FACT Magazine That photo you’re all going wild about probably isn’t Bondax after all @ Musique Non Stop |  |
- That photo you’re all going wild about probably isn’t Bondax after all
- Stream Disclosure and Friend Within’s new single, ‘The Mechanism’
- Watch Outkast’s full Coachella performance
- The Week’s Best Vinyl Releases
- The FACT Playlist: our 10 picks of the week
- Party at the end of the world: an interview with Fat White Family
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Posted: 12 Apr 2014 08:14 AM PDT
 If you were online yesterday, then you probably saw that alleged photo of UK duo Bondax playing back-to-back on a fan. It was doing the rounds pretty heavily, prompting an official statement from the duo claiming that it was “absolutely under no circumstance [them] in this picture”. Few people believed their claim – the likeness was uncanny, and one of the photographed pair even appears to own the same trainers and watch as his Bondax equivalent has worn in press shots – but a second photo of the sweaty scene, re-posted by Bondax on Twitter (NSFW, obviously) shows a different angle which appears to prove that it’s not them. Furthermore, the second image has been circulating the internet for almost a year (again, obviously, NSFW).         |
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Stream Disclosure and Friend Within’s new single, ‘The Mechanism’
Posted: 12 Apr 2014 08:12 AM PDT
 Disclosure have uploaded a new track, ‘The Mechanism’. A collaboration with Friend Within, it will be released on April 15. We’ve embedded ‘The Mechanism’ and Disclosure’s FACT mix below.         |
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Posted: 12 Apr 2014 07:52 AM PDT
Last night at Coachella, Outkast played their first full live show since 2002. You can watch the whole thing above. It featured appearances from Future and Janelle Monae, plus the hits you’d expect – most of which feature on the 50 Best Outkast Tracks.         |
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Posted: 12 Apr 2014 06:30 AM PDT
 This year, we've brought in several new weekly features to FACT's schedule. Joining My Favourite Record and Forgotten Classics is The Week's Best Vinyl Releases, a Saturday column by our friends at Soho record shop Phonica. It sounds obvious, but few people are onto great records as quickly as a great record store, and after years spent discovering gems in Phonica's end of year lists, it made sense to give them a regular space on FACT. Every Saturday morning, they'll run down the five vinyl records that you should grab this week.  BELL TOWERS Territory EP (Public Possession) Public Possession’s fourth effort arrives from Melbourne-born Bell Towers, and it’s a doozy, pulling from Italo disco and vintage Chi-town house. Ring it from the rafters: Bell Towers is definitely one to keep an eye trained on. Audio / Buy here  LEGOWELT Crystal Cult 2080 (Creme Organization) Two appearances in two weeks for the Hague mage, sounding warmer and woozier than ever on his latest full-length. You’ll know by now whether the hyper-prolific Wolfers is your bag – and if quirk-heavy analogue techno doesn’t do it for you, you need a new bag. Audio / Buy here  CRYSTAL MAZEBlack Orchid EP (Echovolt) Greek imprint Echovolt, previously home to Steve Summers and Jorge Velez, continues to go from strength to strength with this two-track set of rickety hypnojams. Mumsey would approve. Audio / Buy here  FRAKSaturate You (Midlight Records) Swedish acid veterans FRAK have been squelching for decades, and they’re not letting up any time soon. Saturate You is top-notch late FRAK – sinewy, frill-free and insidiously funky to boot. Audio / Buy here  GOLDEN TEACHERParty People (Optimo Music) Pneumatic electro? Block party jolliness? Druggy funky house? It’s all here on the third EP from Golden Teacher, who deserve a glowing OFSTED report for this sort of dancefloor-friendly oddness. Audio / Buy here         |
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Posted: 12 Apr 2014 05:37 AM PDT
 Every weekend we post a rundown of the music – old and new – we’ve been enjoying in our UK and US offices that week. No emphasis on the boxfresh or the under-the-radar: just an honest account of what’s spent most time on the respective office stereos, with (where possible) links to the music. Halvtrak - Dust Under Bridges (Appendix i/ii) Pushed as a supplement to Halvtrak’s recent Dust Under Bridges, this free album of funky, angular synth buzz is actually one of the best things Don’t Be Afraid have put their name to. Got us reet excited about the forthcoming King Britt LP on Hyperdub, too. Answer Code Request - Code One of two strong early 2014 Ostgut Ton LPs (Tobias’ A Series Of Shocks being the running mate), Answer Code Request’s set of meticulously sculpted techno tip-toes a fine line between careful and characterful – and, for the most part, keeps its balance. When it’s good, though it’s really good – see ‘Blue Russian”s haptic maschinemusik. HTRK – Psychic 9-5 Club It’s hardly instant, but give Psychic 9-5 Club time and it’ll reveal itself of one of the more quietly devastating full-lengths so far this year. Gothy but strangely grounded, it’s full of magickal goodness but never obscures its vulnerable, soft center. Eric Holm – Andøya Subtext come through with more bouncy boogie house for the lovers…fine, not really. But if you only buy one industrial album of treated telegraph pole recordings in 2014, this is the keeper. Tink – Winter’s Diary 2 The Chicago prodigy had a big week, dropping a track with Jeremih and hitting the studio with Timbaland. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with her growing catalog, check out her most recent tape — just don’t be fooled by the title: these are tunes for any season. Various - Happy Machine: Standard Music Library 1970-2010 Public Information play cicerone once again through the bloopy an gloopy, presenting a 30-year selection of material from library powerhouse Standard Music. Like their 2012 Parry Music collection, it’s a good few leagues above similar competitors, with particular emphasis on the cosmic and the chrome-plated. Jeff Greinke - Cities In Fog Projekt’s forthcoming Structures From Silence reissue has got us rifling through the label’s archives, and it’s a been a pleasure dipping back into Greinke’s 1985 dark ambient classic – sample-based drone, glimpsed through a grubby looking glass, which has barely aged a day. Frumpy – Frumpy 2 A soupy, vivid and transcendent mushroom bath of an album of German prog rock from 1971? Well you don’t have to tell us twice. SZA – Z The Jersey vocalist makes her TDE debut in style: soul-laced alt-pop (one listen will demonstrate why she refuses to be tagged as simply an “R&B singer”) that grounds the dreamy vibes of her early material with rumbling beats by DJ Dahi, Toro y Moi and more. Kendrick and Chance turn up, too, but this is SZA’s show. Ninos Du Brasil - Novos Mistérios Flamboyant festival music isn’t exactly a genre that usually springs to mind when you’re nattering about Dominick Fernow’s Hospital Productions imprint, but Ninos Du Brasil do exactly that, and without even a hint of irony. It’s basically Cut Hands with feather boas and vuvuzelas, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.         |
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Posted: 12 Apr 2014 02:00 AM PDT
 Almost all the ink that has been spilled over Fat White Family trots out how these "sick" and "troubled" boys "crawled out of the squats of South London – an apparent Wild West at the end of the Victoria line – and on to the stage. But such trite labels seem insufficient for the band FACT interviewed in the cavernous attic above the stage on which they were about to play a wild sold-out show at the Electrowerkz club. Though the Fat Whites do shout, spit, use fascist and communist imagery and play shows for the most part unattired – and often surrounded by pigs' heads on sticks – they are also responsible for some of the most refreshingly provocative guitar music Britain has heard for a long while. "Instead of talking about what the music is all about, they'll bang on about aesthetics, how we do drugs, how we're crazy, how we sweat a lot," explains frontman Lias Saoudi in an Ayrshire lilt. "It's kind of silly. If we're the scariest band out there at the moment, it's a truly tame time." Its 11 tracks jump between stripped-down blues (‘Wet Hot Beef‘) that recalls slower Birthday Party songs, unhinged Americana (‘Heaven on Earth‘) of the Butthole Surfers ilk, and huge unhinged football-terrace style incantations (‘Special Ape‘). They sing portentous songs about who killed JFK's assassin, the hanged Wales football-captain Gary Speed, or life through the eyes of a paedophile ("but a kind of sexy paedophile", Lias clarifies).  In a politically consensualist age, when major labels' A&R departments are taking safer and safer bets with tighter and tighter budgets, Fat White Family's music and on-stage melodrama can't help but excite.The day Thatcher died, the band were immortalised on the front of The Independent newspaper, sat in the window of their squat above a Brixton pub holding a placard reading ‘The Witch is Dead’. On another occasion they occupied a south-London branch of Foxtons estate agents, baring a luminous-pink flag that read 'Yuppies Out'. Another read: 'Homes for all!’. "Because of our approach to these things, it's always going be tongue-in-cheek. We're never going to take one side totally," explains Lias. "We've been slated by the Left for not talking the causes seriously enough and from the Right for obvious reasons. So we've just become these idiots walking around South London without a pot to piss in singing songs about bombing Disneyland." Fat White Family are Thatcher's grandchildren – the sons and daughters of Thatcher's children. They are have-nots who are pissed off at being flat broke and at what they see as a stultifying corporatisation to modern life. To many in 21st century Britain, the days of overtly political music are over, but not for Lias and his co-songwriter Saul Adamczewski, who is an admirer of 1990s post-punk outfit The Make-Up for their mischievous and iconoclastic use of religion and politics. "I don't see how anything isn't political. Having a cup of tea is political," Lias says "I try and use things I creatively or aesthetically in a situationist philosophy so people can draw whatever you want from it. We're not telling people what to think, were just trying to ask questions and open up a debate." Situationism was an artistic and also a political revolutionary theory that grew out of the Parisian avant-garde of the post-war years that aimed to wake people up using spectacles – or in the Fat White's case, gigs – and liberate them with direct human experiences. While Lias is wont to intellectualise Fat White Family, Saul sees his outfit in more nihilistic terms. "I love the idea of revolutionary madness," he says, grinning widely to reveal a gaping hole where his incisor once was. "I don't think there is any salvation. I think we can agree on one thing and that is everything is doomed. It's like the party at the end of the world. There's fuck all left to do. We're just rejoicing before the curtain comes down." Twitter: @a_merat         |
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