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Welcome to Cathode: experimental electronica from
Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Hello there. Would you like to join the cathode email list?
email cathode at mail
( at ) cathode dot org dot uk
site by european animal (contact tom dot storey at gmail
dot com).
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SPARKLE PLENTY
ALBUM OUT NOW
1.
Stabiliser City (listen on myspace)
2. Dream
Feeder
3. Another
Wish (listen on myspace)
4. Control
& Restraint
5.
Structure Hunger
6. Without
Memory or Desire
7. Piper
Alpha
8.
Brockenspectre
9. Nightly
Builds
CD/download on
Expanding
Records.
Download it from
bleep.com
In
Newcastle:
buy the CD from the nice people at
Alt-Vinyl,
a record shop
Online,
buy it from Norman
Records or Boomkat
See
videos for several tracks from the album on the Cathode YouTube
channel
Some
kind people had these words to describe the record:
"lovely
music" - Stuart
Maconie, BBC 6Music
“the
relationships between rhythm and texture are always complex and uneasy,
never benign or predictable. Plenty here indeed." - David
Stubbs, The Wire, May
2009.
“It's
good quality well produced electronica … Lots of tinkles,
beats, whizzes and clicks all combine to make a near ear treat. Comes
in a lush digipack …Tasty!” – Norman
Records
“timelessly
warm, tuneful electronica … A very fine album from the
ever-consistent Expanding and a great return to solo recording for
Cathode” – Boomkat
Here's a kind review
from Foxy
Digitalis
and some more kind
words from Metro
“Sparkle Plenty” - the second album
from
Cathode - couples the precision and warmth of the debut with a richer
sonic palette – for instance, the skittering improv
percussion of
“Dream Feeder”, the strings, flutes and piano of
“Without Memory Or Desire”, or the battered
acoustic guitar
and ticking clocks of “Nightly Builds”.
Centrepiece
of the album is “Structure Hunger”, a juddering
serialist-krautrock wonder, which has its origins in a collaborative
project with film-maker Adam Finlay at Newcastle’s Tyneside
Cinema to provide new soundtracks to a batch of vintage
colour-saturated summertime movies.
The title “Sparkle Plenty” comes from developmental
psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist Daniel
Stern’s
work on infant development. “Sparkle
Plenty” is his
phrase for children whose way of coping with caregivers who are
unresponsive or depressed is to “sparkle”
– with lots
of smiles, activity and excitement, that masks the child’s
authentic (possibly much lonelier) emotional state.
It’s an
apposite title for the record; Cathode’s music has always
been
unashamedly about creating something beautiful, which acts to sweeten
something that’s much more melancholy
underneath.
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GHOST
TRACE STELLAR
free live set for download
Ghost
Trace Stellar
was an evening of covers and interpretations of 1920s and 30s
out-of-copyright folk, blues, jazz and music hall from the Open Music
Archive, which took place at the Star & Shadow Cinema,
Newcastle
upon Tyne, on 17 July 2009.
Audio & Video downloads of Cathode's set performed on the night
(skeletal, stretched and static-laden empty-dancehall
reverberations of the source material) are available here
and here.
OUSEBURN BOATHOUSE
free
improvised live set for download
On
9th May 2009 Cathode played an improvised live set at the Ouseburn
Boathouse in Newcastle, at the kind behest of estimable headliners Lanterns On
The Lake.
This was experimental in the proper sense - a first road test for a
totally improvised live set, moving away from straight performances of
previously recorded cathode songs to something more minimal, textured
and performed. It was also a first experiment with live-triggered
visuals. This work-in-progress can be downloaded
in sweet 320kbps here
The live visuals for the three pieces can be seen on
YouTube here
WARM
DIGITS MYSPACE SITE
Warm Digits, the collaborative improv project featuring Steve Jefferis
(Cathode) and Andrew Hodson (The Matinee
Orchestra) finally
has a Myspace site.
You can hear & download edited highlights from our
recent
live show at the Distraction Weekender at The Cluny, Newcastle upon
Tyne. We hope to be making some recordings for
an album soon.
CATHODE
ON YOUTUBE!
There's now a cathode
"channel" (as is the modern parlance) on YouTube.
Most of the films are adapted from the visuals that go with the Cathode
live set, and include edited versions of six (count 'em!) songs from
the new album, Sparkle Plenty:
The quality of YouTube's encoding leaves a bit to be desired - it
doesn't seem to be able to deal at all with the full-flicker effect of
"Brockenspectre", which seemingly gets deleted each time I upload the
proper version - or maybe Mr Tube employes some exploitable youngsters
to weed out anything too avant-garde for his tastes.
You can also see an edit of "The Texture Of Democracy", a film made for
Northern Architecture last year about the wonders of Newcastle Civic
Centre, with sound by Rory OCDC; "Sundowning", the collboration with
video artist Rob Kennedy from a few years back; and "On Demand", one of
the AV Festival Richard Fenwick collaborations.
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