And we're off!

Welcome to the KUMO blog that we've been meaning to start for, oh, quite a while now. This is basically going to be used to punt James' records that are coming out on Ann Aimee Records, which is a sister label to Delsin Recs, and for me to highlight various bits 'n bobs from popular culture that excite and amuse me. We'll also be posting charts with links to where you can buy the black crack (or in James' case, the WAV) and basically sprouting all sorts of nonsense about the records that we love.

To give you a bit of a background on us, in May 2006 James Kumo, Paul Hughes and myself, DJing under the snappily titled 'guise KUMO DJs, began a monthly club night in Manchester entitled KUMO, which in theory was all about having an intimate gathering with an up for it crowd whose musical tastes are as varied as our own, people who aren't afraid to hear lots of different genres within the course of a night. (Which to be fair could describe just about any night in Manchester, great crowds over there) We had the honour of having people like Balearic Mike, Matt Edwards (Rekid/Quiet Village/Radio Slave), Moonboots (Aficionado), Philarmonix (Metronomic Family), Diesel (X-Press 2/Balistic Brothers/Heavy Disco), Terry Farley (Faith/Junior Boys Own), Mark E (Jiscomusic), Jon K (Eyes Down), Tom Wainwright (The Hacienda), Steven McNulty (Heavy Rotation) and Kelvin Andrews (Soul Mekanik) come down and play records at various venues around the city without any of them being particularly successful financially but all of them being a good excuse for a knees up. We did, however, get invited to DJ at the Rejekts warehouse parties, Sankey's, Northern Disco and quite a few other places as a result of our efforts, so people were listening.

I have since moved to California with my wife and James and Paul are both still in Manchester with both of them becoming fathers (for the second time in Paul's case) within weeks of each other...I clearly didn't read the script.

Paul and I also did a weekly radio show on Unity FM where we played records from all four corners of the record shop but for our sins we never quite managed to record any of them. The show is still going and is now known as The Bears Upstairs and you can listen to it every Thursday at 10pm UK Time at Unity Radio on the Interweb with your hosts DJ Bollard, Spaceface, Paul Hughes, TC, Jif, Tom Half-Time, David Spackler and Jeffo, all in various states of inebriation.

I also do interviews for Simon Harrison's Basic Soul website and you can read them here.

So that's the introductions out of the way, let's get a crack on with the good stuff now, shall we?