HOME CONTACT US DISCLAIMER: Music hosted on this site is for preview purposes only. If you like what you hear please buy the artist's work. You can find much of it here: ARCHIVE January 2007

People In Glass Houses The good folks at Stones Throw Records are nothing if not generous. Even though their regular podcasts already provide listeners with a monthly fix of hip hop and funk goodness, they've now decided to go one better and just give away whole albums. For the first week of 2007 Talib Kweli and Madlib's nine-track album Liberation was tossed out as a free download and now they're at it again. Chrome Children 2, the follow-up to last year's acclaimed label showcasing compilation is available, for nada, right here. Two of the tracks - Guilty Simpson's Money Motivated Movement and Aloe Blacc's Happy Now?- are produced by FOP and very busy boy Four Tet and there's a great track from our favourite synth-pummeling crackpot Gary Wilson. More... Posted by: Scott 31/01/07 Poor Mans Dem A mini series like the brilliant BBC/HBO collaboration Five Days is perfect for a little game we like to play at Pinglewood.com, called Poor Man's. You know, like Alex Zane is the Poor Man's Simon Amstell, Anne Hathaway is the Poor Man's Julia Roberts, or Justin Lee Collins is the Poor Man's Jethro. Well, Christine Tremarco (who plays the missing woman, Leanne Wellings) is the Poor Man's Samantha Morton. But unlike the previous examples, this is not meant in a derogatory way. Tremarco is actually very good and simply looks and acts uncannily like Morton, yet unfortunately appears in things like Donovan with Tom Conti, not Minority Report with Tom Cruise. Tremarco and Morton both starred in Carine Adler's groundbreaking 1997 film Under the Skin. And, Charlie Creed-Miles (Morton's ex) stars in Five Days, and he's the Poor Man's Paddy Considine (Morton's co-star in Jim Sheridan's In America). So if you, like us, have a disturbingly accurate photographic memory for actors in 9pm TV dramas, it might lead to you to ponder even more related Poor Man's, or Poor Mans Dem linkage, as we sometimes like to call it. More... Posted by: Alice 31/01/07 A Dog's Life One of our favourite films of recent years is Wisit Sasanatieng’s fantastical ice cream fever dream, Citizen Dog (Mah nakorn). It has it all: severed fingers, an undead cab driver, a man who obsessively licks other people's faces, a profane chain smoking teddy bear, and that's all in the first ten minutes. It's a love story, funny, whimsical and, as these stills attest, quite extraordinary looking. We first watched Citizen Dog at the 2005 London Film Festival and have been trying to track it down ever since, but with no European or American release the closet we've come is a ropey Chinese DVD with no English subtitles. So we've had to make do with Sasanatieng's incredible debut feature Tears of a Black Tiger (Fah talai jone) until now. A Hong Kong Citizen Dog DVD has just been released and it comes replete with all the subtitles you could ever need. You can buy it here and you really, really should. More amazing stills after the jump... Posted by: Scott 30/01/07 Speaking In Tongues Here at Pinglewood.com we harbour sordid dreams of becoming the hip-hop Lisa Moorish. We want three children: one fathered by Ghostface, one by Slick Rick and another, our secret favourite, a small droop-eyed wolfboy who calls Lil Wayne daddy. Alas, we rarely get close enough to A-list rappers for them to impregnate us. But we have rubbed shoulders with the lovely Steve Reid and Kieran Hebden. While we don't fancy propagating their spawn we do love the music they've been making together. Their ongoing collaboration has thus far resulted in an incredible improvised recorded session (released as The Exchange and The Exchange II), a fantastic Reid Ensemble album produced by Hebden, and a series of evermore impressive live shows. Now the inseparable duo has made a third album, Tongues, to be released by Domino on 19/03/07. It's billed as their first album proper and we cannot wait. Here is a little peak into the studio to whet your appetite. Posted by: Scott 22/01/07 Tears of a Clown Wow. Posted by: Scott 20/01/07 There Are No Giant Spoons In Babel There is a scene early in Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Golden Globe-winning Babel in which an American tourist played by Brad Pitt, is struggling to drag his freshly-shot wife (Cate Blanchett) off a bus in the middle of the Moroccan desert. His efforts are hindered by another passenger: a fat, curmudgeonly British holidaymaker played by Peter Wight, a character actor who regularly portrays fat and curmudgeonly men in UK television drama. Brilliant, we thought. The last time we saw Wight he played a butler in the hokiest of whodunit shows, Midsomer Murders. Wight belonged to a secret society called the Pudding Club and eventually turned out to be the killer, but more important than the who was how-he-dun-it. The butler, you see, bludgeoned his victims to death with a giant spoon. More... Posted by: Scott 01/01/07 Even Ghost Riders Started Small Welcome! And please excuse the mess. The site is still being built but we wanted to put this video up all the same. Consider it a private view. We recently watched Werner Herzog's incredible Even Dwarfs Started Small. The scene that struck us most wasn't the one where the dwarfs crucify a monkey and parade it around their compound (though that was pretty cool) it was this one. Proof that hyphy, and in particular ghost riding the whip, didn't originate in the Bay Area, but in a crazy 1970s midget community. (The clip is soundtracked by DJ Ayres and Nick Catchdubs very fine remix of E-40's Tell Me When To Go.) Posted by: Scott 16/11/06