W+K folks make music
Musical endeavours by W+Kers past and present.
Above is the debut video from 2:54, featuring former Wieden + Kennedy staffer Colette Thurlow. Scarlet is the title track from their forthcoming EP, their first release for Fiction and the fruits of their work with producer Rob Ellis (PJ Harvey) and mixer Alan Moulder (Nine Inch Nails). The Guardian describes them as:
Foggy, claustrophobic gloom-pop delivered without a hint of a smile, with at least one of them sporting a black leather jacket. (It does also describe them as 'excellent'.)
Meanwhile, W+K planner Oscar Powell has just released a12" 'The Ongoing Significance of Steel and Flesh' on his own label, Diagonal Records.
It's available from Boomkat, who describe it thus:
First edition of 350 copies. Laser-cut, hand-assembled jacket housing hand-stamped & numbered insert* Diagonal, a new label from London demands your attention with three KILLER bare-boned rhythm tracks by label head Powell, backed with a superb Karl O'Connor (Regis) remix. Powell's original tracks are a masterful reduction and consolidation of ideas studied from the likes of Nitzer Ebb, Suicide and Mika Vainio, matching their rockabilly attitude with the kind of dry, technoid funk exercised by Raime or Vatican Shadow. His title track is all chugging, bow-kneed swagger, like warehouse music made in 1959, while '09' is sludgier and gloweringly stush, and 'Robotics' like some leather-lashed tribal tattoo from Cut Hands. Needless to say, Karl O'Connor's remix appointment is an inspired choice – a purified reduction of fluid bass and echoic snares subsumed by a looming, pitch black wave of wraith-like phantasms. An essential selection for the connoisseurs.
Slightly less current, but MD Neil Christie's old band He's Dead Jim finally made the nationals in last month's Word magazine, as part of a feature on the DIY post-punk scene of the early 80s. Can a triumphant reunion tour be far off? (Funnily enough, no offers yet.)
He's Dead Jim's album 'Colour Climax, Monochrome World' (described as "pure [trash] punk, a lot of Mark E. Smith and maybe some Billy Childish") is still available here.
