, in varying stages of finalistion. We hope to finish more in the coming weeks. We shall inform Pok‘s fans of any such developments via our News service and on Twitter.

Silver Ships on the Sea is one of Pok‘s personal favourites from the growing Anthology collection. It is our deepest hope that you, the listener, will feel it and love it the way we do. Play loud through big speakers if you can!

If you would like to download or listen to Silver Ships on the Sea by Pok at Bandcamp, please click here.

If you would like to download or listen to the entire Anthology album by Pok, as it stands at present, please click here.

All of the songs on Pok’s Anthology album can be enjoyed right here at the Wud Records website by clicking here.

Scratchings by Pyg, an old recording from Devon’s finest exponents of caustic folk, has been added to the Wud Records Archives. Scratchings is a live EP from 1998. It consists of four songs and was recorded on a farm in rural Devonshire.

Scratchings is a reasonably accurate snapshot of how the band were sounding in the spring of 1998. Their subsequent studio recordings, Tracks (1999) and Gruntings (2001) were far more refined than the raw raucous joyful noise Pyg created on this live recording.

In Scratchings, the band are sounding tight, rehearsed and slick, with Martin’s vocal being particularly good. Malcolm’s guitar growls away merrily in the background. The rhythm section is strong and solid. Martin and Malcolm were the songwriting powerhouse behind Pyg that made their material so wonderful.

Steve, Pyg‘s fiddle virtuoso, left the band a couple of months after the recording and we believe he returned to his native Scottish highlands. The photo used for the cover of the EP was taken after he had already left, so he is not present. Instead, a plastic pig and a pig mask were used.

We hope you enjoy this old recording of Scratchings by Pyg. The guitar at the start of Amerikay was distorted in a rather nasty way. We cleaned it up from how it was on the cassette. Hopefully you will be able to listen beyond the intro into the rest of the song, which was a real favourite among Pyg fans.

We recently inserted a lot of old Pyg recordings into the studio machinery with a view to releasing some of the best bits. We shall let fans of Pyg know about these future releases via our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to listen to Scratchings by Pyg on the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you prefer to listen to Scratchings by Pyg on SoundCloud, please click here instead.

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for February 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.

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 March 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 feed!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during February 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.

Congratulations to The Bastard Sons of Dennis. Their song The Furniture (part 1: overture) from their truly extraordinary creation The Furniture/Los Muebles returned to the top of our latest chart. The gruesome twosome had two more songs in our top ten, with Good Times and Sometimes charting at positions eight and nine respectively.

The rest of the chart was dominated by Flicker and six tracks from their wonderful 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

The ever-poular Medicines by Dark Company, from their 1993 album Rage In Heaven, returned to number two in our chart. No other act was included in the top ten for February 2020.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in February 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 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 February 2020 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.

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. 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 February 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!

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for January 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.

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 February 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 feed!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during January 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.

Congratulations to The Bastard Sons of Dennis, who occupied the top three chart positions in January 2020. Their acoustic progressive rock epic Sometimes was our most popular SoundCloud track last month. December’s top track, the acoustic funk progrock masterpiece Good Times dropped to number three and their song The Furniture (part 1: overture) from their truly extraordinary creation The Furniture/Los Muebles stayed at number two.

The remaining places were taken by Flicker with two tracks, Dark Company with four and Wud with just one. No other acts made it into our chart this month.

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