The Pop Goes The Revolution Sessions

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Pop Goes The Revolution is now in its third series at Subcity Radio, curating unsigned and independent music from Scotland and the rest of the UK since 2008. As part of a one off the show brought in four of Scotland’s best unsigned acts to play an exclusive Subcity Radio session. These 11 tracks are all taken from that session.

The show invited two of their favourite live acts - Endor and Cancel The Astronauts - as well as two bands they had never played and had overlooked in the past - White Heath and Tango In The Attic.

After the show was broadcast the show asked people to vote for their favourite songs from the sets via the show’s Facebook page. The 11 songs with the most votes are here to download and keep.

You can listen to the rest of these recordings, including full sets by each of the bands at the Pop Goes The Revolution Sessions

Endor (solo)
Without The Help Of Sparks
Chapel Doors

White Heath
Election Day
Sunday In Fragments
7:38

Tango In The Attic
Leftside
(Unnamed New Song)
The Letting Go

Cancel The Astronauts
Animal Love Match
She Said She Loved Somebody Else
Love Backwards

Photo by Moniker42

Posted at 18:59, 2nd December 2010

Update // World AIDs Day 01/12/10

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World AIDs Day started back in 1988 as a memorial to the victims of the disease. Despite us knowing a lot more about HIV/AID's attitudes and fears about the disease have remained largely unchanged. There are currently:

* 33.4 million people living with HIV worldwide * 31.3 million adults * 15.7 million women * 2.1 million children under 15

Here we have a podcast with an interview with Alison Lord of the Terrence Higgin's Trust. The motto is wear and condom and get tested regularly. Don't put yourself at risk.

Give your support to World AID's Day

Posted at 16:15, 28th November 2010

Eric La Casa & Jean-Luc Guionnet // House

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Two of Europe's leading field recordists: Eric La Casa and Jean-Luc Guionnet, produced what Barry Esson (a curator of the Instal festival) describes as “a series of un-edited, one-shot subjective sonic portraits”. The recordings were investigations into the spaces people live in and their relationship with music and sound. The series of blurry audio networks questioned cause and effect between residents and musicians.

The ongoing project, entitled House, followed protocols (available via Eric La Casa's website) in four Glaswegian houses. I asked the artists about the reasons behind undertaking this project, their intentions with these protocols and the results of this process.

According to Eric La Casa, the reasons they undertook this process was “because we wanted to answer a very specific question, the main one was how and why are you listening to what you are listening to in your house...we wanted to use the music that people listen to in their house as the sound of this house.”

A result of this process is, as Jean-Luc Guionnet explained that “the music you hate, you can really like it in this context. You hear it through all this, through what the person is telling you about it, through his space...his life. For me, its very touching, I didn't know any of the music before, I didn’t care about the music before, but now I have a link in my brain with this music because of them.”

House like other field recordings has scientific practices at its core. The artists explained this in the lobby of the hotel they were staying in during the Uninstal festival: ”We have a lot of distance with it at the same time, if we want to measure a space with a sound, like here in this hotel, we will put a sound here and listen to it all over the hotel. The best way to do this is to put some perfect white noise here, very loud and see how it resonates around the building.”

House differs from a purely scientific process, because it doesn’t analyse those exact measurements, as Jean-Luc explained further: “We used use the music that people choose, so it doesn't measure anything at the end, its like we are measuring but we don't, its like we use the way we should do it but we don't do it the proper way. We do it with stupid music instead, not because its stupid, but its because its music. It shouldn’t be music to do that, but in the end it still measures something --its more about the thoughts of a person. For example, if this person is listening to his or her music in the kitchen and when we go with microphones into the toilet to see how this music is going in the toilet. It means that this person, who is listening to music in the kitchen, when they go to the toilet, that's how the music will resonate in the persons head. This is a lot of information about this space and this person. We forget about the exact measurement, but we learn a lot.”

Arika who program the Uninstal and annual Instal festival (a festival that examines the very definitions and boundaries of music) favour a academic almost scientific approach to music, but its Arika’s passion for the experimental that informs its programming and makes their annual Instal festival such an intense and thrilling experience. It is, as Barry Esson explains, “about thinking music”. The festival is concerned with authorship and challenging the perception of an audience as a single passive group.

The audio associated with this post contains an interview with Jean-Luc Guionnet and Eric La Casa and a one-shot recording that followed a similar set of protocols to House, but instead of investigating the intimate space of individuals, it explores the Tramway as an exhibition space and a place of work.

The House project and the questions is poses is still being interpreted and developed. The Tipping Point, the second stage of House, which Jean-Luc describes as “more like the feedback of the person” (a process where they give the person the microphones and headphones) is further explored by Jean-Luc Guionnet, Eric La Casa, Gaël Leveugle & Seijiro Murayama at the Tramway on Sunday November 14th as part of the Instal Festival, continuing the “endless loop” they describe in this interview.

Image by Instal// Words by Josh HIll

Posted at 17:49, 13th November 2010

RM Hubbert and Wounded Knee // Garden Party

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We decided to open up our back-garden to Subcity's club night regulars, punks, older dudes, passerbys and even a bunch of kids. Falling somewhere between field recording, musical performance and party, we recorded two unique performers in a cacophonic mix of improvised performance, audience, bird-song, aeroplanes, mobile phones, guitar cases, cars and drain gurgles.

RM Hubbert's intense guitar technique collects styles from around the world, such as flamenco and taiko - and fuses them with his Glaswegian post-rock roots (he was formerly a member of El Hombre Trajeado), his debut album 'First & Last' is available in physical or pay-what-you-want download.

Wounded Knee is a vocal artist from Edinburgh, he incorporates a postmodern Hebridean waulking song ethic with one of the most accomplished dramatic tenors in contemporary music. Song, spoken word and sound effects drawing influences from as far afield as Gaelic psalm, improvisation and throat techniques à la Bobby McFerrin and even scat. At the heart, a modern symbiosis of folk and mantra, culminating in an artist who is unique, playful and captivating.

Photo by Alistair Clark

Posted at 22:11, 26th May 2010

Finlay Archibald // Glasgow Cen Pirate Party PPC

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Debate is Free is interviewing candidates standing in the various Glasgow constituencies in the upcoming UK General Election. First up is the Pirate Party's only Scottish candidate: Finlay Archibald who is standing in Glasgow Central.

Archibald is 19 and a maths student at Glasgow's Strathclyde University. He has been heavily involved in running the Scottish branch of the Pirate Party UK. Since joining the party, Archibald founded the first Pirate student society in the UK and he wants to engage with the people of Glasgow to give them an MP that they can be proud of, something which he feels Labour has proven they cannot provide.

You can find more information about the Pirate Party UK and its candidates on their website.

A full list of candidates standing in the Glasgow Central constituency is below.

Finlay Archibald Pirate Party UK

John Bradley Conservative

Ian Holt British National Party

James Nesbitt Scottish Socialist Party

Osama Saeed Scottish National Party

Anas Sarwar Labour

Ramsay Urquhart UK Independence Party

Alastair Whitelaw Green

Chris Young Liberal Democrat

If you are a candidate or part of a campaign team and you want to put your candidate forward for interview email: debate@subcity.org.

Posted at 21:18, 27th April 2010

Dirty Keys // Dirty Keys Please

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Dirty Keys formed in late 2009 in Glasgow, under the leadership of local scene veteran Dave Gillies, sometime member of, amongst others, Jonny and the Robots, Izo Fitzroy & The Royal Bastards and The Martial Arts. Tired of playing other people’s music, Gillies decided to set out with his own material, self-described ‘piano rock’, citing as key influences the likes of Randy Newman and Ben Folds – strong melodies, witty lyrics, and impeccable musicianship. Having spent some time in the studio working on material with producer Brian Young, whose prior credits include albums by John Martyn and Simple Minds, the band is set to become a fixture on the city’s live scene throughout the coming year.

Left of the Dial // Photo by Dirty Keys

Posted at 22:33, 20th April 2010