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Wud Records: February 2021 Musical Discoveries

Posted by Wudmaster on 01/03/21

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 February 2021 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 February 2021 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!

Lemming Meringue: history of the band completed

Posted by Wudmaster on 19/02/21

Lemming Meringue‘s history has been updated. It is now finished, as far as we can tell. It is something we have been intending to finish for a very long time, so it is pleasing to have finally done so.

When the new Wud Records website was first launched in 2008, a lot of things were added very quickly without being completed. This is particularly true of biographical histories. Something needed to be written so that the pages could exist. Several have never been finished. We are attempting to finish off these old writings, finally.

How the time flies. It is almost 36 years since Lemming Meringue felt they were doing things somehow right and could finally change their name to Wud.

In spite of all the interest from the press, the general public and the music industry, and the potential for a very successful career, Wud‘s attempt at total global domination was far too short lived. This was entirely due to the constant personality clash between Ken and George. In fact, the band lasted barely six months. What a shame and what a waste.

That, however, is another story, which you can read about by clicking here. It is a story which we hope will be completely written sometime soon.

As usual, when it is finished we shall let fans know via our News service, the Bandcamp Community and on Twitter.

George wrote the Lemming Meringue biography and is still very much alive and well and part of Wud Records.

Ken, however, vanished without trace in the late 1980s after becoming a born again Christian. We have no idea what happened to him or if he is even still living.

What is most surprising to us about Ken is that there is no sign whatsoever of any of his post-Wud singing anywhere on the internet. This seems to be a terrible shame for a man of his talent. Whereever he is, whatever may have become of him, we hope he found peace within himself and a happy place to be.

Lemming Meringue’s history can be reached by clicking here, if you would like to read it.

Wud Records: January 2021 top ten tracks published at SoundCloud

Posted by Wudmaster on 01/02/21

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for January 2021 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. This is always a tremendous help to creative souls. Likes from people who clearly don’t listen to the music are ignored.

Songs published at Bandcamp are also completely omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because Bandcamp statistics require separate treatment.

Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our February 2021 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 January 2021 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms.

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) returned to the top of the charts in January 2021, up from the number two position last month.

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. The HS2 project is the latest of many of these.

Another Alchemeon song, the live progressive rock / space rock / cosmic rock epic Born of Stars, re-entered the charts at number eight. Despite being over fifteen minutes long and the audio file requiring many many hours of fiddly and tedious repair work, it has received plenty of love and attention since its eventual re-release last summer.

Flicker‘s wonderful instrumental piece Farsight dropped back to this month’s number two. It features the voices of Maharaj Ji / Prem Rawat and Jonathan Agnew as well as some sounds from Captain James T. Kirk’s ship the USS Enterprise.

Three more tracks from Flicker‘s beautiful album At Least 1000 Words featured in the first chart of 2021. Blown Away, Moonpath and Welcome to the Family were all tremendously popular, ending the month in postitions four, six and ten respectively.

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 achieved two of the positions on the newest chart. Dancing In The Dark from the work-in-progress Alien Heat album came in at number three after we announced that we were busy working on finalising it. We are hoping very much that we will be able to finish and release this, and other songs from Dark Company‘s Alien Heat album in the coming weeks.

The other Dark Company song to feature is Phase Out, the quirky reggae song with a section in five-time and featuring Pete’s wonderful lyrics laced with cutting dark humour. Phase Out is the opening track on the work-in-progress fourth Dark Company album, Can of Worms.

Also appearing on this month’s chart we see the first two tracks from the delightful Cherry Smoke Empire album by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. The Furniture (part one: overture) and Good Times finished the month in positions five and seven respectively.

None of our other acts made it onto the chart this month.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in January 2021, 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.

Wud Records: January 2021 Musical Discoveries

Posted by Wudmaster on 01/02/21

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 January 2021 into one agreed playlist and published it on the first day of the next month.