News

The Signmaker and Rage in Heaven albums by Dark Company are now being distributed globally to all the major streaming platforms.

We have tended to shy away from distributing to the big global corporations. This has been largely as a kind of protest against the dreadful imbalance in the way they remunerate artists. This corporate unfairness is a widely discussed topic and you can easily read more about it online. However, we tend to feel that it has become necessary to bite the bullet and launch our bands on those platforms.

You can even download the Signmaker and Rage in Heaven albums from some of those services as well. However, we would recommend using Bandcamp for downloads. With Bandcamp, you will pay a lot less and our bands will receive a significantly bigger slice of the pie.

Bandcamp are simply the best platform for music downloads as far as the artist is concerned. If you are an artist, you should definitely sign up! Please click here to go to the Wud Records Bandcamp page.

Bandcamp also have a community feature, and you can join ours if you click here.

The Signmaker and Rage in Heaven albums are being distributed in partnership with CD Baby. CD Baby were offering an exceptionally special deal on their one-off payments for lifetime distribution. Although that offer has ended now, their costs for submissions are drastically reduced, especially for albums.

If you are thinking about distributing an album or single, it may well be worth your while giving CD Baby a try. Their one-off payment for a lifetime of distribution is a far better deal than having to pay for distribution every year.

In order to make it easier for fans to find Dark Company‘s music on all the different streaming platforms, we recently created a linktree for Dark Company, and indeed our other active acts – Flicker, Pok the Bard and The Bastard Sons of Dennis.

We shall be distributing more of our bands albums via CD Baby in the coming weeks. Please follow our Twitter and bookmark our News service to keep up with all such developments.

Below are links to where you can stream Dark Company‘s Signmaker and Rage in Heaven albums. More such links will be added to Dark Company‘s linktree and the Wud Records Links page in due course.

https://music.apple.com/us/artist/dark-company/411636012
https://tidal.com/browse/artist/17022283
https://www.deezer.com/en/artist/6381602
https://open.spotify.com/artist/35k4zUxUmSeIW4kEpbtTrt
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxId8DcxREuGrvIeWjfkp-A
https://play.anghami.com/artist/2648633
https://www.amazon.de/music/player/artists/B004GZVJ8M/dark-company

Linktrees created for all of the active artists on Wud Records? Really?

Yes! Wud Records has created linktrees for all of the label’s active artists.

Linktree is an excellent resource. It allows you to put all of your links together in one convenient place. That way, anybody who is interested in what you are about can find out a lot more about you quickly and easily.

Wud Records and our bands continue to expand outwards to more and more places across the internet. We felt linktrees would be a very good idea. Now all of our links and our bands’ links have been grouped together to ease your journeys of browsing enjoyment.

We have tried as best we can to put each linktree together in a logical order. Each one has been given a funky colourful design that will work well on your phone, tablet, or computer.

We shall be adding more links to all five of the linktrees created recently. If anything extremely important happens that is new, we shall of course be annoncing it in our News service and on Twitter.

If you feel you need to consolidate your links, we wholeheartedly recomment signing up. The whole preocess is very quick and user friendly. Other link consolidation websites are available.

To check out the Flicker linktree, please click here.

To check out the Dark Company linktree, please click here.

To check out The Bastard Sons of Dennis on linktree, please click here.

To check out Pok the Bard’s linktree, please click here.

To check out the Wud Records linktree, please click here.

Wud Records linktree

Flicker linktree

Dark Company linktree

Pok the Bard linktree

The Bastard Sons of Dennis linktree

Wud Records live streaming on Twitch is now a real thing! We have been planning on putting this into operation for some time, and now it has finally happened.

The new Wud Records channel for live streaming on Twitch is there to live stream any action that may be going on in our studios. Why not drop by and say ‘hello’? You can see and hear what we’re up to, live and as it happens, with no rehearsals or editing.

You might be privileged with a front row seat to listen in when there’s mixing or mastering going on. You could witness some amazing (or dreadful!) live musical performances as they take place. You may find somebody moving things about, fiddling with software, maintaining or repairing equipment, tidying up, and all that other usual studio stuff.

That’s not all! You might see our musicians and personnel. You may hear us working on songs by Flicker, Dark Company, Pok the Bard, The Bastard Sons of Dennis, or even one of our legacy bands. You could perhaps even be a witness to Archive material from the Wud Records cassette or CD vault being unearthed and readied for the general public’s listening pleasure.

Everything there is done with an intention of achieving a result, as time is often limited. We are happy to discuss what we’re doing with you as it happens. You could drop by to share a coffee and a conversation and see for yourself how things are done in our studios.

So how do we work this? Well, there is a very old laptop that runs internet things in the studio. It’s not a very good laptop, but it’s the only available machine at present. This means that the quality of the live stream may not always be tremendously superwonderful all the time. However, we invite you to drop by just the same, and perhaps we can upgrade that facility when more people join our community.

The studio internet connection is only made possible by using a device that allows the router to be hardwired directly through the electric mains cables. The studios are built into what used to be the strongroom of a bank.

This renders internet, radio, shovels from would be music thieves, and intercontinental ballistic missiles ineffective. There is no chance of those things, or anything else, penetrating the walls, which are deep below the ground. Specialist equipment had to be brought in to drill every single tiny little hole we needed in the walls and ceiling!

We have never connected the main studio computer to the internet. This is a deliberate decision, taken for security reasons. Such a connection cannot even be done without some different parts being installed inside the case and a screwdriver or two. None of the studio music machines are connected to the internet, although there are a couple of devices that we sometimes carry to a different building and plug in there for an update.

Do you fancy visiting us and being the proverbial fly on the wall? If you don’t have a Twitch account, it’s free, easy and quick to sign up. Here’s the link for your bookmarks. You can quickly create a free account from here too:

www.twitch.tv/wudrecords

Due to the unpredictability of work, family and life in general, it is not possible for us to publish a schedule or regularly stream at particular times on a particular days. Instead, we shall announce on Twitter when a live stream is about to start so you can come along and join in the fun. Make sure you’re following Wud Records on Twitter to receive live streaming alerts.

If you would like to follow us and watch the people of Wud Records live streaming on Twitch, simply click here!

Wud Records live streaming on Twitch

The Wud Records charts pages are finally up to date! Wud Records started making the charts pages a few years ago. It’s been a low-priority project. All the same, it is still very satisfying to finally have this finished.

The monthly Wud Records chart pages stretch right back to October 2015. That was when we first joined SoundCloud and started uploading our bands’ many, many tracks at that platform.

There is plenty more music still to add too! Announcements of further additions will be made in our News service and on Twitter.

Monthly charts have been one of the features of the Wud Records website for several years by now. The first one was published in August 2016. By clicking here, you can read the assocaited News post that was published to herald its arrival.

Occasionally we would publish a chart before then, from Bandcamp statistics on facebook for example. Sometimes they were based on the original software we used for music streaming at the Wud Records website – the now long defunct Flamplayer.

One of the team would add one or two pages from time to time, when other things were going on in the Wud Records offices. It was something low key that didn’t require too much concentration to continue. Finally the pages are all up to date. We shall endeavour to keep them that way for all future charts too.

On 24th September 2018 the first chart page was published at the Wud Records website. This was for October 2015, the month when we joined SoundCloud. Around three weeks later, on 12th October 2018, we announced the beginnings of the charts pages at the Wud Records website in a News post. You can read this News post by clicking here, if you wish! :)

SoundCloud makes it very easy for its users to make compilations of whatever tracks they like. It is also a very good tool for growing a fanbase. If you happen to be a musically creative type and you’re feeling a bit underappreciated and undiscovered at the moment, why not try our handy guide for growth? Click here to open the page.

It works brilliantly, despite being six years old by now. The links may not be terribly reliable any more, but the theory is first class. We recommend you try it for yourself. After you discover that like it, you can buy us a coffee, or order some merch from our shop, or even download an album or two from our Bandcamp store to say “thanks guys”! ;-)

Only you can influence our next chart. Anything we do at those sites doesn’t get counted. That means if you hear something you like, keep playing it! Add it to a compilation. Give it a like. Leave a comment or two. Share it to your social media channels so your community has the chance to find it too. All these things are a tremendous help to a small indie label such as ourselves, and will absolutely influence the results of the month’s chart.

If you would like to see what’s been hot in all our charts pages, please click here and then select any month or year from the list on the left.

SoundCloud all time top tracks – although the data is not always completely inclusive depending on how you look at it, so not entirely reliable!

The Dark Company logo at the Wud Records merch store is going to disappear very soon. So if you want to own a warm hoodie, cool t-shirt, handy backpack, stylish laptop sleeve, original travel mug and all manner of other things emblazoned with the esoteric magikal alpha omega glyph of the Dark Company logo, you had better be quick!

Here is a link to click that will take you directly to all 83 of the Dark Company logo products at our third party merch store:

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/117156172

There are 83 different products with this design available right now. In case you should be thinking of buying a new baseball cap, wall clock, cushion, spiral notebook, comfy socks or all manner of other items, why not buy one of ours? It will serve you well, look great and help us bring you some new music!

More Dark Company news will be coming your way soon, so please make sure you are following Wud Records on Twitter as well as our News service pages here at the Wud Records website.

To visit the Dark Company logo page at our merch store, please click here.

To stream a Dark Company album whilst you are browsing, please click here and choose one from Bandcamp.

If you would like to read about Dark Company, listen to a work-in-progress album, hear some demos, see some photos or be awestruck by Pete Greatorex’s amazing visual artwork, click here to go to Dark Company’s homepage at the Wud Records website.

If you would like to check out all of the other designs available at the Wud Records merch store, please click here.

All kinds of fabulous new designs will be appearing in the Wud Records merch store soon.

Our band Flicker have their own merch store, which you can visit by clicking here.

Lightweight sweatshirt with Dark Company logo

A significant control room upgrade has taken place at the Wud Records studios! We have been working towards this for some time and believe it will make a big difference to the quality of the music we release.

The issue of our studio monitors has long been hampering confidence in Wud Records releases. With new audio monitors installed, we have already started to correct some of the things that are simply not quite right in a few of the mixes of tracks we have released recently. “You cannot mix what you cannot hear,” a wise man once said.

Back in the 1990s, when we were operating out of Silent Running Studios in Exeter, the equipment setup there was top quality. At that time it was a small state-of-the-art facility that was hired out to the general public, and the birthplace of Dark Company. It ran on an eight-track reel-to-reel with a sync box to drive the MIDI devices.

For monitoring we used a pair of eight inch Mordaunt Short near fills. A big stride backwards would bring the eight inch Tannoy far fills into play. For anything deep down in the audio basement, we had a quartet of massive 18 inch Peavey Black Widows to handle that.

As a result, much of what we produced and released in the 1990s transfers well to other systems. It still sounds fantastic today.

We have been working towards this control room upgrade for some time, as you can see in this news post from last July. The plan now is to remix, remaster and re-release a number of tracks that don’t quite seem to satisfy us.

New music will start being released too, finally.

Please be sure to follow our News service and Twitter. We make all important announcements there.

Often we tend to post news to our Bandcamp community first. If you want to be one of the first to hear about new releases and the various ongoing events taking place at Wud Records, you can join our Bandcamp community.

If you are not a member of Bandcamp, it’s free to sign up. Bandcamp has a fabulous ethos and offers the best deals anywhere on the web right now for musicians selling their music. Click here and a new tab will open where you can join our community and sign up, if you didn’t do so already.

Where the magic happens! The control room of Studio One.