Led Bib

‘Sweet Chilli’ new video & free single download out today, Monday August 24th

Led Bib release a free download of ‘Sweet Chilli’, the second single taken from their 2009 Barclaycard Mercury Prize Album of The Year ‘Sensible Shoes’ today. It is accompanied by a video by nascent Italian filmmaker and animator Chiara Ambrosio.

The new video can be viewed here:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xa9720_sweet-chilli-led-bib_music

‘Sweet Chilli’ encompasses all the Led Bib signature sounds with driving melodies, twisted improvisation and split second band reactions. The new music video, created by Chaira, transports the viewer into a world of shrinking suitcases and surrealist string figures, a place where Led Bib cut outs emerge from the inside of old typewriters and matchboxes and potions are consumed from fingernail size vials. Chiara’s beautiful otherworldly approach offers a bewitching visualisation when coupled with the urgent sonic assault of Led Bib.

‘Sweet Chilli’ is available to download for FREE alongside the music video from http://www.ledbib.com/download.html and http://www.myspace.com/ledbib.

We’ve been helping out Open Arts recently, an organisation which offers welcoming art groups for people with mental health problems.  The 12 week art courses they run comprise of sessions including drawing, painting, collage, print, textiles, clay, wire and photography and take place in community venues across the whole of South Essex.

To have a look at the blog we helped them to set up click here

My online nosey-ing has evolved to include a lot more science of late – now that I’m splitting my time between university and S&F stuff.

I’ve noticed quite a cat theme too, both seem to be everywhere. Lecture notes lie next to pictures of pot bellied Toms and at the end of long days I’ve seen Siamese patterns squished into the inferior surface of the Hippocampus. Plus I found myself reading about how Ben ‘Bad Science’ Goldacre acquired an American Association of Nutritional Consultants “certified professional membership” on behalf of his late cat, Henrietta too. It’s like I’ve become the new Murakami protagonist. What does it all mean?

Another such coincidence I thought i’d share sprung from a lecture I had the other day on clinical reasoning (swamps, marshes and conditional, interactive stuff) and they were talking about how they’d stuck a load of cameras on a bunch of Occupational Therapists heads to understand their reasoning. There was a bit more to it than that, but it got me thinking about a fella i’d read about called Mr Lee. Lee makes little cameras to put on feline necks, so that their owners can track what they’ve been up to. It’s a wonderful piece of kit (ahem, kat) called a cat-cam.

If you’d like to order one for a cat fanatic pal for Christmas you can get one here or for the catless amongst you there’s the Cat-Cam calender ‘beyond the cat flap’ to paw over.

Culture Label is coming to a world wide web near you. As I understand it their plan is to do an ‘Amazon’ for the cultural products sold through gallery and museum shops – from Science Museum gizmos to Haywain coffee mugs.

As someone who is generally more a looker than a buyer when it comes to municipal arts vendors (and with good reason I should add, the prints I bought in the Guggenheim two years ago being still rolled up on a dusty shelf), I am glad to see they’re launching the whole venture by shaking things up a bit. releaseonedotzero is a design competition to “kill the coffee mug” by devising more imaginative, witty or innovative kinds of cultural merchandise.

There’s a football scarf that turns into an actual football. There’s a pleasingly geeky pencil rubber that is embossed with ‘CTRL+Z’. I’d like to propose some too: how about a pair of ‘Duchamp’s Fountain‘ earrings? Or a working Salvador Dali pocket watch?

(Above: Led Bib)

Led Bib should be a pop band. They have those strong individual looks of bands that I used to pull out of Smash Hits when I was younger. The exotic looking one, the young looking one, the smouldering one, the bad ass, the kind of goofy but really he’s the cutest one. Ahem, anyway… not that I rate ground breaking music on the grounds of how cute the band members are or anything, but, the super avant garde jazz pin ups are playing as part of a festival next month. As we are ardent fans of all things Led Bib here at Seb & Fiona Ltd., we thought this looked rather good. It’s free too! Come and cheer.

Spitalfields Summer Stew
Friday September 5th
Bishops Square Amphitheatre, Brushfield Street, Spitalfields E1
12.30pm – 6pm
Free Event

Featuring: Billy Jenkins & Steve Morrison + Led Bib + Steve Noble + Harry Beckett Band + Liam Noble & Paul Clarvis

Spitalfields Summer Stew is a one-day jazz festival which draws together some of the greatest living legends of the avant-garde with the leading lights of the young British scene – comedic pathos blues and fiery rock and roll, re-imaginings of folk songs and drums played with things you wouldn’t quite believe possible.

LINE UP

12:30-1:30 Billy Jenkins & Steve Morrison ‘Here is the Blues!’
1:45 – 2:05 Steve Noble ‘Solo Drums’
2:35 – 3:35 Harry Beckett Band
3:50 – 4:35 Liam Noble & Paul Clarvis
5:00 – 6:00 Led Bib

Links
www.liamnoble.co.uk
www.ledbib.com
www.hereistheblues.com
http://www.spitalfields.co.uk/dspevent.php?name=SPITALFIELDS+SUMMER+STEW

…how many interesting – and by interesting I mean really interesting – things we have been near to in our lives without even realising it? We walk past rare ming vases behind closed doors and we trudge over Roman coins beneath pavements – we do this all the time, but there is no way of knowing about it. It’s tragic.

(Courtesy of phatcontroller's photostream)

Take the London Stone, for instance. I never finished Peter Ackroyd’s ‘London: The Biography’ but I did get through the first two chapters, and I still talk about the largely forgotten legend attached to this small hunk of rock. In times past, it came to be seen as the heart of the city, and a conqueror was not really a conqueror until he touched it with his sword. These days it’s embedded discreetly into the wall of the Bank of China on Cannon Street. How many people walk past it on the way home from a day’s banking – heads down, barking into mobiles – not for a moment suspecting that, there and then, they could quickly conquer London?

Interesting Things I Am Near is a new website that you can search by postcode (or GPS) and tells you about interesting things you are near, linking you to blogs and other places on the internet that know of such things. So far that’s mainly the wonderful Nothing to See Here, The London Review of Breakfasts, A Good Place for a Cup of Tea and a Think and eggbaconchipsandbeans, although I think they may also have included a database of megaliths and more will be added…

(above is an image of a beaver, it has no relevance to the below post, aside from that i quite like it)

Spitalfields has been the spiritual home of pies since Square Pie laid down its steak and ale roots there back in 2001 (on reflection, it probably goes back a wee bit further, what with the jellied eels and meat and potato and that). Still, the square pies have been away for a little while, but rumour has it they’ll be back in September *and* they might be doing something rather fun to celebrate… More on that soon.

On a completely un-pie related topic, well aside from the fact that band leader Mark Holub of super jazz group Led Bib is an ardent Square Pie fan, there’s a great gig by the aforementioned band tonight at the Vortex. They are thoroughly good. So good they make all my molecules shift around and dance around like a sausage dog chasing its tail, its like playing a piano made of marshmallow, it’s like having a big feast of a breakfast with all your favourite friends, when you know you’ve still got the rest of the day to go. Come see them dear reader. It’s a spectacle. It’s great!

‘EDF Substation’: the term brings to mind brick structures, on the side of a rail track or a sullen piece of derelict land; something belonging to the same category as the hatches we walk over on the pavement – things we don’t really notice or think about as we go about our business. “Secure structures into which high voltage electricity is distributed”.

Recently, a large box clad in glass appeared in Old Spitalfields Market. By day it is white, but sometimes at night it glows in changing colours, attracting the cameras of passers by with its deep purples and majestic blues.

(From dyntr’s flickrstream)

Each side of the box carries a giant passage of writing, a voice from the past, a perspective on one or more of the many identities that this area has held…

“Have you any distinct idea of Spitalfields, dear reader?” asks Charles Dickens of the market hall before going on to describe the area’s “sallow, unshorn weavers”. Through the centre of the box runs a thin dark line which, on closer inspection, tells the story of this ancient “stronghold of Noncomformity” – from Roman cemeteries, through secretive societies, to the current day.

Seb & Fiona worked with design agency Imagist and architects Jestico + Whiles on this project, which (we hope) saved an EDF Substation from becoming a utilitarian eyesore and turned it into an artefact that holds pieces of the area’s history. We curated the text, selecting passages by Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens and Peter Ackroyd and commissioning a new one by Jeanette Winterson; and we wrote the timeline, so visitors can learn the intriguing and often poverty-stricken stories that have made Spitalfields such a muse to London’s psychogeography.

Also from these stories we found inspiration for the market’s eight new gate names (replacing the previous “gate 1″, “gate 2″ etc)…

This is Punchinello Gate, so named after the gun that Pepys saw fired in the Old Artillery Ground (towards which this gate would have faced).

The other gate names, in clockwise order, are Sherrin (after the building’s architect), Montagu (after the 19th Century Jewish philanthropist), Wollstonecraft (after the early feminist and philosopher), Mulberry (after the fruit from which silk is made), Huguenot (after the first of Spitalfields’ many waves of immigration), John Balch (after the market’s founder) and Spitfire Mk. Vb W3311 (after the fighter plane purchased by traders in 1942 in aid of the war effort).

The gates are soon to be joined by signs which will hold some stunning old photographs we unearthed – and more information for those curious about the stories that led to the naming.

We had some lovely news last week that Old Spitalfields Market had won the ‘BEST FASHION MARKET’ gong in the Time Out Shopping Awards.

The market beat the nearest contender Portobello by “an impressive 153 votes” and was described by the magazine as the “most inspiring style market in London”. The market sent us down to the Award’s Dinner to say thanks for all the work that we’ve done, which was very nice of them. We went for afternoon tea at Mayfair’s sumptuous Connaught Hotel. Lovely!

I meant to write about this sad little story back when I heard about it. I remembered again when I was chatting to one of the hospice patients yesterday and felt compelled to pen a line.

St Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney is a really brilliant charity. They take care of the terminally ill in a very sensitive way – supporting their families, the patients and their carers. The things they do ensure that when people are at the end of their life, they and those around them are made to fell as comfortable and supported as possible.

So it’s particularly sad to learn that one of their ambulances was stolen from the hospice car park. The large white £40,000 VW van which had the word AMBULANCE written on the side, was used to take terminally ill patients to and from the hospice, and was one of only 2 ambulances owned by the hospice.

Sadly, it’s still not been found and they are having to spend a lot of money hiring buses and drivers for the patients.

I mean, how low do you have to be to steal a hospice ambulance?

Anyone with information about the ambulance which was stolen in February 2008, is being asked to contact Hackney Borough motor vehicle unit on 0207 275 3604.

Or maybe, if there’s a nice big benevolent buisness person reading this, maybe, y’know, being a new financial year and everything – you could just buy them a new one. Now there’s a nice idea for a Thursday.

Here’s a link to their website and what they do: and a story that ran on the beeb about it.