News, Schmooze and Summer Time Blues

The title of this post might be a little misleading, yes there will be news, however, I am not too sure about the schmooze and blues. It just seemed like a good idea as it kind of rhymed, plus my head is slightly frazzled after far too much alcohol abuse, so it's the bst you're going to get from me today I am afraid...

First off, I have a wee reminder that this Thursday we are putting on our third live Peenko Session at the Hidden Lane Tea Room with Randolph's Leap, I Build Collapsible Mountains and all the way from the US of A, we have Daniel G Harmann, who is over here on a tour of the UK. Regular visitors will have heard me banging on about Randolph's Leap and I Build Collapsible Mountains for a while now, having put out records with both artists it made sense to me to ask them to come along and record a session. If anyone is interested in coming along for the evening, then let me know asap as we still a handful of spaces left, you could still pre-book a space here.

It's been a while since weve heard anything from the Lava Experiments, or at least it's been a while since I mentioned them on the blog. They've been busy working away on their new EP, 'Love Lust and Loss' which comes out tomorrow (30th May), to celebrate it's release they're having a launch night at the Captains Rest this coming Saturday, the 4th of June. As wee teaser the band have let me give away one of the new songs from the EP which you can stream/download below.

The Lava Experiments - Time to Forget

Over The Wall finally come to the end of their 'Around the Isle's in 80 days tour' next weekend with shows in Edinburgh and Glasgow. On Friday 3rd June, they're playing at Nice N Sleazy's in Glasgow with support from John Knox Sex Club, then on Saturday (4th) they're through in Edinburgh at the Cabaret Voltaire, with Cancel The Astronauts and Washington Irving doing the honours . Tickets for both gigs are just £5 and doors are at 7pm. The boys round up the tour with a gig at in their own flat, which will be available to stream thanks courtesy of the awesome folk at Glasgow Podcart.

Over The Wall-History Of British Welfarism 1945-1984 (Vic Galloway Session)


The renowned music charity Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy in Scotland and Creative Scotland have teamed up to launch a once in a lifetime opportunity for new and emerging Scottish bands to win The Big Apple Award, which will see the winner playing at the prestigious Scottish Music Awards held annually in Glasgow this November, and in New York City with the American-Scottish Foundation during Scotland Week 2012. Bands that enter will be short listed by a panel of music industry experts over the summer before the top five are selected to play their own gig at the Garage in Glasgow. The winner will then be revealed at this years, The Scottish Music Awards – The Tartan Clefs which take place this November. The winning band will then be given the opportunity to show off their skills In New York as part of Scotland Week 2012
The competition is being promoted in association with News of the World’s A-Listed magazine and is open to Scottish bands only. Artists should send demos along with any pictures into the A-Listed magazine office as follows:
The Big Apple Award Entry A-LISTED - Scottish News of the World, 6th Floor, Guild Hall, 57 Queen Street, Glasgow G1 3EN

Next weekend sees the return of the annual Edinburgh Meadows festival, which boasts an array of local talent including Foxgang, Jesus H. Foxx, Stagger Rats and the The Pineapple Chunks. Further details on times and who else is playing can be found here.

I'll finish this wee post off with a video from Glasgow folk four-piece, The Porch Song Anthology. Who released their new EP The Late Mournings a few weeks back, but I only just got round to watching it, my bad, they're good though...

Scots Way-Hay - The Artists Album of the Year (Part 3)

When I sent emails out to all of the bands that I have featured this year as part of my Scots Way-Hay posts I honestly didn't expect to get much of a response. Turns out that I was completely wrong, as I have been inundated by bands wanting to share what's been floating their boat this year. This week we have an array of choices from Bronto Skylift, Admiral Fallow, Kid Canaveral and the Lava Experiments, there are some cracking choices in there, plus a lot of stuff that passed me by. I'll defo being making sure that I check them all out though. Right, let's get on with the show, here's this weeks picks....

Abner Trio - The Giant Crushes You

chosen by Niall, Bronto Skylift

"It's amazing and subtle and uplifting and feels like an album.And the art rules"

Field Music - Measure

chosen by Sarah Hayes (flute,vocals), Admiral Fallow

"I didn't realise it was a double album when i got it and was concerned it would be a bit self indulgent but needn't have worried. Just lots of great pop songs with some quirky touches."

(also loved 'Ian Stephenson-Line up')

Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma

chosen by Joe Rattray (bass), Admiral Fallow

"It's a really dense electronica/hip-hop album with jazz undertones and a great collaboration with Thom Yorke (...And The World Laughs With You)"

(also loved 'The Phantom Band-The Wants')

Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz

chosen by Phil Hague (drums), Admiral Fallow

"In Stevens own words "The Age of Adz, is, in some ways, a result of the process of working through health issues and getting much more in touch with my physical self. That's why I think the record's really obsessed with sensation and has a hysterical melodrama to it"

Laura Marling - I Speak Because I Can

chosen by Kevin Brolly (clarinet, keys), Admiral Fallow

"Marling's second lp released on 22 March 2010 was produced by the great Ethan Johns and has a more mature sound and lyricism, dealing with "responsibility, particularly the responsibility of womanhood."

(also loved Meursault-All Creatures Will Make Merry)

Local Natives - Gorilla Manor

chosen by Louis Abbott (songs), Admiral Fallow

"A brilliantly catchy guitar record with a lot of interesting harmonies and hooks. The band self funded the record which is pretty admirable these days. It was technically released in the UK at the end of '09 but in the U.S in Feb this year. Sneaky eh."

(also loved Frightened Rabbit-The Winter of Mixed Drinks)

SWANS - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky

chosen by Fraser, The Lava Experiments

"To those familiar with SWANS ignore the next few sentences. To the uninitiated, SWANS were established in 1982 by Michael Gira in NYC. They released in excess of 20 albums (studio and live) before their demise in 1997. During their career they produced some of the most aggressive, brutal, visceral, yet beautiful music I've ever experienced.

In January this year Gira announced that "SWANS were not dead". 'My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky' was released in September this year and for me it is the best album of the year.

Listening to the album wraps me in a blanket of melancholy; a rather comfortable blanket that has the converse reaction of being remarkably uplifting. Mountainous challenges no longer seem insurmountable. Irritations dissolve into the background noise, where they deserve to stay. This album makes me feel better.

It has the blueprint of the early day SWANS; a grotesque, relentless, pulsating backbone. Early SWANS are definitely an acquired taste and one that the majority would be delighted to by pass completely. But, this album is very accessible. That is probably due to the undeniable nod towards mid era SWANS where the feeling was more avantgarde psychedelic folk. There's a maturity in Gira's work that's inevitable with a musical career spanning almost 30 years. Topped off with some of the best vocals Gira has recorded (in my humble opinion) this is an outstanding piece of work and one I'd urge any reader to have a go at!"

The Noyelle Beat by Standard Fare

chosen by David, Kid Canaveral

"I had heard good things about the band that produced my favourite album of 2010, but like so many other bands that I hear good things about, I just hadn’t had time to check them out. Luckily, this changed when we (Kid Canaveral) were asked by Half My Heart Beats to play with Standard Fare at their night in Glasgow. They were absolutely brilliant, and afterwards I couldn’t buy a copy of The Noyelle Beat off of them quickly enough. We were off on a short UK tour after the Glasgow show and SF’s album was on repeat almost the whole way.


There is something really rather special about this album, Emma Kupa’s vocals in particular. She has a rare talent of not only singing the lyrics, but properly emoting them, sucking the listener into the situation and immersing them entirely in the song. I defy you to listen to ‘Love Doesn’t Just Stop’ (which is the best song I’ve heard all year, and an absolutely devastating opener for an album) and not have the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when Emma hollers that note at the end of the verses. The playful interaction of Emma and Dan’s vocals twisting around each other on ‘Nuit Avec Une Amis’ is a real joy to listen to, detailing the dangers and the subtleties of a possibly (probably) ill-advised liaison with a friend. ‘Philidelphia’ is just the sweetest song, and anyone who has been separated for a time from a loved one, over any distance whatsoever, will be able to relate to it. The three-piece instrumentation of the album could well have been limiting to a band with less imagination, but the wonderful rhythms and changes therein, that are best exemplified by ‘Let’s Get Back Together’ and ‘I Know It’s Hard’, show that that The ‘Fare are not ones for simply knocking out “Four-to-the-Floor” indie by numbers.

Another real strength to this album are the vivid pictures it paints, not merely through the words, but the way the are delivered. Add the vocal performance and musical accompaniment to “my favourite thing/Saturday, Sunday morning/Dancing with you/In the living room” on ‘Let’s get back together’ and it changes from something that could be awfully twee written down, to something beautiful, a passage in the song that takes you right to the feeling of an after hours moment with a loved one, the ordinary living room and the inebriated dancing becoming something amusing, touching, daft, intimate: just one of those wonderful moments. Similarly, ‘Wrong Kind of Trouble’ has a very simple set up, the music adding a slightly hazy quality to the situation described, and the pay-off of the last line, again, is all about the resigned, heart-broken sigh of the delivery. Just brilliant. Singles ‘Fifteen’ and ‘Dancing’, are joyous pieces of dancefloor-filling indiepop, with the latter being a close-to-perfect single (well, perfect actually) and providing Scott and I with a song to sing (terribly) whilst shambling out of a post-show club in Leicester. And many times since. It also contains one of the wisest couplets of recent times with “There’s always gonna come a time when we don’t know the answers/Always gonna come a time when we should just go dancing”. The wonderful opening drawl of the first few lines of ‘Wow’ is what I have been bothering my neighbours with by belting them out in the shower for the past couple of months. It's a brilliantly judged closing track for the album.


Yes, the lyrical content is something that many bands have done over and over (well, most bands): love and loss, desire, longing, libido, friendships, mistakes, dancing and drinking, but very, very few manage to add that little bit of magic that Standard Fare do, the bit that a listener can really connect to. I have read and heard many people comparing Standard Fare to the Popguns, and while The Popguns are responsible for one of my favourite singles ever, I think that Standard Fare have surpassed The Popguns back catalogue with ‘The Noyelle Beat’. I don’t think that The Popguns ever bettered their third single “Waiting for the Winter”, which is a perfect pop song (one of the b-sides ‘Because he wanted to” was wonderful too, mind), whereas I would rate at least a couple of the songs Standard Fare’s debut as equals to this, and I would say ‘Love Doesn’t Just Stop’ and ‘Dancing’ actually top it.

There is wit, sincerity and real joy in so much of the album. None of it is laboured or tortured with emotion. It is unpretentious, genuine, heartfelt and moving, without ever being earnest or sickeningly twee. I absolutely love it, and that doesn’t happen to me often at all. I haven’t listened to album this much since ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’ came out, and there isn’t much higher praise than that".

Scots Way-Hay #20 - The Lava Experiments

by Heidi Kuisma

For any of you that have been reading my blog for a while now, then you might well remember that I already ran an introducing feature on these guys. Thankfully this time you will have the benefit of having something sensible to read, rather than my rambling attempts to describe the band. Their second volume of their series of 'blackbody' EP's was a cracking wee voyage into the world of psychedelia, so when I must admit I was pretty excited when I got sent a copy of the Volume 3, the last in the series. Needless to say it didn't fail to impress, they continue to bring innovative ideas to the table and grow in stature as band at the same time. Ladies and gents, the Lava Experiments.......


Would you care to introduce yourself?

Fraser Rowan – guitar, vocals, laptop programming

Rory McGregor – Bass

Alan Wond - Drums

How would you describe the music you make?

That one used to be a real toughy for us, until Lisa-Marie Ferla (Under The Radar Blog) came along to one of our gigs. She reviewed us and suggested that we are breaking new territory and re-defining genre’s. We didn’t feel the need to argue with that. She described us as “Dark Evolutionary Shoegaze” and “Heart-Achingly Beautiful Post-Rock”. We think that’s spot on. Some Shoegaze can be a bit poppy and formulaic. ‘Dark’ hopefully removes all ambiguity as to which side of the fence we sit on there and the use of ‘evolutionary’ hints towards something new; not the resurgence of another My Bloody Valentine clone. In the same way, there’s a fair amount of Post-Rock that’s just bland. ‘Heart-achingly beautiful’ again clarifies where we sit within the spectrum quite eloquently.

How did you start out making music?

Fraser - I picked up the guitar when I was 13 and have been playing in bands since. I got my first 4-track when I was 19 and started experimenting with sound manipulation. I thought I invented saturating sounds with reverb reversing them and slowing them right down. Gutted to find the Beatles got there first. Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works 1” got me into electronic music in a big way. I’ve been messing around with organic/analogue sounds ever since.

Rory - Reason I picked up the bass: I liked a girl at school, she liked guys in bands. Found out later she preferred guitarists, but by that stage I had fallen in love with playing. Like Fraser and Alan, I’ve also played in a good few bands, both in Aberdeen (my home town) and in Glasgow. Fraser asked me to step in on bass duties till he found a permanent replacement for the previous bassist. I was only supposed to be on loan from my other band, The Sleepwalkers. However, after we played our first gig together (Blackbody Vol II ep launch) Fraser and Alan asked me to join permanently and that was that.

Alan - Music has always been a big part in my life, growing up I was always interested in playing drums. Both my uncle and brother are accomplished drummers. I got my first kit when I was 8 and started in a pipe band when I was 10. I’ve played in a few local bands, but this is the first time I’ve been in a band playing the type of music I really want to play. There’s a real creative feel to what the three of us are doing right now.


Fraser - The Lava Experiments is a project that’s been around in one form or another for about 4 years now, with me starting off writing ambient electronica (mostly with a guitar, a moog and Ableton on my mac) for my own enjoyment. When a mate forced me into playing a gig it was just me playing guitar and singing and the laptop banging out the beats, bass, strings, etc. (Rory was actually at that first gig so I’m surprised he joined the band after hearing it like that). After a few gigs a mate joined playing bass. It wasn’t until Alan joined about 18 months ago that The Lava Experiments started to resemble what we have now. When Rory joined about a year ago our sound transformed entirely. Alan and Rory gelled immediately. A more innovative drums and bass duo I’ve yet to come across.

What process goes into the way you write songs?

It used to be that I would produce rough but complete tunes on the laptop, remove the drums and sometimes the bass and fill in the blanks. Now the process is far less prescribed. We are writing new stuff at the moment and it’s a very different process; one which all three of us are heavily involved. I’ll create a soundscape – just a backbone of a piece then we all set about engineering a structure round about it. This process is far more collaborative than before and, in my opinion, the results are more creative.


Who are your big musical influences?

Fraser - Michael Gira, Boards of Canada, Dextro, This Will Destroy You, UNKLE, the record label Type (eg. Helios, Xela, Deaf Centre, Machinefabriek, etc).
Rory - Bruce Foxton, Chris Squire, New Order, Swervedriver

Alan - Deftones (Abe Cunningham & Chino), Sigur Ros, This Will Destroy You, Taking Back Sunday

What are you all listening to at the moment?

Fraser - Deftones “Diamond Eyes”, The National “High Violet”, UNKLE – “Where Did The Night Fall”, The XX “XX”.
Rory - Arbouretum “Song of the Pearl”, Pale Saints “In Ribbons”, Quack Quack “Slow as an Eyeball”, Soft Machine “Seven”.
Alan – August Burns Red “Constallations”, Deftones “Saturday Night Wrist”, Mew “Frengers”, This Will Destroy You “This Will Destroy You”.


You are currently up to Volume three in your series of EPs, why did you choose to release your music in this way? Do you plan to continue to put stuff out this way or can we expect an album at some point?

The Blackbody trilogy was created as a challenge to my self. It’s hardly original to release music this way but I wanted to do something a little bit different. I’ve always been into ‘collections’ of music and I suppose it was an ambition of mine to create something like that. It worked out better than I had expected to be honest. There’s a real maturation in the quality of the work from I to II to III. I’m delighted with I and II, but I’m most proud of III. Volume III sounds like a band that’s found its sound and identity and probably more importantly is comfortable in that place. We are already writing new stuff and will release that as an album early next year.

What can we expect to see/hear from you in 2010?

The next 12 months will be really important for us as a band. We have a few exciting propositions in the pipelines for live outings later this year but nothing has been confirmed at this time. The key aim for us is to up our profile and get into the festival circuit next summer.

The Lava Experiments - Never Been Lost

The Lava Experiments 'Blackbody trilogy' is available as a set, including their remix EP 'Piecing Memories Together', all for the bargain sum of £12 (including P&P), just head here and order CD Bundle 1. In case you already have one of the four CD's and are interested in getting the other three, they have also created CD Bundle 2. Just highlight the CD that you already have and they will forward the other three for £9 (including £2 P&P). If you fancy catching them live, then you'll be pleased to learn that they are playing Catapult at Maggie Mays in Glasgow on the 12th of August.

The Lava Experiments
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The Lava Experiments return with new EP

Glasgow three-piece Lava Experiments (mind I posted about them a while back) are set to release their new EP, 'Piecing Memories Together (Remixes)' this coming Monday (25th Jan). The EP features remixes of their Blackbody Vol II EP from dan le sac, Pumajaw (ex Loop) and Betamax Warriors.
Initially the EP was going to be a digital only release, but the band have decided that the remixes are too good not be put out in some kind of physical form, so there will be a very limited run of 100 CD's available to buy from their website.
I've embeded all of the songs so you can have a listen and make your own mind up, if it floats your boat then get it bought.

John Wills (Pumajaw/Loop) - A Million Miles From Home


dan le sac - Talentless Hack


To celebrate the release of ‘Piecing Memories Together’, the Lava Experiments are playing at The 13th Note, Friday 29th Jan. Tickets are £5 on the door or £3 in advance from Skiddle.


Betamax Warriors - Thoughts Of Jam Dub


The Lava Experiments - Radio Edit


The Lava Experiments
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Introducing - The Lava Experiments

Since starting this blog last year I have been really fortunate to have 'discovered' lots of Scottish bands, every day something new seems to come to my attention. Some good, some not so good, the Lava Experiments would defintely fall into the good category. In this past year I have come across a few bands that seem to have been influenced by the Beta Band, the main two being Django Djano and FOUND, both of whom seem to have taken the poppier influences and made them their own. The Lava boys seem to have taken the darker elements of the Beta band, fused with a blend of Depeche Mode. The first time I listened to them was on a hazy hungover Saturday, their ambient chilled out sounds nursed me through the pain better than a roll & sausage with can of Irn Bru. Take for example the opening track on their new EP, 'Piecing Memories Together' (listen to it below) the initial build of the song makes you feel like your on some kind of lift off into the unkown, before building slowly into a dream like ambient rollercoaster of fun. Quite simply, wow!

The electronic Glaswegian three-piece originally started out as the solo project of main man, Fraser Rowan, they already have a few releases under their belts, including self released album ' Wavelength' (which you can download for free from the link below) and their 'Solar' EP.
Since 2008, they have been working hard on new material, undertaking a project to release three EP's entitled the 'Blackbody' Volumes. with Vol.1 being release in May of that year.

Vol II, the second EP of the trilogy came out on Monday there, limited to just 100 physical copies, this Ep won't about long. If you fancy getting your hands on a copy then you might still be able to buy a copy here, or you could get your glad rags on and head down to Sleazys tomorrow night for the EP launch (Friday the 4th of September), tickets are a measly £5 if you go here, or alternatively you can stump up £6 at the door. If you can't make it and you leave it too late to buy a physical copy, then you can purchase digital copies from iTunes, Amazon, Napster etc.

For more sensible words on the Lava Experiments go here and here

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Download their debut album 'Wavelength' for FREE