To celebrate reaching the ripe old age of 10 we produced this super limited edition 7″ vinyl with tracks by two of Birmingham’s most talented acts, Modified Toy Orchestra + Einstellung. The package also contains a beautifully designed 18 page booklet with tonnes of photos to commemorate our last decade of activity from SUNN 0))) shows in drained pools to Giant (aka Shepard Fairey) exhibition way back in 2000 .
And at only £5 these are a real bargain BUY NOW

(Only 300 produced – get them while you can)

Also available as a high fashion accessory a very limited edition enamel badge also available from our SHOP design by the pretty amazing Francesca Williams.

You too can be as cool as this lady…

“Last night at the Cinema I served a woman wearing a steel Capsule pin. She
seemed genuinely astounded when I complemented her on her badge and I looked like the coolest popcorn shoveler who has ever lived. If you live Birmingham and don’t know who Capsule are then you’re probably not actually living in Birmingham, you’re probably just existing, shuffling along mindlessly in a grey musicless world. If you’d like to learn a little about Capsule you can make a start by reading their new zine, a shamelessly self promotional little document which features n article about Skweee by Total Boner Mike Coley. Maybe he’ll eventually get around to posting in on here but in the meantime head over to Capsule’s site to read it.”
www.totallybone.com/

Review of EINSTELLUNG & CLUSTER at Town Hall Birmingham by Paul Jeffery photos by Katja Ogrin

Cluster, with their roots in the late 60s, defined the roots of everything from experimental ambient to dance, with a mighty dollop of krautrock thrown-in for good measure!
I’d not set foot in Brum Town Hall before, but it’s a cracking venue, all Victorian pomp and splendour sympathetically and expensively restored. Acoustics are good, spacious, but easily filled by relatively modest amp stacks.

First on were a band I was only very vaguely aware of – Einstellung, a Brum-based four piece relentlessly compared to Neu!. They offer-up a kind of ambient drone-metal, heavily guitar-lead, and occasionally pitching and bucking with some ferocity within the confines of their longish set pieces, ultimately yielding a sound that fits within the looser boundaries of Krautrock. These are not wet-behind-the-ears newcomers either, having all served time in other successful bands before. Their particular fusion rocks too – and I have honestly never heard guitar feedback used quite so creatively or effectively as in their set closer. On reflection I would have been pleased if I’d showed-up for this set alone.

Read Full review HERE

For your viewing pleasure and to warm you up for forthcoming announcements for Supersonic 2010 – IRON LUNG live at Supersonic 09 – absolute comic genius! Look out for a live release coming soon…

still a handful of Harvey Milk live vinyl from Supersonic 08 BUY NOW

Ben Graham from The Quietus talks to Einstellung, Birmingham based Apache beat, interstellar overlords

Formed in Birmingham in 2003 by ex-members of stoner rock band Sally, industrial metal titans Godflesh, Kat Bjelland’s Katastrophy Wife and post-rock/ shoegaze outfit Grover, Einstellung have stripped the motorik chassis of the first Neu! Album down to its essential cogs and gears, and fitted it to a custom-built hot rod roadster, equal parts Sonic Youth skronk, My Bloody Valentine narcotic noise and Black Sabbath hard rock. The resulting album, Wings of Desire, is finally available in the UK as one of the first releases on Capsule Records, brought to you by the fine people behind Birmingham’s unspeakably excellent Supersonic Festival. Released as an exquisitely-designed limited edition of 500 heavyweight vinyl double albums, Wings of Desire is a record that needs to be listened to loud, its six lengthy instrumental tracks (all given cod-German titles) building from droning, lazily melodic beginnings to monstrous, fuzz-blasted raptures and epiphanies, via sonorous avalanches of warped and clanging sturm und drang. We spoke to Einstellung guitarist Andrew Parker on the eve of a major show opening for Cluster at Birmingham Town Hall on the February 11, where the band will play their forthcoming second album, And The Rest Are Thunder, in its entirety.

Read the full interview HERE

Einstellung support legendary Krautrock duo CLUSTER on Thursday 11th Feb at Town Hall Birmingham
Tickets available from https://tickets.thsh.co.uk 0121 780 3333

You can purchase ‘Wings Of Desire‘ limited edition double vinyl from our SHOP – cover designed by artist Lucy McLauchlan (only 500 ever made)

Jenny Moore and Lisa Meyer are Capsule – Birmingham promoters of great alternative music and arguably the sole reason why great alternative artists visit the home of heavy rock music. In 2003 they launched Supersonic festival, which has carved out a reputation as the best and loudest noise festival in the UK – if not the world –seeing headliners including Mogwai and Sunn O))) – and has an undeniable knack for getting the world’s best alt. bands onto a UK stage for the very first time. Last year saw the first ever UK show for Italian soundtrack legends Goblin (whose credits include George A Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Dario Argento’s Suspiria) – it was truly a magical moment.

Supersonic takes the best parts of city and field festivals and infuses them into one. The festival site – Birmingham’s Custard Factory – is closed off from the rest of the world, yet you still get to sleep in a comfy bed and have a shower every morning. The pool that provides the centrepiece to the Custard Factory is drained and made into the main stage, whilst readymade venues become other stages and a cavernous warehouse provides a second large stage, tailormade for the incessantly loud noise Supersonic has become known for. It’s a one of a kind, and the people who attend are described by Lisa as “people who want to experience something new and aren’t afraid to go see something a bit different, it’s definitely not for fans of playlists.”

READ FULL ARTICLE

What is it about that beat they call Motorik? The beat Klaus Dinger, its ‘inventor’ preferred to call ‘Apache’, that people generally associate with Krautrock, although its appearance in this particular genre is limited to a handful of tunes only? On the face of it, a four-four beat of simply ‘bass-bass-snare-bass’, or as I sometimes prefer to play it, ‘bass-bass-bass-snare’ with no accent or groove, shouldn’t really be all that should it?

Yet to me and many others (according to the results of a quick Google of ‘Motorik’) this beat is so much more. When I hear Dinger doing his thing on those opening tracks of the Neu! albums, and in my opinion no-one did it quite like him, I feel like I’m setting off on a journey, a mystery trip with no destination in mind. I’m on an inter city train, soothed and hypnotised by the, steady grooveless, yet somehow groovy rhythm, gazing through the window, my mind registering the evolving guitar lines like the passing scenery, the occasional reversed guitar or drum fill like a sudden tunnel or passing train on the other line, but always focussed on the beat, always propelled forward.

I was first introduced to this beat through that esteemed shaman of all things Krautrock – Julian Cope and his ‘Jehovakill’ album of 1992. The track in question ‘The Subtle Energies Commission’ certainly had the ‘Apache’ beat but was verging more towards spacerock. No matter, from there a whole Neu! journey unfolded in front of me. The early works of Stereolab, especially the ‘Transient Random-Noise Bursts…’ album and ‘Refried Ectoplasm’ retrospective had me hooked. Later came Primal Scream’s ‘Shoot Speed Kill Light’, to me the perfect motorik battering ram, underpinning Kevin Sheilds’ squalling guitars and ‘More Light’ by J Mascis and the Fog.

In Einstellung, we often use a motorik beat to convey a sense of movement, a vehicle to link specific sections of music together, a kind of “Ok, we’ve done that bit, get back in the car-we’re off to the next bit” to the listener. Other times I might just use that beat as a solid foundation for the guitars to gradually build upon for extended periods, taking the listener out of themselves, warping their perception of time, until something comes along, maybe a little deliberate stumble in the rhythm to awake them from their daydream.

For me, the music writer and critic Douglas Wolk summed this up perfectly in his piece for the Boston Phoenix -‘The old Neu!-rediscovering the roots of motorik’ when he said “Dinger and Rother made listeners wait and wait for something to change by more than degrees, or for a vanished rhythm to reappear, and their fans learned to love the waiting game”.

The full article is a concise summary of the classic Neu! albums and can be found at http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/music/other_stories/documents/01779241.htm

Si Rider – Einstellung

Thursday 11th Feb 2010

Cluster play Town Hall Birmingham

with support from Einstellung

Doors 8pm

https://tickets.thsh.co.uk

Zun Zun Egui

This was an amazing gig bringing together the energy and anarchy of the punk rock band The Ex with the drive of Brass Unbound, a brass section with Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson on baritone and tenor sax, Roy Paci on trumpet and Wolter Wierbos on trombone.  The sheer volume of sound and the swirling rhythms created a stunning degree of excitement.  Basically it was led by The Ex with weird but wonderful vocals and an excellent drummer.  I am often critical of the limitations of rock drummers, but this one (sadly I didn’t get her name) really drove the band in a very interesting way totally different from what jazz drummers do.  Brass Unbound essentially added riffs that blended very effectively and excitingly with the The Ex rhythms.

I have one fairly major reservation.  As the gig progressed, I began to want Brass Unbound to vary their role more and to have rather more freedom.  There were some solos: a particular good one from Ken, one of Mats’ almost trademark screaming solos, and punchy contributions from Paci and Wierbos, but more would have been nice.

This was, however, another good example of rock and jazz mixing naturally and successfully.  It wasn’t jazz rock as that term has become associated with a certain style that emerged in the 1960s and 70s.  Here it was a rock gig incorporating strong elements of free jazz , but in a very structured way.  And it certainly wasn’t jazz drawing on rock.  We will have to start thinking of new names to capture this important and exciting music.

Review by Tony Dudley Evans of Birmingham Jazz
Photos by Jenny Moore

Capsule Film from Film Ficciones on Vimeo.

For your viewing pleasure – a short film to celebrate our 10 years of work.
This amazing bit of documentary footage was created by Scott aka Film Ficciones