News

The Ember EP from 1999, Moving on a Moment in Life, has been fixed and put back in the Wud Records Archives. This EP was the final studio recording of Ember in their final incarnation. Lead guitarist and backing vocalist Dan Wright was the main creative force of the band and the one member who was constant throughout its existance.

Moving on a Moment in Life was recorded, engineered and produced by Martin Dearmun of Transit Recordings. Martin was also the singer and acoustic guitarist in another of the Wud Records Archive bands, Pyg.

This EP features four of the band’s songs, including the beautiful and wistful Aquamarine, and Moving On, which was a relatively new song for the band composed by lead singer Joe and a couple of his friends.

Please note that we do not own the copyright to Ember’s songs. The copyright belongs to the individual writers of each track, the details of which can be found on the individual tracks’ pages.

If you would like to listen to Moving on a Moment in Life by Ember here at Wud Records, please click here.

To listen to it over at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

The top ten tracks for July 2016 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist at SoundCloud. Tracks have been arranged from one to ten according to their popularity.

We shall publish further such playlists on a monthly basis. These playlists will take into account plays, likes, downloads and reposts at SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Tracks that are only published at BandCamp will be omitted from the SoundCloud playlist.

We are discussing the possibility of using the most recent monthly top ten tracks playlist as the default music player across the Wud Records website. These players will replace the old broken FlamPlayer. We also plan to do something similar and separate for our Archive bands when we have restored a few more of the Archive playlists.

July 2016 was by some distance our busiest month at SoundCloud. We’d like to thank everybody who helped to make it so by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks there. Only you, the listener, can influence our August 2016 playlist, so if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it!

When we have a bit of spare time we will make further top 10 playlists going back to when Wud Records first joined SoundCloud. The way their site is structured makes it easy for us to do so, so well done to SoundCloud for being so splendid in that regard. The Wud Records charts used to be a popular feature a few years ago and it is great to be able to bring them back.

Congratulations to Dark Company, whose song Medicines was our number one track in July.

If you would like to hear the top 10 songs from Wud Records, as played, downloaded, liked and reposted by listeners, please click here.

The demo EP compilation from Goodstaff in our Archives has been repaired and the playlist added at SoundCloud. This compilation comes from two demo CDs that Goodstaff made.

The first five tracks come from their 1999 recording at Crazy Cat Studios in Exeter. The last three were created at Torna-K’s studio in 2000 and mastered by Dave Bliss. Neither CD was given a particular name so we simply named this compilation of the two EPs eponymously.

When we first came upon Goodstaff performing live at The Cavern in Exeter, we had no idea what to make of them as we had never heard anything quite like that before. Ross was playing the most orange guitar in the world slung down by his shins and his vocal style was highly individual as well as being powerful and precise. There was clearly some form of musical intelligence at work and we felt that further investigation was desirable.

Nowadays we absolutely love their songs and remember them fondly, not just for their music, which requires a surprisingly high level of virtuosity to attempt to play, but for the characters that made up the band, and the attitude and the fun and mutual respect we all had when we came together.

Please note that we do not own the copyright of these songs. Ownership belongs to Ross Martin and Goodstaff. These recordings have been published here in our Archives because we love them and feel that they need to be heard by the world, even though Goodstaff themselves have long since disbanded.

We hope that you will enjoy this blast of fresh air and great songwriting from the turn of the century.

If you would like to listen to Goodstaff here at Wud Records, please click here.

If you prefer to listen to them over at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

The Search Party Demo from 1999 has been repaired and included in our ever-growing collection of playlists over at SoundCloud. Search Party are one of our Archive bands as they were never a part of the Wud Records label. The band came to our attention when one of the Wud Records team became their regular live front-of-house sound engineer back in the day. They have a certain similarity in style to Dark Company. We will no doubt continue to love their music forever.

Search Party were a stunningly good live band. They played many shows and wowed audiences across the southwest of England with their unique blend of melodic progressive ethno-trance-rock featuring powerful vocal harmonies, inventive guitars, unusual wind instruments, ethnic drums and trance-heavy sequencing. We hope one day to find some more Search Party songs to publish for you to enjoy.

One of the band’s most innovative features was their use of the five-string Telecaster. Lawrence broke a high E-string one day and chose never to replace it.

Please note that Wud Records does not own the copyright to any of the material published in our Archives section. It is not our intention to compromise or violate in any way the copyright of the respective owners of the works that are there. We simply published this music because we love it and feel that it still needs to be heard by the world.

If you happen to be a copyright owner of any of the Archive material and would like it to be removed, corrected, republished, approved, or anything else, please email wudmaster@wudrecords.co.uk so that this can be done.

Search Party are the first of our Archive bands to have their playlist repaired since the malfunction of the old Flamplayer, which can still be found festering and rotting at a few pages here at the Wud Records website. In the coming days and weeks we shall be repairing the rest of our Archive section and with luck will be able to bring you some new Archive material as well. Details of further repairs and releases will be published in our News service and on Twitter.

You can listen to the three songs on the Search Party Demo at the Wud Records website by clicking here.

If you would prefer to listen to it at SoundCloud instead, please click here.

The lyrics for the Clonk! Demo have been transcribed and are still so fresh they are radiating warmth. Some brand new web pages have been added to the Explict Music website precisely for these sets of the band’s lyrics. Also at these new pages over at Explicit Music you will find details of the recordings and some fun facts about the songs.

All of the information has been made available at Clonk!’s three song pages on SoundCloud as well. That means that if you choose to listen to their Demo here or over at SoundCloud you can follow the lyrics and read about the tracks whilst listening.

Clonk! were very popular back in 2002-3 what with their somewhat tongue-in-cheek live performances that oozed virtuosity. Although the band are no longer active, their songs will continue to live on here at Wud Records.

Deep within our archives there is a little more Clonk! material and we hope that one day we shall be able to bring this to you as well. When we manage to dig it up we shall inform fans via our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to listen to the Clonk! Demo here at Wud Records whilst enjoying the lyrics at Explicit Music, you can do so by clicking here.

If you prefer to do the same thing over at SoundCloud, please click here instead.

Just as a quick footnote, we seem to have removed the default FlamPlayer from various pages on our website but the new player that we hoped was going to appear has not yet done so. Instead, the whole of that area of the page now looks a bit… odd. This is mostly down to ignorance and incompetence on our parts and we hope to rectify this prolonged ongoing issue in the near future.

The Daylight Demo by Rough Terrain has now been repaired and added to the growing collection of Wud Records playlists at SoundCloud. The Daylight Demo also makes up the last four tracks of Rough Terrain’s Exit Stage Deaf compilation.

One of our favourite sayings here at Wud Records was coined by engineer Paul before the first track of this was laid down. Originally it had been scheduled to be recorded a week earlier than it actually was in the end. An exasperated, frustrated and disgruntled Paul explained the situation to studio owner Ian Dent, blaming Rough Terrain‘s non-presence on “…discommunication, disorganisation and general untogetherness.”

As luck would have it, Rough Terrain managed to conquer their difficulties the following weekend and these four tracks were the result. The overall sound was somewhat lighter and more refined than Rough Terrain‘s live raw power. There was also a fair amount of experimentation involving the various Daylight Studios percussion instruments, the in-house Fender acoustic, and the Bare Remix of Slark Lywilsbie.

The band did not stay together for much longer after this recording. They played one more show at The Bystocks in Exeter, then Andy left to begin an undergraduate degree at Cardiff University. Despite numerous auditions being held, nobody could replace their charismatic silver-tongued frontman. The remaining band members decided it was time to hang up their skin-tight spandex leggings and move on.

George specifically asked this writer to point out that he particularly dislikes the song Two Timer, which he wrote aged 17, and regrets even writing it at all. He politely requests that you simply skip this track when listening, although he agrees that the intro is pretty cool.

If you would like to listen to the Daylight Demo by Rough Terrain here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would prefer to listen to it over at the SoundCloud website, please click here instead.