Re: (idm) Ninja Tune Back Catalog

From 9-5SuperSpy
Sent Tue, Jun 30th 1998, 07:39

On Tue, 30 Jun 1998, Irene McC wrote:

> > How about Amon Tobin?  I have the Creatures EP and have heard his
> > stuff as Cujo. Any tips on his Ninja releases?
> 
> His "Cujo" releases are coming out on Shadow Records, which is a
> subsidiary of Ninja Tune.  All excellent, solid stuff!  Try Cujo's
> Adventures in Foam full-length, or last year's excellent Bricolage
> (Ninja Tune) and the recent release "Permutation" - which I can't
> comment on, since it hasn't filtered down to me yet, but from all
> accounts seems to be brilliant. 

umm, no. Shadow is a division of Instinct, who's pretty notorious for
poorly handling incredibly good records (i.e. fax, rising high, em:t,
Ninja Tune). Back when Ninja Tune only had UK office, they used to
license select releases to Instinct, who would then stick the Shadow logo
on them. They didn't even handle the publicity, they hired
Stephanie Smiley over at Domestic (a really good but often
overlooked label) to handle all of that. Something happened between them,
and now Ninja Tune has it's own North American office. In the end it
turned out for the better, now all of the Ninja stuff gets released here,
and Instinct/Shadow has been forced to release some good stuff of thier
own.
 
> > Finally, I have Journeyman's "National Hijinx" LP but also saw that
> > he had another album called "Mama 6/3001".  Is that one any good? I
> > really like the fact that National is so dark and schizophrenic
> 
> Under the "Woob" flag (Paul Frankland's alter ego) he is anything BUT
> schizophrenic :-)  Spaced airy ambient sound pastiches with snippets 
> of spoken word taken out of films etc.  The best Woob (imo) would be 
> em:t's 1194 - - but it's *nothing* like his Journeyman output.

You're way off here too. While I agree that "National Hijinx" sounds
nothing like the two woob releases (N.H. being Franklands most
beat-driven work this far), "Mama 6" sounds *very* similar to the
first woob release. Both are brilliant spacey ambient dub albums, and both
were released in 1994. I have yet to hear a Paul Frankland release I
haven't liked, but I'd recommend them in this order:

1. woob (em:t) 
2. Journeyman - Mama 6 (Ntone) 
3. Journeyman - National Hijinx (Ntone)
4. woob2 (em:t)

-Daniel
x-xxxxxxxxx@xxxx.xxx

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