I know it's short notice, but...

If you are anywhere near London tomorrow, Thursday April 27th.

RHYTHM & SOUND,
with TIKIMAN and half a dozen other sound systems
The Neighbourhood Club, 12 Acklam Road, Ladbroke Grove, W10 5JJ

Bare Files

I suspect this one will be of interest solely to me and Seb but there is a massive collection of grime/dubstep mixes and radio shows available for download over at Bare Files.

weareie

And while I'm giving props to other blogs, the best-named blog out there, weareie, has just posted another fine mix of vintage jungle - Hyper-On E, Rufige Kru, Photek, DJ Crystl - forty minutes of pure sweetness.

No Condition Is Permanent

No Condition Is Permanent looks like an interesting music blog, posting entire albums of vintage african sounds with lengthy writeups. The downloads are via Rapidshare so don't torture yourself if you can't roll with that...personally I'm downloading some King Sunny Ade albums right now.

Winkelmann's Happy Endings

Mark asked me to post this compilation for you all.

Winkelmann's Happy Endings (ZIP archive, 89.3 mb)

01. Judge Dread - The Winkle Man
02. The Faces - Cindy Incidentally
03. OST - Ekkelog
04. RK Veulpoepers BV - Hakrobionies
05. Stepaside - Get Out of Dublin
06. Ram John Holder - Brixton Blues
07. Sunday Funnies - Reach Out
08. Hawkwind - Love in Space
09. Ween - Freedom of '76
10. Steely Dan - Green Earrings
11. Patrick Moraz - Primitivisation
12. Santana - Mirage
13. Odyssey - Battened Ship
14. Christine Harwood - Wooden Ships
15. Nick Garrie - The Nightmare of JB Stanislas
16. Wendy & Bonnie - What's Really Happening
17. Sergio Mendes & Brazil 66 - Righteous Life
18. David McWilliams - Three O'Clock Flamingo Street
19. Pinky MacClure - Heartsease
20. Joyce - Ave Maria
21. Gary MacFarland - Suzanne

If we're especially blessed, I hope he'll be able to pop on some background notes in due course. Note that this file goes away in one week.

Flac to audio

Dear Peoploids,
I was wondering what folks use to convert flac files to regular audio. They're easy enough to play on the PC through winamp or whatever but increasingly I'm getting stuff that I wanna share or play on the moldy old hi-fi (remember them?) I've half paid attention to folks over on Eurotraders so many times but d/ling a liberated Japanese boot of Velvet Underground Sister Ray recordings has upped the ante somewhat. I'm using windows XP and I'm looking for something an ex-pat Lancastrian can understand.
All help gratefully received etc.

Killing The Music Industry

It seems that some people are having problems downloading the files posted via Rapidshare. I'm going to suggest that we use Yousendit for the time being. At the moment, Yousendit invites you to set up an account - it is not necessary to do this in order to upload a file. The benefit of the account (which is free) is that you can post files up to 100MB in size whereas without signing up you are limited to 50MB maximum. 50MB is plenty for anything short of a TOAD.

As mentioned before, the big problem with Yousendit is that the files are removed from the server after seven days. If you are one of the people who does download and listen to these tracks, you might want to add the blog to your Bloglines account/live bookmarks/aggregator. Alternatively, if the file has already gone by the time you see the post, leave a comment and maybe the poster (or another member) will repost the file.

Anyhow, for your listening pleasure, here's one of the bonus tracks from the US edition of the Domino Fire Engines compilation...and it's a cover version to boot, even though it's Saturday.

Fire Engines - Jacqueline

Cover Version...er...Monday

Just to test out Rapidshare, here's Davy Graham covering "Moanin'" by Art Blakey. I remember thinking that the riff sounded very familiar when I heard the Art Blakey album a couple of years ago...took me until this weekend to twig that I'd heard it many times before, buried on Folk, Blues & Beyond.

Davy Graham - Moanin'

If you have any problems downloading it, leave a comment to that effect or drop me an email.

Welcome To The Future

Welcome to the new Frank's blog - this first post will lay down a few groundrules. I will subsequently edit it to include the answers to any questions I am asked about how to use the blog. Once it disappears below the fold I will make a permanent link to it in the sidebar for ease of reference.

Posting privileges are open to all current and former members of Frank's Apa. Admin privileges are open to anyone whom I trust not to make a hash of the HTML. Commenting will remain open to all comers unless spam becomes a problem.

As before, the abiding principle is that the blog should not subtract from the print version of Franks, so give a little thought to whether anything you're planning to post here would be better saved for your zine. Obviously this doesn't apply to former members.

By and large, I expect most of the posts here to involve mp3s. Unlike Typepad, Blogger does not allow us to upload files directly. Instead you should upload the file to one of the free upload services such as Rapidshare or Yousendit, then post the link to the uploaded file here. Files will stay up longer on Rapidshare than Yousendit - thirty days after the last download rather than seven days after the upload - but Mark has some unspecified problem with Rapidshare. I will update this section if and when we come up with better solutions to this issue. If you want to upload a TOAD, I recommend that you zip (archive) it and upload the .zip file.

You going to stick up some instructions on how to post?

1. Go to http://www.blogger.com and enter your username and password in the "sign in" box at top left.

2. This takes you to the dashboard where the F-Blog is listed as Ruth is Stranger Than Richard. Immediately to the right is a green plus-sign - click this to open the post window. The interface is more or less identical to Typepad.

3. Could you really not have worked this out for yourself, Marc?