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 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 November 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 the 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.

This is for future-proofing. If the artist decides to leave SoundCloud or removes their track from that platform, you might still be able to enjoy hearing them elsewhere with a cunning click of the mouse.

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 November 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 Critical Error eponymous album has been added to the Wud Records Archives. The audio was salvaged from cassette and sent to us. We cleaned and mastered the files. Now you too can enjoy the amazing Critical Error eponymous album!

This is tremendously exciting news! We were all big fans of Critical Error back in the day and never thought it would be possible to hear their music ever again. Now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it’s here!

The band’s main songwriter, Steve Mavin, tragically died in March 1999 from complicated health problems. He was just 47. It is a real honour to be able to leave a monument to his memory and his wonderful music in the Archives.

We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who made this possible. Paul for finding the audio files and the cover art, Aidan for his help and suggestions, and most of all to Rosie.

Rosie sent us the audio files and photos. She typed up the lyrics and credits and created a biography of the band. She remained in close contact to advise us every step of the way how best to represent the Critical Error eponymous album. We’re very grateful and humbled by the efforts that everyone has gone to in order to make this thing happen.

The Critical Error eponymous album was recorded in the summer of 1987 by Paul Bateman in his now legendary studio at 32 Howell Road, Exeter. Rough Terrain were recording their first demo there at the same time, and Prism shortly afterwards.

At first listen, Critical Error may sound like whimsical acoustic hippy music. Once you dig a little below the surface, there are some incredibly deep and sometimes tragic stories being told, based on the band’s real-life experiences.

We always admired their songwriting and their slick live performances back in the day. Listening again, with the benefit of more than three decades of hindsight, we appreciate even more what a great band they were.

Songs from the Critical Error eponymous album will be released one at a time. There will be a gap of a day or two, or longer, between each release. This is due to technical reasons regarding the way new tracks are released at SoundCloud.

There are eleven songs and a bonus track altogether on the Critical Error eponymous album. If you are reading this sometime in the future, all the tracks will be there. If you are reading it close to the date it was published, there may be more yet to appear.

There will be further announcements in our News service and on Twitter with regard to further Critical Error material being released. Be sure to follow those pages closely!

If you would like to enjoy hearing the Critical Error eponymous album right here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you should happen to prefer listening to it at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for October 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 November 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 October 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 alternative rock anthem and call to action The Freaks (Shall Inherit the Earth) topped the charts in October 2020.

The Freaks (Shall Inherit the Earth) was a very popular Spacegoats song before Alchemeon started playing it. It was performed around many a uk campfire during various road protests, as well as other infrastructure project protests such as against the new high speed two railway.

Many people protest because they believe that these things cause terrible and unnecessary damage to the landscape of the uk. These projects cost billions to implement, money which arguably could be better spent on other things. And for what? A small gain in journey times.

Alchemeon had four of the top ten places this month. All four tracks come from their Live in Session Spring 2009 album, which was re-released recently. Finale and The Centre of the Cyclone both proved to be tremendously popular songs in October 2020, ending up at positions two and three respectively. Last month‘s number one song, Crazy Mandy, dropped down to number seven.

The rest of the chart was dominated by Flicker, who took up half of the ten available positions. All five of Flicker‘s tracks come from their wonderful 2002 album At Least 1000 Words.

Flicker‘s 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 were the only other act to feature in our latest chart. Dead Generation, a work-in-progress hard/alternative rock song (which we love!) made its first appearance on our charts by entering at number four. Dead Generation comes from Dark Company‘s Noir album, which is an album entirely made up of demos at present. Noir is a fantastic collection of songs, even if perhaps it is a bit rough around the edges.

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

This is for future-proofing. If the artist decides to leave SoundCloud or removes their track from that platform, you might still be able to enjoy hearing them elsewhere with a cunning click of the mouse.

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 October 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!

Critical Error‘s archive pages have gone live! We are tremendously excited and happy about this. Critical Error is a band we have been hoping to include in our Archives for years, ever since the Archives began. And now, finally, we can tell everyone about it, after sitting on the news and sqeuaking a bit for the last few weeks.

Critical Error were very highly regarded in what was a fantastic music scene in south west england during the late 1980s. They were also great friends of the Wud Records posse back in the day.

Critical Error even recorded their eponymous album at Paul Bateman‘s now legendary home studio, at the exact same time that our legacy band, Rough Terrain, were busy making their Howell Road Demo. The Howell Road Demo became a part of Rough Terrain‘s Exit Stage Deaf compilation album. The two bands shared Jerry on bass for a short while. Stuart “The Amazing Blind Screaming Blue Stu” Cannon made regular live guest appearances for Rough Terrain as well as appearing on one of Critical Error’s songs.

A whole galaxy of stars who were highly respected virtuoso musicians from various other bands, made guest appearances on Critical Error’s eponymous album. There was a wonderful community spirit to it and the calibre of musicians that the band Critical Error attracted shows just what high regard they were held in by those who knew and understood.

At the time of publishing this news post, not much music has been released. More will be released over the coming days.

Album, EP and demo releases will be announced in our News service and on Twitter. Individual track releases will be announced only on Twitter, so be sure to follow us. You can follow us by clicking on anywhere it says ‘Twitter‘ on this page.

The Critical Error music will all be released on SoundCloud. We release tracks there gradually rather than all at once. This is due to the way people discover music on SoundCloud. It means more new fans have a better chance of discovering the splendid songs of Critical Error when we release tracks separately. Normally 24 to 48 hours is a long enough wait, so it won’t be very long until all the songs are available.

The music of the live Critical Error band was mainly acoustic. Their performances were compelling. Audiences were entranced by the spells the band wove with their magic. Typically a Critical Error audience would listen, enthralled and spellbound by the charismatic quartet.

Despite sounding like gentle hippies, their songs had a dark undertow. They could jolt the listener whose attention had wandered back to captivation with a sharp lyric that induced an outburst of thinking.

We sincerely hope you will enjoy listening to the music of the Critical Error band as much as we did. Collectively we hope that the spirit of Steve Mavin, the band’s main songwriter, who tragically passed away in 1999 aged just 47, a man who was well known and well loved by those who knew him, will smile and endure.

To visit the main Critical Error band page here at Wud Records, please click here.

If you would like to see a gallery of photos and artwork for Critical Error, please click here.

To read the biography of the band by founding member Rosie Mullin, please click here.

If you would like to read all of the original lyrics by Critical Error, please click here.

Alchemeon lyrics and information at Explicit Music have been updated. This is following on from the recent re-release of all the remaining Alchemeon material.

Aditionally, all of this information has been transferred to the appropriate Alchemeon song pages, both at Bandcamp and at SoundCloud.

That’s not all. Both the Winter and Spring pages at the Wud Records website have fully clickable and working links for Alchemeon lyrics and information. The links to the download pages of the individual tracks are functioning correctly as well.

A few fun facts have been added for each of the songs. Credits have been ascribed in full. As far as we can tell, they are all as correct as can be, notwithstanding anomalies caused by the passage of time.

All of the lyrics have been transcribed and proof-read. They are all accurate, even where they differ from the official versions at Pok’s web pages.

Some of the songs, such as Born of Stars, tend to be quite loose lyrically speaking. This allows room for improvisation and variation from one performance to another. If you compare the two Alchemeon versions of Born of Stars, you will see and hear that the lyrics are, in some places, slightly different from each other.

We feel it is unlikely that Alchemeon will ever reform. This is because of Pok‘s workload, Jim‘s mental health problems, George‘s permanent emigration from the uk and Iggy’s disappearance, possibly back to his homeland of Slovakia. We are very thankful to have been able to enjoy the music of Alchemeon during the short time that their star shone.

Studio versions of a variety of Alchemeon‘s songs are in varying stages of completion. When they are finished they will be added to Pok‘s Anthology album. It is difficult to predict when any of them might be finished. What we can say is that Born, The Centre of the Cyclone, Crazy Mandy and It’s a Blue Sky Don’t Hold No Rain are all progressing well.

This may be the conclusion of all the work regarding Alchemeon that we are able to do. Should this prove to be false, we shall let Alchemeon fans know of any further developments or additions in our News service and on Twitter.

To read all of the official Alchemeon lyrics and information over at Explicit Music, please click here and then click on the individual songs.

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

If you prefer to listen right here at the Wud Records website, please click here instead.

If you would like to download or listen to Alchemeon Live In Session Spring 2009 from Bandcamp, please click here.

If you prefer to listen right here at the Wud Records website, please click here instead.