snö – Various Artists – 3CD set

Darren Hayman and John F Morrison reunite for their first ‘French’ track in over twenty years. Jack Hayter also contributes to this 3 CD compilation of Winter ambient music.

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Sno – triple CD – Various Artists

Lido – Record Store Day Vinyl Re-issue 2023

Order the RSD 2023 reissue of Lido here…

We have re-issued my instrumental album based on open air swimming pools for Record Store Day 2023. It’s an all new package with new art, clear vinyl and a beautiful booklet with all my paintings in it.

I have just 60 copies of this, order quick!

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Lido Vinyl (including download)

You Will Not Die – Darren Hayman – released 4th November 2022

“You Will Not Die” from Darren Hayman
4th November 2022 on double vinyl & double CD from Fika Recordings

Following a stream of thematic and conceptual albums over the last 15 years Darren Hayman has recently returned to a more introspective, personal kind of music. Darren received critical praise, awards and government grants for albums about the witch trials in the English Civil War; the mid 20th-century boom in new towns; forgotten rural communities; and the political writings of William Morris.

“You Will Not Die is about relationships of all kinds beginning and ending, but it’s also about our interior lives and how we process change as we get older. I was thinking about mortality and the temporariness of everything but also thinking of that fragility as a very beautiful thing to try and put into music.”

“I think of this record as taking place at night, in contrast to the daytime setting of Home Time. This is an album about empty dance floors, lacklustre parties and lonely night buses home.” The record is entirely electronic and recorded on Darren’s collection of ’70s synthesisers. “These instruments themselves are very fragile and mortal, they corrode and decay and behave in erratic ways. They do however, remain alive, for now.”

Darren is the only musician on the album and the music conforms to a strict set of self-imposed rules; only one voice, only 12 tracks, only one polyphonic instrument. ̈Through this control and limited palette I found new melodies and structures. I wanted these old machines to guide me towards my most human record. ̈

‘A Real Human Being’ is inspired by Darren’s experience of life drawing. “Modern life encourages us to reduce people to images, jokes, memes. In life drawing, you’re treating the person as a form, watching where the light and shadows fall, and then you’re reminded that they are real, alive.”

In ‘No Lime for the Gin’, a group of old friends is reunited in middle age, holding a half-hearted party where the talk is dominated by their hopes and broken dreams. ‘Turn My Grey Tick Blue’ is a wry look at the anxieties of dating in the digital age.

‘You Were Always Here’ ends the album on an optimistic note. Finding love late in life, the narrator ruminates on how the bad things happened for a reason, and that perhaps we always end up where we’re supposed to be.

“In recent years my life has had its own upheavals and it would seem weird not to have this emerge in my music,” says Darren. Home Time (2020) was a bright, acoustic, set of songs but was, at its heart, a break- up album. “I wanted to make fun of myself and of this kind of record.”

You Will Not Die is a much slower and more brooding voyage through similar waters. It is a seductive, soulful collection of songs and instrumentals that sits among Darren’s most emotive and intelligent work.

“bold and unique” The Sunday Times
“Hayman has hit a creative purple patch… a treat” Mojo
 “uniquely intimate and very satisfying” BBC

Pre-order the double vinyl here…

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Double Vinyl (including download)

Double CD

You can also buy the download from Bandcamp here…

Hefner – Steve Lamacq Session 15.07.98 – Double Seven Inch

Third and final Hefner contribution to the Precious singles series … and what a contribution it is, a session from Steve Lamacq’s ‘Live Lounge’ with a Jonathan Richman cover in the mix. The download will also include ‘The Hymn For The Cigarettes’, which the band played live into the show from Maida Vale. Plus the package includes a set of four ‘Hefner does DiY’ postcards by Darren Hayman, which any self-respecting fan will surely want. And he’s done his usual top job on the sleeve notes.

Songsheet:
The Weight Of The Stars, The Hymn For The Things We Didn’t Do, Every Little Gesture, To Hide A Little Thought

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Steve Lamacq Session Two 7 inch pack

Maida Vale – Hefner – Red Vinyl (RSD release)

Never before available on vinyl this is a recording of Hefner’s full concert for the John Peel show with brass section and Amelia Fletcher on guest vocals, (released on cult indie label wiaiwya) on 13 May 2022. Available on black and green vinyl.

On the 23rd August 2000 Hefner played a very special show from BBC’s Maida Vale studios to an invited audience for the John Peel show. This was the highlight of a relationship between the band and the greatly revered DJ which saw 5 Peel sessions and four live concerts broadcast on his Radio 1 show.

The concert on this album features an 8 piece version of the band with includes a brass section, pedal steels, ukuleles and violin alongside their own guitars bass and drums. It also features several contributions from Amelia Fletcher, (Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, Wedding Present, Marine Research). The songs have been newly remixed from the original master tapes.

Order Maida Vale on red vinyl here!

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Maida Vale Red Vinyl (including download)

You can also buy the download from Bandcamp here…

Hefner – John Peel Session 13.10.98 – double seven inch

“It’s all about sex with Hefner, isn’t it?” – John Peel

Hefner’s unique brand of lo-fi indie folk made them a staple of John Peel’s show in the late 1990s, when they often took high rank in the annual Festive 50 chart voted for by the legendary broadcaster’s devoted listeners. Released on vinyl for the first time, this is the group’s first Peel session, featuring a Beach Boys cover plus three early Hefner songs – and free downloads of the original BBC files and a set of postcards featuring early gig flyers designed by Darren.
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Songsheet:
The Science Fiction
I Stole A Bride
You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone
Lisa And Me

Pre-order now, prices include P and P.

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Please note, this record should ship out on or around 1st March. If you order records together with it they will also be shipped at that time.

John Peel Session 7 inch pack

Pre-order the Lamacq and Peel session together. Prices include P and P.

John Peel and Steve Lamacq Session 2 x double seven inch pack

Hefner – Steve Lamacq Session 15.07.98 – Double Seven Inch

Indie favourites Hefner were to become regulars at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios with both Steve Lamacq and John Peel vying for their services. This is the group’s first-ever BBC session, recorded for Lamacq soon after the release of their debut LP; among the four songs is live favourite Twisting Mary’s Arm, which was usually the closing song of their live set. According to Darren Hayman, they intended never to record it but eventually relented. Gatefold package also includes free downloads of original BBC files and a set of postcards.

Songsheet:
The Librarian
Tactile
May God Protect Your Home
Twisting Mary’s Arm

Pre-order now, prices include P and P.

Please take care to choose correct worldwide location.

Please note, this record should ship out on or around 1st March. If you order records together with it they will also be shipped at that time.

Steve Lamacq Session 7 inch pack

Pre-order the Lamacq and Peel session together. Prices include P and P.

John Peel and Steve Lamacq Session 2 x double seven inch pack

Breaking God’s Heart – Hefner – Vinyl and 2CD

Finally, a second repress of the debut album by Darren Hayman and his first band Hefner in time for the 20th Anniversary.

It’s like the original. It has ten songs on it.

The two CD version has 40 songs on it, including 30 b-sides and outtakes.

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Breaking Gods Heart Black Vinyl

Breaking God’s Heart 2CD set with 40 songs including b-sides and unreleased songs

Or buy the download here…

The Fidelity Wars – Hefner – Vinyl Re-issue and 2CD

Another repress for Hefner’s second album.

It remains many people’s favourite album of Darren’s. Odd and angular, it is a brutal reading of falling and out and in of love and contains his most well known songs.

The CD re-issue is almost as desirable with 29 extra tracks b-sides and outtakes.

NME – “‘The Fidelity Wars’ is a treasure and comfort for anyone who’s set out on the bumpy road to love, and gotten distracted by the scenery along the way.”

Pitchfork – “Lots of bands write songs about girls. Some bands don’t write anything but songs about girls. And then there are those select few bands that elevate writing songs about girls to a hallowed art form. If David Gedge (erstwhile Wedding Present leader and current Cinerama frontman) is the president of this club, then Darren Hayman, the cocky leader of Hefner, is surely the up- and- coming VP.”

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Fidelity Wars Black Vinyl

Fidelity Wars 2CD set with 40 songs including b-sides and unreleased songs

The Greater Electric by The Great Electric (vinyl)

The Great Electric return with their second full-length album The Greater Electric, released on WIAIWYA on 1st Oct 2021.

Darren Hayman from Hefner plays keyboards and saxophone on this record and is also a co-writer on all songs.

Recorded in and around their native South London, this record sees the band building upon their love of sound collage, improvisation and cut-and-paste recording techniques.

The record sees the band build upon the first album’s motorik psychedelia, with the palette of influences on this record expanded to include early Simple Minds, ambient pioneer Hirosmi Yoshimura, and the avant-pop of Franco Battiato.

2020’s enforced remote collaboration was no huge change in process for the band, as it’s an approach they’ve always thrived upon since their inception. Large sections of the record were recorded individually before being passed between home studios, where individual parts were layered in before being passed on, Chinese Whispers-style.

HARKONEN, the 25-minute album opener, was shaped from hours of extended improvisation, including long sections recorded live with Damo Suzuki of Can. As it evolves, the track veers between textured motorik rigidity, dreamy psychedelia, pulsating psych-rock, and bitcrushed noise to the extent the pressing plant asked if the mix was supposed to sound like that.

Elsewhere the band showcase shorter, more immediate pop songs such as the triumphant optimism of VanDen Plas. The track builds continually, welding a celestial ensemble of Michael Rother-inspired guitar textures and layers of analogue synth melody.

The Red Forest combines the textual interplay of vibraphone and piano with the rigid timekeeping of a drum machine, building to a Foxtrot-era Genesis crescendo drenched in layers of Fripp-ian fried cosmic fuzztone.

Elsewhere, Jogging imagines the motorik sound presented in an alternative universe where vast stadium audiences clap along Radio Ga-Ga style, while Afterburner fizzes with layered, woozy Ry Cooder-meets-Eno intertwined guitar and synth melodies.

With The Greater Electric, the band have combined an even wider palette of influences reaching far back into the historical canon of motorik psychedelia that they showcased on their 2017 debut The Great Electric, but it’s an album whose immersive production feels firmly rooted in the second decade of the 21st century, and rewards consumption in a single sitting.

About The Great Electric

Featuring alumni of bands as diverse as Kenickie, Hefner, Mum and Dad and Go-Kart Mozart, The Great Electric need little in the way of introduction.

Formed back in the winter of 2012, after a debut EP on the Static Caravan imprint, the band released their self-titled debut album on the ever-reliable WIAIWYA imprint in 2017 to critical acclaim.

The band’s sound is shaped by a shared love of classic German electronic and progressive acts of the 1970s coupled with the pop music sensibilities, hooks and production of 90s groups such as Stereolab, Quickspace, Pram and Electric Sound of Joy.

The Greater Electric represents their first new material in three years, recorded in and around South London.

Pete Gofton – Production + Bass guitar | Malcolm Doherty – Guitars | Darren Hayman – Synths + saxophone | Rob Hyde – Drums

Praise

“A record to get lost in, its undeniable charms gently revealing themselves on repeat listens”
For The Rabbits

‘A star-hopping cosmic ride on a sonic surfboard fused of equal parts La Dusseldorf and Silver Apples’
The Sunday Experience

released October 8, 2021

Order The Greater Electric on gold coloured vinyl here!

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The Greater Electric

You can also buy the download from Bandcamp here…