News

A fine pair of songs by The Bastard Sons of Dennis have been completed and uploaded to the Wud Records website and to our shop at Bandcamp. Both songs are Blue Oyster Cult covers that The Bastard Sons of Dennis have played live many times and they have been added to their Cosy Lube Turtle collection.

The two songs are Before the Kiss a Redcap from Blue Oyster Cult’s 1972 eponymous album, and Teen Archer from their 1973 recording known as Tyranny and Mutation.

If you would like to download songs from the Cosy Lube Turtle album, you can do so by clicking here.

We are discussing the possibilities of making a new album with Pok. We are planning to make a top quality definitive studio recording of all the great classic songs from the 80s and 90s that were played by the likes of Now, Laughing Sun and Alchemeon.

Pok has been a man of wud since wudding first began and has gone on to form The Space Goats and Lilith’s Labyrinth. He is more involved in traditional Bardic work right now and you will often see him raising the morale at protest camps and performing at druidic events. His blog is a fascinating and diverse piece of work and you can visit it by clicking here.

We are literally only in the discussion stage of things at the moment so it will be a long time yet until there are any results. However, we are all excited by the prospect of paying respect to these songs and laying them to bed for the world to enjoy.

Wud Records has linked Facebook to our shop at Bandcamp. This means that you can listen to and download our bands’ songs whilst enjoying everything Facebook has to offer.

If you would like to check out our music page at Facebook, you can do so by clicking here. Please give us a ‘like’ as well. :-)

All of our music is available at ‘name-your-own-price’, which includes free, although we ask for your email for a free download. When files at Bandcamp are upgraded we send out the new files for free to everyone who has paid at least 89% of our price for a song or album.

If you would like to check out our shop at Bandcamp, you can do so by clicking here.

To celebrate today’s extraordinary conglomeration of triangles that took place at 11 minutes and 11.11 seconds past 11 on the 11-11-11 and to commemorate all those that fell during war on this day of remembrance, we have decided to change the prices of all of our music that is for sale at Bandcamp.

Now you can decide to pay what you think a track or album is worth, even if that is absolutely nothing at all. Hooray! Simply name the price you wish to pay when you select an album or track. If you put a zero we ask only for your email address, which is used for our own confidential records and never shared with anyone else at all.

As our customers know, when a piece of music receives an engineering upgrade we email the upgraded file for free to everyone who paid for it. We will continue to do this for everyone who pays for music, although not for those who download for less than 89% of the price threshold we set for each item.

We will review this situation either after 111 free downloads or at the end of 2011, whichever happens sooner.

Why 111 you may ask. Well, on this numerically peculiar day 11-11-11 we can reveal an interesting fact about the number 111. Not only does it make English cricket fans put their feet on the table and hope for another run, it is also extra special in this year of 2011. If you take the last two digits of the year of your birth and add them to your age, no matter how old you are, the result will be 111. Somebody born in 1930 will be 81. 81 + 30 = 111. Somebody born in 1978 will be 33. 33 + 78 = 111. And so on. Try it on yourself!

Also, to demonstrate the shape of things to come, we have uploaded the recently-twiddled Live in Session Autumn 1985 collection from Laughing Sun to Bandcamp and in the coming days, weeks and months will be transferring a lot more of our material to Bandcamp for you to download.

To take advantage of this fantastic offer, visit our shop at Bandcamp by clicking here.

It’s about time we gave Dark Company fans the band’s 2011 autumn news as the boys have been hard at work.

As you may already know, Pete’s health is not very good so we have been trying to work around his medical issues. We are trying to finish up the last few things from Dark Company’s back catalogue. As such Pete has been singing his vocal parts for the Drift of Stars album recently. This is more than half-way finished, at the end which there may be the odd bit of touching up of things that could be better.

Beyond that, we are looking into an uncertain future that may contain new songs if the health of Pete will stand up to it. He has been composing drum loops to go with the new songs he has written which may result in another new sound and direction for the band although obviously these are very early days.

Progress has been made with their Bad Habits album. All of the extra mixes for Buick Visions have been mastered and uploaded and now the next song, Nightshifters, is being tweaked rather a lot. We anticipate that the finished version of Nightshifters will sound somewhat different to the beta version currently available on the Bad Habits playlist. We have also been looking at sleeve design for the album and have some interesting and fun ideas on that front.

We have been upgrading the alpha mixes of the Alien Heat album and have completed ten of them so far, although there is still much work to be done towards the finished alpha stage. We are currently working on the drumming and synths in Easy Street and Wonderlust and the remaining four songs need extensive editing in Studio Two. These things will come to pass soon.

A few years ago Pete wrote a novel called Cello and we are looking into publishing it online in a blog format with all of Pete’s extras, such as maps of the galaxy and so on. We are also considering the music that may have been existed in that world and may attempt to create some with Dark Company.

More Dark Company news will be published soon. If you would like to follow the Dark Company Twitter feed you can do so by clicking here, and if you would like to see or join the Dark Company Facebook page you can click here.

We found, prodded and uploaded an archive collection of songs Live in Session Autumn 1985 from Laughing Sun. This collection of songs was the second half of the set they would play at their first live performance, at Exeter College. Unfortunately the first half of this session has not materialised, and may in fact never do so.

The cassette this was taken from had no title or markings on the spine and a track list written faintly in pencil. Only the acoustic version of Cosmic Dancer was identified on the B side, so to find the two subsequent tracks was a surprise.

If you would like to hear just the songs that were played by the whole band, you can click here.

There is a further collection for specialists, which include the moments between the songs and the other bonus tracks. If you would like to listen to this full version, please click here.