My first boombox was called a Tensai Rhytm Machine. It looked like a standard boombox but it also allowed you to split the stereo into two recordable mono tracks and included five or six pre-set rhythms, which if you held two of the buttons down together allowed to ‘mix’ the rhythms. Prior to the invention of the first Tascam 4 track portastudio’s this was the first thing I owned that allowed me to record music with some basic overdubs and a rhythm track. Many happy hours were spent in my bedroom trying to be the next Durutti Column. Sadly my guitar playing never quite made the grade…

This video documentary created by National Public Radio in the US (who also produce some amazing free live concert podcasts avialable on iTunes), is a great 10 minute history of the boombox. It’s a shame that JVC never capitalised on the brand fame they aquired amongst the Hip-Hop community. How many brands since have tried to get rappers to positively namecheck them in a song?

French group Phoenix have made some great pop records for most of this decade, with it seems only the American rock critics taking much notice (Pitchfork love ‘em to death). Well hopefully ‘Lizstomania’ from their fantastic new album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix will change all that, it has summer smash written all over it. This fantastic unofficial video mash-up takes clips from the The Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink to brilliantly soundtrack Phoenix’s latest single. And don’t you just love Molly Ringwald’s kooky 80’s dance moves….ENJOY

The band have also offered up all the constituent parts of the track for free via their website, which has not only led to a slew of remixes being made in bedrooms and home studios everywhere, but a good deal of them have started appearing on music blogs across the globe (I’ve found 8 so far), making Phoenix the most blogged about artist on Hype Machine today.

Emma has worked at wieden +kennedy for almost 5 years and is very excited about her upcoming sabbatical- 6 weeks off paid whoo! Going from aussie backpacker to temp receptionist to TV producer has been an exciting ride. She is happy TV advertisement have been featuring better music of late than they have in the past.
She especially loves rock music and feels she may have been born in the wrong era as most of the tunes on her ipod are from the 80s and early 90s. She loves to sing the Don’t Go Breaking My Heart Elton & Kiki duet with anyone who will join her.

Favourite album at the moment? For chilling: Bon Iver, for dancing: Eagles of Death Metal or Kitty, Daisy & Lewis
A song that always makes you smile? The Shins: New Slang
Favourite recent gig? MGMT, Vampire Weekend
Greatest party record of all time? AC/DC: Shook Me All Night Long
Song you couldn’t resist singing or humming along to loudly, even though you’re wearing your headphones? Go Your Own Way: Fleetwood Mac

Last week citizensound met Albion. We did (well, Paul did with our support..,) a presentation on music and how does that influence our daily life. It was a very pleasant gathering at Albion, we were invited for lunch. Upon our arrival there were already 15 people gathered round the table sipping their tea and having a bite in what could have been a perfect Sunday family lunch. We loved it!

Tim Bateman is a senior creative at Albion.

For Tim, music and design have always gone hand in hand so it was no surprise that he works with a bunch of musicaholics. They spent most time listening to music, talking about music and making compilations for each other, “they could have been inspired by a story we had read in the paper or made as a birthday present or to share our favourite tracks of the year. And, as designers, we’d always want to package them in a way that we thought represented the quality of the music” .

Can we have more of these kind of agencies? Please..

We asked Tim some questions about his favourites.

Favourite album at the moment? White Denim - Workout Holiday/Exposion. The UK and US releases had a slightly different tracklisting (and name) but either way this is an incredibly good debut and definitely the best album of 2008 and Pavement - Brighten The Corners. The original was awesome enough but the recent two disc reissue has got another 34 tracks including Grave Architecture, my favourite track from Wowee Zowee. Definitely the best reissue of 2008.

A song that always makes you smile? I think it’s the lyrics that make me smile in these two tracks from the Lemonheads: The Outdoor Type and Being Around . Evan Dando is a complete lyrical genius and The Outdoor Type contains my favourite line ever: “Never learnt to swim, can’t grow a beard or even fight, I lied about being the outdoor type”. Being Around is just good all the way through with lyrics like “If I was a booger, would you blow your nose? Where would you keep it? Would you eat it? I’m just trying to give myself a reason, for being around”. Lovely.

Favorite recent gig? Another twosome: In October, my girlfriend and I did an eight hour road trip up the Pacific Coast Highway, getting to Berkeley just in time to see Sigur Ros play an epic, rain soaked, crowd-stampingly good set at the open-air Greek Theatre. Then did the eight hour drive back down to dance our asses (american for arse. Not donkey) off to Cut Copy at another open air gig in downtown LA.

Greatest party record of all time? Again this one works in twos. And these two tracks have never failed to get parties going: First, put on the Headman mix of Seelenluft’s Manila. It’s impossible not to tap or nod a part of your body to this track, that bassline is just too damn funky (and the lyrics are all about starting to dance). Then, just before people realise how much fun they’re having, stick on House Of Jealous lovers by the Rapture and watch grown men (and women) dance around on tables screaming the chorus at the top of their voice like a bunch of air guitar-wielding girls.

Song you couldn’t resist singing or humming along to loudly? Even though you’re wearing your headphones? I could’ve just picked one for this question but I didn’t want it to feel left out. So, the ultimate singing, humming, tapping or screeching like a guitar riff along to song for me is Set You Free by The Black Keys. A friend of mine used to refer to it as knicker-elastic-snapping but I’m sure I’ve snapped a fair amount of people’s patience while I’m listening to it on headphones. And coming a close second is To The East by Electrelane. It sounds like the soundtrack to the coolest indie flick ever. I doubt I sound quite as cool while I’m squealing along to its addictive chorus.

This is the cover for Tim´s Two Thousand and Eight album.

We love sharing music, and as a special early Christmas gift we thought we’d give everyone access to our latest “It All Ad’s Up” podcast, which we put together on a regular basis for our friends who are responsible for music syncs in advertising agencies across the world. The aim of the podcast is to share with them some of the great new music that is tickling our fancies at the moment, but also some to highlight some of the musical treasures that make up our record collections.

We launched soundsearch our bespoke music search and licensing service back in March 2008, and it has been going great guns.

We’d like to think that a lot of our success is down to providing something that is bit different from a lot of the other music search companies out there. Our recommendation are based on over 40 years of hands-on experience in the music business and some truly fanatical record collecting, and not some fancy computerised system. And with our A&R hat on we are always on the look out for new and interesting that is under the radar or yet to be signed to a record label. So some of the tracks included on the podcast are receiving a premier here.

So we hope you enjoy listening to the music of… Fujiya & Miyagi, El Guincho, Jonquil, Dragons, 4 Hero, Lykke Li, She & Him, Richard Swift, Findlay Brown, Marla Hansen, Sia, Erin McKeown, Son Of Dave, V.V. Brown, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Quiet Village, Amon Tobin, Department of Eagles, Tom Middleton, Robert Logan, Buraka Som Sistema, Operator Please, The Mummers, Efterklang, Alison Statton & Spike, Allá, Bellaruche, DJ Day and Locust…

So without further ado here’s the music…

To listen now:

To download the podcast:

We are very proud of our business cards. We not only print them with the highest ethical and environmental standards but we also always chose an image that reflects our passion for music. This one is from nuno barão, a portuguese artist now living in London. We thought this photo could one day become a beautiful album sleeve. Each time Nuno presents his showreel on the computer, he choses a different soundtrack on itunes to go with it. It depends on the day, the person seeing it and his mood. An artist that is inspired mostly by music. And Portuguese? Yes, please.

1. Favourite album at the moment? Naked -Talking Heads, Knowle West Boy -Tricky and What´s The Time Mr. Wolf? - The Noisettes. Oops, that´s three… sorry… one is not enough…

2. A song that always makes you smile? Nothing But Flowers… again… Talking Heads.

3. Favourite recent gig? Tim Exile at the opening of club Matter.

4. Greatest party record of all time? Last Night The Dj Saved My Life - Indeep.

5. Song you couldn’t resist singing or humming along to loudly, even though you’re wearing your headphones? By Your Side by CocoRosie

I love mashups when they do something really simple and really smart. Tim Bowman’s clear little mashup takes the technology behind Last.fm to recommend a whole load of videos for you to watch from You Tube. You simply type in an artist or a last.fm username and you get an instant video channel, rather than just listening to a a bunch of audio clips! It works pretty well, in the example (below) I put in 70’s UK art-punks Wire and got 70’s US art-punks Per Ubu! If you want to see what I’d recommend just type in nickwatt into the search box! Go check it out here

After digging out my Desperate Bicycles records I decided to hunt out my copy of the first single by Scritti Politti. If that name seem familiar it may be from the hits they had in the mid 80s with singles such as Wood Beez (Pray Like Aretha Franklin) or The Word Girl, or you may even know the blissfull The “Sweetest Girl”, which got to the giddy heights of number 64 in the UK charts back in 1981 (the song was also the opening track on the NME’s C81 cassette which citizen Bay has been digging big time of late). However, before the band became an intellectual pop band much beloved by certain factions of the UK music press, they made a series of independently make scratchy DIY punk records. Scritti founder and current Dalston resident Green Gartside saw the Sex Pistols on the opening night of the Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy’ tour at Leeds University, and decided to form a band.

The band came to London in 1977, moving into a legendary squat in Regent’s Park Road in Camden Town. Scritti Politti were galvanised into actiom the Desperate Bicycles and released their first DIY single, titled ‘Skank Bloc Bologna’ on their own St. Pancras label in 1978. The inside of the sleeve included information on the cost to make the single - recording (£98), mastering (£40), pressing (2,500 7 inch singles for £369.36) , Rubber Stamp and labels (£8), plus information on their distributor Rough Trade Records, then still a record shop in Notting Hill. And just in case you didn’t get the idea he first time around, they printed the costs of producing the John Peel sessions EP on that cover as well.

Green notoriously hates the bands early records, which he claimed “sounds like some anti-produced labour of negativity”, but he finally relented and let his label Rough Trade reissue “Skank Bloc Bologna” on the compilation Early, which brings together the bands first four singles and EPs. The album is available for download at emusic, or you can buy the album from the Rough Trade shop here, for the bargain price of only £6.99!

I came across a great blog called Little Hits last night. Each week or so they post up a favourite track from often long forgotten records, the majority being from the punk and post punk era. As the site’s owners are based in the US it’s quite amazing how many obscure British punk and indie records they managed to get their hands on! You can listen to all the tracks they write about on the site, and if like me you are of a certain age, listened to Peel nightly in the late 1970s and early 80s, and bought lots of obscure 7 inch singles, this will be a great trip down memory lane.

One of the featured tracks on the site is by the wonderful Desperate Bicycles. I can still remember hearing the band on John Peel’s Radio 1 show. Their first session consisted of four tracks, one a version of their début single Smokescreen which lasted all of 50 seconds (the single version was padded out to a progtastic 2 minutes). The band managed to press up 1500 copies of the single, with money from the first 500 records being used to press up and distribute the next 1000. Fortunately I’m a proud owner of said single, bought back in the day from the New Record Inn in Sunderland.

One of my favourite singles by the band was their sophomore effort The Medium Was Tedium. The playing on the record makes many of their punk contemporaries sound like ELP, even the mighty Fall sound competent in comparison. But the brilliance of song was its hook, which extolled “It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it”. And it was. And we did. This was the DIY punk ethic in action. The sleeve detailed the cost to record, press and distribute Smokescreen was a massive £153, (probably a few grand in today’s money). It’s amazing to think that 30 years later the total cost to make, distribute and market your own DIY release can be virtually zero! Sadly Desperate Bicycles founder Danny Wigley has resisted the reissue of any of the bands music, but if you fancy taking a trip down memory lane, or want to hear what all the fuss was about back in 1977, you can hear much of the bands recorded output here.

citizensound bumped into Steve King recently, and he kindly gave us his five recommendations. Some classic choices in this list, along with a surprise or two from the Global CEO of Zenith Optimedia!

Thanks Steve. 

1    Favourite album at the moment?
The Clash - London Calling. Of current albums probably Mark Ronson latest mix.

2. A song that always makes you smile?
Bob Marley - Redemption Song

3. Favourite recent gig?
Spice Girls at The 02! Took my daughters and actually enjoyed the show. Also saw Rolling Stones at same venue few weeks before - probably best I've seen them play.

4. Song you couldn't resist singing or humming along to loudly, even  though you're wearing your headphones?
American Pie. Don Mclean - played endlessly on long family car journeys.

5. Greatest party record of all time? Sexual Healing - Marvin Gaye - only because I'm such a naturally good disco dancer.