Back Up Your Mp3s: Sky Larkin

This week Neu Magazine celebrates new music in the UK & Ireland. We'd give it a snappy title like "Best of British" but that just makes us think about meat. Mainly Sausages.

In the build up to Sky Larkin's new album "Kaleide" Douglas Adams tells you to “Backup your MP3s guys” in a really funny way. Read or die.

An ipod breaking is always a traumatic experience. The first time it happened to me, I followed the ‘age old’ advice found on the internet of “dropping thy musicke device onto a soft surface.” This didn’t work and I got more and more annoyed until I eventually threw it against my bedroom wall. That was it. It was broken. No coming back.It sat in a bowl along with some uneaten American sweets (bought for the novelty value – I don’t actually like sweet things that much) for a month or so until I thought I’d give it another try and plugged it into my computer. It seemed that all it had needed was a charge. Filled with a new love for the world, and believing that there must, indeed, be some sort of justice I endeavoured to never let this happen again and finally back it up. This never happened, but, I thought “you know, this’ll be fine. I won’t worry about it”. Over the next few months it developed a charming quirk of occasionally crashing when Pause was pressed, and making a strange clicking sound (like the head skipping over the plates, which should have been fixed by the original ‘drop onto carpet’ trick). This may have been due to me insisting on putting it into my shirt pocket, falling asleep, waking up at a service station, bending down to get out of the van and dropping it six feet onto concrete. Quite frequently. Anyway, this stopped after a while and I wiped the sweat from my brow and thought “thank god, it’s repaired itself. I’ll back it up soon!”Then we went to Seattle to record the second record. On the day of the flight home, exhausted but happy, my ipod ran out of battery, I tried to charge it in the airport but to no avail. I tried my trick of holding down the soft reset (Menu + Centre Button) combo for a few minutes. No luck. Nothing I tried would fix it.That was it. I got home. It was still broken. It now sits next to me, in the same bowl full of sweets, with about 60Gb of music on, inaccessible. (Speaking of this, if anyone can get into an iPod Classic – the one with the metal back – please help me.) And so it began, the re-ripping and downloading onto my new iPod. I hate this part. Thank fuck for download codes in vinyl. So here’s the list, at the beginning of the rebuilding of my digital music collection of some songs which I’ve loved for a while, and some which I’ve only recently discovered.

Volcano! –Fire Fire

This is off the album “Beautiful Seizure”. Which is amazing, but a bit spazzy, and this is one of the least spazzy tracks on here that wasn’t Apple or a Gun (because that was the single and totally not mixtapeish). They’re one of the most amazing live bands I’ve ever seen, the amount of feel the drummer puts into his playing is astounding.

Why? – Darla

This is from “The Early Whitney EP” but I got it from the Anticon Label Sampler 1999-2004 album. Anticon is such, such an amazing label. I have total faith in anything they put out, this started with listening to Clouddead in 6th form then Why? and all the Buck 65, Dose One, etc etc tunes that would pop up (on limewire) or introduced to me by my friend Tommy. The first time we went to New York I sat in a sushi bar with a man from Wichita and talked about Anticon for hours one night. This is one of the reasons I like Wichita so much. One of the best and worst moments of my life to date was meeting Yoni Wolf on the last night of the Los Campesinos! tour in San Francisco last year. I made a bit of a dick of myself as it was the first time I’ve been genuinely star struck. Ask me about it some time. It was horrible.

The Most Serene Republic – Proposition 61

Arts & Crafts = another amazing record label with a consistently good roster. That’s it really. It’s a great song from a great album and it was in my girlfriend’s car’s CD player constantly for a long time, so it was one of the first things that came to mind.

Algernon Cadwallader – Motivational Song

I have no real reason for loving this band so much. I’m just going to quote their last.fm page “ it’s like American Football meets SOMETHING FUCKIN’ COOL THAT I CANNOT EXPLAIN AT ALL. “That’s pretty much it.

Yuck – Georgia

I don’t know why, but for a long time I thought that this band was going to be fucking Chillwave, mainly because of the people that had recommended them to me. They’re not though, they’re just awesome. Their drummer has an afro and is from New Jersey, and knows someone who used to go out with “The Situation” from Jersey Shore. But they’re more than that. Much more. (This was my favourite song of theirs that I could find on hype machine)

Sparklehorse – Happy Man (Memphis Version)

Good Morning Spider was the one of my 10 minidiscs I had when I was 14, I stole it from the drummer in my band and listened to it a LOT. Until my minidisc player broke after someone threw it at my head. Then Mark Linkous died and I remembered how much I LOVED this band. Hopefully the Dangermouse/Linkous/Byrne LP will get a release this summer, because it’s great. You can buy the 12” promo copy from ebay but don’t bother - it’s quite a crappy pressing, wait for the proper one.

Mechanical Owl – Brittle II

In case you haven’t read my Wikipedia page, I did a Music Technology BTEC ND at college in Wrexham (and Physics A2 Level yeah?). It was a rubbish course, at a rubbish college, in a rubbish town. Made enjoyable by an incredible, caring course leader (who had a serious – but non-fatal – heart attack at 35 from all the stress of us), one tutor who left to have a baby at 55 and on his way out expressed his hatred for the institution by shredding all of his documents; including marks for a whole year. Our course leader had to guess those... and some seriously good fellow coursemates.Mike (and Matt) Mechanical Owl was one (two) of them. Everyone knew he was a genius 9 years ago, he’s only got better. Someone has a copy of the songs he produced for projects in college including “Outsane” – a comedy experimental piece. Then we went to Uni together and lived together. During his time in Leeds, alongside his Mechanical Owl work he also managed to produce a hip hop track named “Wall Sharks” that any member of Sky Larkin will be happy to tell you about.

He’s not dead or anything, but he has moved to Mold, North Wales.

Copy Haho – You Are my Coal Mine

We played King Tut’s in Glasgow a couple of years ago with Hot Club de Paris! and these guys played first. I had no idea who they were (they were old friends of Hot Club’s), then we kept bumping into each other on line ups and it dawned on me how amazing a band they are, and how they’re some of the funn(i)est and most drunk people that I’ve ever met.

They need to make an album - Soon. This song was on an iPod I borrowed, and somehow I’ve never lost it in the many iPod crashes I’ve experienced since.

Sky Larkin play

26 Jun 2010 02 Academy 2 w/ Broken Social Scene Birmingham
9 Jul 2010 Corporation w/ Broken Social Scene (Drowned in Sound show) Sheffield
14 Jul 2010 The Garage, Highbury and Islington London, Islington
19 Aug 2010 Sneaky Pete's Edinburgh

and because they're so funny/post good pictures you should check out their blogz.

Katie blogs at Harkathon
Nestor blogs at hellohellophant
Doug occasionally posts at gonetoosoon.tumblr.com