Weird October...Volume meets the Month of Mauz

 

I usually follow up Dubtember with Weird October. I share a bunch of musick I've collected up that is weird enough to lead up to the end of the month & my favorite holiday, Halloween

This year I'm off on a tangent more bizarre than any other I've followed. Not that the musick is so weird this month, just the idea behind it all. It began with two divergent events that mingled in my mind & led to the upcoming insanity. They both occurred in June when I was sharing Various Artists compilations. On the Party Like it’s Only $19.99 post, I received a comment from mauz.

mauz sez:
     “oh boy ... terabytes of digitalized music library that I collected frantically for more than 40 years were stolen 3 years ago (the vinyls already sold for good ages ago) .. thanks to you I am getting back some of the most precious bits .. my soul is shining again at the sound of it ... I am a music junkie, I have been working in a pirate radio (the librarian guy) and Dj in clubs for more than 10 years .. I found you following the osbcure leads of Muslimgauze, Tackead, Chrome, Andy Weatherall, Legendary Pink Dots, Cop Shoot Cop and the others we know ... You got my trust and I found links to amazing music that, surprisingly, I never heard before.

I have no words good enough to express my gratitude. nowadays I am a dirty homeless living on the streetin Berlin .. collecting money to buy a new SD card to fill up with this goodness. and the youngsters keep asking me "wtf is this great music" nobody else knows.

if I can do some humble request:more Two Lone Swordmen, more more MBM, Hiphoprisy, Consolidated, Young Gods, pls more Foetus, Alan Vega solos, Dj Spike, Keith LeBlanb Freakatorium, Radio Morocco (Nation Rec) etc etc.

ciao Maurizio

ps. forgot to mention that I was mesmerized to find Dark Star, Franz was a good friend and I recorded and mixed his second album in my studio.. featuring a track by me (Darkstar & Technogod)”

I was instantly drawn to this. I lived for several years as "a dirty homeless" so I can totally relate. Having 40 years of collected music stolen would devastate me beyond belief. Plus I believe I deduced from internal clues the identity of the author & am familiar with his music. The Dark Star reference led me to believe that he was talking about "Walking in Patterns(featuring Technogod)" from Artefacts by Dark Star, intended as the follow-up to Dark Stars's debut Travelogue that I have shared here in the past. That song was mixed by Maurizio Liguori (the Italian Adrian Sherwood), I came to believe that mauz, author of the comment, is Mauxuam (Maurizio Liguori) of Technogod & Ohmega Tribe. 

Mauxuam (born in 1965) started making electronic music at the end of the 80s in Italy. At that time he was DJ for some local & pirate radio stations in Bologna. He also organized many underground club nights & concerts. In 1992 he had his first release on Nation Records in the UK with the Italian band Technogod, a group that toured throughout Europe often opening act for bands like Consolidated, Meat Beat Manifesto, & The Young Gods. Around the same time he founded the Lost Legion Alien Collective & Ohmega Tribe.  Late 90s found Maurizio working as a producer / remixer for the mainstream Italian music industry as well as doing soundtracks for commercials, theater, & performance art for independent video productions & cartoons. Towards the end of the millennium though, disillusioned by the music business / consumer culture, he sold all of his electronic gear & set out on a long nomadic trip, spending many years traveling between India & Australia.

I replied right away to mauz' comment, stating that I wanted to communicate further because I was interested in supplying some of his requests. It seemed perfect for me, like it would give my sharing a personal & humanitarian purpose. I included a link to an Ohmega Tribe release (see reply on the June "How Much?" if you're interested) as inticement. I have never heard anthing back. I don't know if he never saw my reply or that life on the streets had taken its toll or if he was just waiting for me to get on with it. I could only imagine terrible scenarios but decided to carry on with this concept anyway.

At the same time as mauz' comment, I came across a folder in my Various Artist section labelled VOLUME. In it was seventeen volumes of compilations that seemed to feature many of the bands that mauz mentioned. It seemed like fate.

I still have not heard from mauz, but I am pursuing this craziness anyhow. Perhaps he will see some of these posts & I will know more. Or I will just have shared a shitload of great music with you all, my friends, so either way the craziness leads to good results. So to put an end to this overly long introduction, here goes, a month-long mix of Volumes & mauz request as only NSS does it.

Pump Up the Volume - Volume One

When I was sharing the Various Artist items in June, I came across a folder I had with all the Volume volumes, all seventeen of them. Had completely forgotten all the fantastic musick these great CD 'zines comtained.

Volume was a magazine in the form of a series of compact disc compilation albums that were published in the UK in the early to mid 1990s. The albums typically contained exclusive tracks & remixes from a diverse range of indie artists. Each album was packaged with a 192-page booklet that contained features on the artists. The booklet was the size / shape of a CD jewel case. It was usually packaged with the CD case in a cardboard sleeve. Volume One was published in September 1991. The series came to an end in December 1996, with Volume Seventeen.

 

 

Robin Gibson & Rob Deacon thought up the concept of a CD with a complementary book in the early 1990s. They realized that many publishers were not interested because the record shops were already full of discount Hit compilations. Gibson was determined to publish both the CD & the publication of the highest quality. The two set up their own publishing venture which they called World's End Ltd. run out of a tiny basement flat in Edith Grove, Kensington.

 

By December 1992, Volume was selling issues for £9.99. Each issue contained otherwise unavailable tracks by obscure bands inside a smart CD-sized paperback book. The magazine was making a modest profit. The brand's visual trademark was photographs of tropical fish, with a different species appearing on the cover of each issue (in addition, the collective spines laid end to end of Volume One to Volume 10 formed the image of a shark). 

The artists featured in the magazine ranged widely from indie guitar groups such as Curve, The Wannadies, & Cocteau Twins, to ambient / techno artists such as The Orb or The Shamen to trip hop bands like Massive Attack to electronic body music group Nitzer Ebb, & hip-hop acts such as Cypress Hill. Electronic music was featured quite heavily. The CD & magazine served as an introduction to the listener / reader for new sounds from bands which had yet to break out.

By October 1996 & the fifth anniversary, editions of Volume were selling more than 25,000 copies, having been translated into French & Japanese. However, the increased number of magazines offering free CDs had eventually made the Volume compilations concept unsustainable. The company closed not long after the fifth aniversary edition came out.

Here is the Volume debut CD.

 

Various - Volume One, Volume V1CD, September 1991.
decryption code in comments

Meat Beat Manifesto – Love Mad
Papa Sprain – Flying to Vegas (H.ark! remix)
Nitzer Ebb – Come Alive (remix)
Kitchens of Distinction – Innocence
Throwing Muses – Red Shoes (version)
The Darkside – Guitar Voodoo (live)
Dr Phibes & the House of Wax Equations – Sugarblast (edit)
The Popguns – Going Under (Vitamin K remix)
The Orb – Reefer Spin in the Galaxy
New Order – Confusion (remix)
The Shamen – Hyperreal (remix)
Fortran 5 – XX21 (remix)
My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult – Leather Sex (remix)
Consolidated – The Sexual Politics of Meat (edit)
The Wolfgang Press – Sucker (version)
Daisy Chainsaw – Upmanship Down
L. Kage – Another Story from Raintown

 

 

 

Pump up the Volume,
NØ