It's out! Listening posts are on the website and over on Bandcamp. Also, following the Murder, She Wrote nod, here I am below, fighting with a puppet for your affections, with thanks to Rob Quickenden at Ford Lane.

Maybe it should be renamed Dark Krampus instead of Dark Compass given the time of year, but it's always nice to see songs getting a play on the radio, in this case, the song is In Your Neighbourhood. 

On that vague song theme, this year's festive Neighbourbood card has now been posted and there is a new collection of things over there which provides a backdrop to my previous seasonal efforts (and a whole lot of hoarding). Last year's festive episode of your favourite puppet adventures is also available to watch too, pending the next instalment.

Speaking of festive and puppets, I knew buying this tiny deckchair would be a great investment. Merry Christmas. 🐻🎄
P. S. As always, suitably wintery versions of Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and I Believe in Father Christmas are available to download for free by clicking on the song titles or over on Bandcamp. Thanks to Rob at Synth City for playing the Greg Lake cover.

No new releases for Bandcamp Friday tomorrow (still on a learning and muttering under my breath curve), but I did make a video a few days ago which brings together my childhood TV habits, sandcastles and celebrity rocks in support of the Neighbourhood. I got stung by a wasp filming it so please give it a watch and help me feel like the suffering for art wasn’t in vain. Will keep you posted if any baby insects burst out of my leg.

With apologies to Ron Mael from Sparks, Matthew Corbett and everyone on Ryde seafront just trying to have a nice, normal bank holiday. 🎬

 

I was fully intending to make some equus puns, but it's even too hot for horse jokes. Instead, I will just share this new horse-themed album from Glass Grave, which I recently contributed to (Neighbourhood folks, check your emails/Bandcamp for a download code). 



Also, for anyone that owns a BLACK ARROW record, you might recognise the release imprint BLACK ARROW COMMUNICATIONS and the "BAC" logo, which is part-broadcasting icon and part retro airline graphic. What started as just a riff on the rocket and satellite theme has now gotten slightly bigger and, as a collective label effort, now encompasses a new project from Dom Deane, which I'm sure a lot of you will love if your heart is where the arp is. We have a makeshift website and newsletter, but have successfully avoided a podcast thus far (nobody wants to hear awkward mumbling on the radio, I'm sure).

If you can't stay cool in the sun, at least you can be cool checking out the stuff above. 😎

So you might've noticed that the website is looking a bit fancier. We're very much back from space travels now and I decided to do some digital DIY. Hope you like it.

Also, I've made several improvements to the Neighbourhood. You can join up via Bandcamp and any newbies who do so during April will get a bonus CD as well as a limited edition cassette. I accumulated quite a lot of songs during lockdown so let's see how many we can get finished this year...

Finally, it's ten years since Haunted Gold was released. Here's the animated video that came out shortly beforehand - I was scanning away in the evenings after work and despite meticulous hoovering, I never quite got rid of all the glitter. See if you can spot the Barney Bubbles and brief Depeche Mode references as they pop up!

Broadcasts and radio seem to be a bit of a theme recently. First off, BLACK ARROW & ETHER/ORBIT were released together on cassette via The Dark Outside (normally broadcasting from the Galloway Forest) and now Cities and Memory has released a new project called Shortwave Transmissions (broadcasts from around the world), featuring my contribution, Ottawa Shortwave. 

You can listen to the entire release on Bandcamp and hear a special radio programme from its curator on Resonance FM (broadcasts from London). 

P. S. Given the recent news that Bandcamp have enabled queuing in their listening app, I've added all of the songs currently on the secret part of the site to Bandcamp as well so they're easier to play on the go. If you're interested in learning more, head this way.

They're back! Bandcamp will be resuming Bandcamp Fridays in 2022. They'll be on February 4th, March 4th, April 1st, and May 6th.

As a small token of appreciation, every order (at least until we run out) placed on Bandcamp Friday will get a shiny new "Fidoratone" sticker, inspired by a long, meandering thread on synth logos and locally, lovingly made by our friends over the water at Sticker Freak (they're fellow fans of retro design and everything hauntology and horror-adjacent, so have a virtual wander over there). Now you can say you've heard the word about the bird and all that.

Start the countdown!

As it turns out, I’ve accumulated quite a lot of my own space junk (some of which you can see in the video for The Stars, Like Dust) and whilst you can find Apollo moon landing commemorative plates, NASA mission patches and everything from Sputnik t-shirts to Cosmonaut Christmas decorations, there really isn’t much beyond a first day cover for BLACK ARROW or Prospero (and I only know that because Marlene, who I interviewed for BLACK ARROW, told me about having this lone souvenir at home - with a copy archived at Wight Aviation Museum), so I designed a few things that I thought might keep it in people’s memory a little longer, based on wayback space graphics and the kind of things I used to collect as a kid. Go here for ace new patches on Bandcamp, here for them on the main site or let lots of bright colours orbit your eyes over at Teemill. There may even be some tapes to follow shortly, but that deserves its own post.

P. S. If you email or tweet me a picture of you wearing either the Prospero print or any of the puppet designs from Teemill land, I’ll send you the corresponding Bandcamp code for either In Your Neighbourhood or ETHER/ORBIT. Seems only fair, right?

Today marks a year since BLACK ARROW was released. This article from Mark Brown was something I read early on when researching more about it, which gives a good overview of the kinds of topics covered in the conversation with Marlene and probably best describes many of the ideas I wanted to explore further around this small chapter in the history of space and satellites. It talks about unrealised futures, the relief from several people who worked on it at pivoting to space-focused projects from missiles and the idea of quiet work instead of aggressive mythology building.

Worth mentioning perhaps that it's in a quiet time that I've written a companion piece to BLACK ARROW (this time focusing on Prospero) that I hope to be able to share soon before moving onto album pastures new. Additionally, working on music that's a bit different to normal has provided me with some really excellent samples to meddle with (thanks and sorry to Glass Grave whose guitar parts for those releases are being rinsed across the forthcoming synthier ouvre at the moment too) so expect to hear more noise in with future electronics!

There's still a free extract of BLACK ARROW up here if you missed it the first time around too, so grab it while you can.

P. S. The photograph is courtesy of the folks at The Needles Old Battery, who were kind enough to show me their High Down archives and files.

P. P. S. If, for whatever reason, you've always wondered what BLACK ARROW would sound like as test card music in a big band style, you'll want to see the latest goings on here.

The hawk-eyed among you might've noticed the recent appearance of a dual-colour, gem-encrusted cassette in various places. This is the first physical release of debut album 'Verxes', which is available exclusively to Bandcamp subscribers in the Neighbourhood. It's backed up on the B-side with demos, rarities and remixes, only 50 have been produced and once they're gone, there likely won't be another run, so if you'd like to get your hands on one (and also to see what else I'm generally up to), you can head over to this place. Thanks to Simon Pott (a.k.a. electronic musician isvisible isinvisible) for the top picture.

New in the neighbourhood, mugs featuring your favourite finger puppet band (includes download of In Your Neighbourhood)!

My Bandcamp was looking a little drab so I put down some pink carpet to spruce it up a bit. Hands up who likes Pepto-Bismol?

Head over there now to admire the new carpet.

I hope you asked Father Christmas for a Bandcamp gift card this year, as Gilded Cage is now available on CD from Bandcamp (and subscribers get 20% off all physical merch)!

If you’re wondering about the availability of a physical version of ‘Gilded Cage’, then you’ve come to the right update. Currently, vinyl is still in production, but as soon as it’s here it’ll be going up on Bandcamp and, if you’re a subscriber, you can get 20% off. 

Secondly, a few of you have asked for CDs and whilst a record is a beautiful object, you’re right, it’s quite hard to listen to in the car, so I’ve had a limited number of CDs made and they should be here within the next two weeks! Thanks to @zomtographer for the artwork for those.

Lastly, thank you for your patience and encouraging comments. I took this picture a few weeks ago, as both the sticker and the context seem quite fitting for anyone doing a creative project or making music independently. We are all this motorhome.

If, like me, you float between the digital world and the tangible world, you can get hold of new album Gilded Cage and every single digital Curxes release for £20, plus 20% off physical merch like CDs and vinyl. Read more over at Bandcamp. 

Photography by @zomtographer.

Along for the Ryde. I took this at the International Classic Car Show a few weeks ago because it reminded me of the kind of thing you see in Twin Peaks and Fargo.

More of that sort of thing in the Neighbourhood.

Seeing as yesterday was Friday the 13th and there is a puppet king for that, I thought I’d share some thoughts on one of the more obscure inspirations for ‘In Your Neighbourhood’. If you watch the video and listen to the glockenspiel melody, they might summon to mind elements of the US children’s television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. It wouldn’t be a completely wild connection to make.

Mr. Rogers’ Neighbourhood wasn’t a show I ever watched as a child (although I did avidly watch fellow PBS network show Sesame Street which of course has its own neighbourhood-based song) but something I stumbled on by accident when reading a seemingly endless feed of grim news. It was the “look for the helpers” quote which caught my eye and led me to clips of the series on YouTube. I’d sat there ready to roll my eyes at a bunch of naff characters making flutes out of vegetables or laugh at some stuffy presenter, but to watch it is to feel like you have momentarily stepped inside an entirely different world, with its charmingly bizarre puppets and unparalleled, deliberately slow delivery, which gently encourages its young audience to be present, tolerant, engaged and visible, without being patronising. In one episode, Mr. Rogers talks about managing feelings, acknowledging and dealing with them constructively, as opposed to the advice erring on the side of suppressing them (which although relevant now, is a whole other conversation). His speech at an awards ceremony where he times the audience in near silence whilst asking them to think of someone who has “loved them into being”, is capable of disarming even the most militant of misery guts. Even if you can’t get behind any of that, he successfully sued the KKK for targeting children with racist messages, rallied for VCR taping of programmes, gave George Romero his first filming job and introduced musicians such as Wynton Marsalis and experimental pioneers Bruce Haack and Esther Nelson to an audience of kids who may not have experienced jazz or electronic music otherwise.

Where the song ‘In Your Neighbourhood’ differs though, is in the erosion of belonging and highlighting the creeping influence of pure nostalgia, which brings so much into conflict, often without any good rationale behind it. A few months before I moved from my hometown to a more remote hillside, I felt like many people in the UK, weirdly unsettled and like I didn’t really understand people’s motivations for things anymore. I couldn’t find the helpers. My sense of place felt warped, because of a negativity I couldn’t quite comprehend. If only the ‘good old days’ we’d alluded to were the good old days of ‘the neighborhood’, where, seemingly, everyone and anyone was welcome.

Ahead of the release of single ‘In Your Neighbourhood’ this Friday (06.10.2017), I’ve designed a few Curxes x Mercht t-shirts featuring The Captain, Flamingo (constructed by Mitchel Wang) and Herman the Cat from the accompanying video. 

They’re available online for a very limited time and you can browse all of the designs here. Mercht also offer worldwide shipping options so you you can be part of the neighbourhood wherever you are.

P. S. If you’re a Bandcamp paid subscriber who’d like to purchase a tee - please drop me a line and I’ll still honour the physical merch discount by email once the tees are posted. Thanks!

‘Uniseum’ is taken from the forthcoming album, ’Gilded Cage’, due for release 20.10.17. Go to robertafidora.bandcamp.com/neighbourhood to support this release and future projects. Thank you.

Directed by Rob Luckins.