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LP
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FAI 019LP
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Kristian Craig Robinson, aka Capitol K, is a multi-instrumentalist and record producer with a long history in London's most interesting under-the-radar music places and spaces. With a musical story like his, one can expect side streams. His new record, Birdtrapper, is "the sound of an initiation rave in a utopian hidden village", and his latest exploration of Mediterranean audio mythos following on from Goatherder (FAI 014LP, 2018). The six track mini-album was similarly formed from ritualistic improvisations performed in Malta (where Capitol K was born), using home-made flutes, reed pipe, bamboo percussion, drum machine, bass guitar, but this time features a wider use of synthesizers, with the alternative dance floor in mind. Where Goatherder was an awakening of genetic primitivism, Birdtrapper is an evocation of sonic bird callers, proto-rave abandon, ambient resonance, and an ecstatic captive state, along with the previous work's visions of hunters, temples and scrub land music. Goatherder caused a quiet kind of quake and was beloved by The Quietus, BBCR3, and 6Music. For the last seven years, K has been behind the consoles at the heavily influential Total Refreshment Centre, recording and mixing records with the likes of Trash Kit, The Comet Is Coming, Rozi Plain, Alabaster DePlume, Dry Cleaning, Flamingods, Cykada, Ibibio Sound Machine, BAS JAN, and John Johanna. It's not just recording; he's also become an influential, if understated, mentor to a new wave of producers and bands. His experience in studio environments is long and storied, including stints at Studio Plateaux on an island in the middle of the Thames and in the Royal Symphonia's squatted rehearsal rooms. Capitol K has released seven albums and the Birdtrapper follows a legacy of influential releases on early 2000s electronica labels including Planet Mu and XL. Aside from this he also runs the record label Faith & Industry. It's a friends and family, love not money affair and he has released music by Champagne Dub, John Johanna, Super Best Friends Club, Blue House, and Clémentine March. Clear vinyl.
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LP
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FAI 014LP
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Goatherder is the seventh album from underground London producer Kristian Craig Robinson, AKA Capitol K. This ace manipulator of audio and punk warlord of groove has crossed a tapestry of styles and approaches with his own secret compass since 1998. Along with everything from Chinese pop to the marching band music of the United Arab Emirates in his early musical vocabulary, the influence of rave, new wave, grunge, and noise-core would collide to create a bold new sound. The last seven years have seen Capitol K's stature as a producer elevated with his establishment of the renowned Total Refreshment Studio and recording work with musicians such as the Mercury Music prize nominated The Comet Is Coming, global dance act Ibibio Sound Machine, the pan-Arabic Flamingods, Serafina Steer and her BAS JAN project, and contemporary folk artist Rozi Plain, among many more. This latest work was developed and recorded in his native Malta, where he built a studio in a cave (a former goat stable). K gathered bamboo instruments collected around the world, including an ancient Quecha reed-pipe (his new-found lead instrument), and various resonating vessels and percussive objects including dry fennel storks collected from Punic troglodyte sites, and atonal flutes built from fresh cut farmland reed. Ritualistic improvisations took place over a series of seasonal visits, awakening genetic memory and plant communication. Back in London the tracks were interfaced and expanded with post-industrial machine beat and bass guitar lock down. Homage is paid to new age synthscapes, while a spirit jazz overtone arrives from K's recent years as the sonic muscle behind a plethora of luminous albums born in his Total Refreshment Studio. Goatherder follows on from the 2016 collaborative incarnation Loose Meat and sonically abridges 2012's Capitol K album Andean Dub. Outside of studio production and his solo repertoire as Capitol K, Kristian has toured as guest musician with multiple bands over the last 15 years, including Brazil's Cibelle, Archie Bronson Outfit, and Du Blonde. His last project, Loose Meat, was a collaborative album of poetic dance music received lots of radio play in the UK and toured across the country for a year, performing a number of festivals. He established the Faith And Industry record label which handled his subsequent releases. He now releases a number of other artists through this label that he develops and produces.
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CD
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FAI 007CD
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"Kristian Craig Robinson AKA Capitol K is on a quest to find a utopia within sound and with Notes from Life on the Wire with a Wrecking Ball, his 5th album, he may just have found it. There are few other artists who can make the experimental sound quite so engaging. Notes from Life on the Wire with a Wrecking Ball is a record born out of creative London, but Capitol K is by no means your usual citizen. Recent years he has spent much of his time living in squats and places soon to be demolished with other artisans. Ideas around the act of detournement (deviation of course), psycho geographic wandering, Utopian fantasy and outsider writings strongly influence this album. As Capitol K says, 'Seeing how artisans have reacted to social economic alienation, and managed existence alongside and in spite of rapid consumerist, homogenization, which is particular rampant in London, I became increasingly aware of the maximization of culture going on, maximum house, maximum color, maximum impact, so in turn I wanted to create a subvert maximum music for a maximum world.' Recordings were performed in a lo-fi studio set up in a squat on Drum St, alongside highly skilled Italian Jazz Drummer Vladimiro Carboni and Brazilian guitarist Felipe Pagani, whom he met while playing electronics for Tropicalist act Cibelle touring the world in 2006, they had little previous knowledge of the Capitol K unique sound, or electronica in general. This sums up his vision of combining cultures of the world, as K puts, 'I wanted their influence of real skill and strictness within the shaping of this album, to act as a balance to my lo-fi London Flaneur approach.' It is also true that this album is a love story, unless you are autistic in which case it's about mechanics."
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CD
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FAI 005CD
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"Kristian Robinson, aka the maverick musician and producer Capitol K provides another wonderful culturally diverse opus with his fourth studio album Nomad Junk. The album is a post-modern journey of playful and melodic pop juxtaposed with a global urban environment backdrop, as Tokyo, Taipei, Barcelona, London and Hong Kong all provide a heady brew of original found sound footage. Featuring a bounty of addictive hooks and melodies you can listen to or shake a leg at, Nomad Junk is an accomplished album from an artist with pedigree, and follows his previous albums Sounds Of The Empire (Planet Mu), Island Row (XL), and most recently Happy Happy (Faith & Industry). Capitol K's mixture of lo-fi rock, electronica, Asian-pop, field samples and Arabian melodies produces a dramatic collage of East meets West with a global magpie's eye."
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CD
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FAI 004CD
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"Happy Happy, the latest album release from Capitol K -- and the first for his own independent label Faith and Industry -- is the follow-up to 2002's Island Row (XL/Planet Mu). It's the most fully realized of Capitol K's recordings to date: a homemade, kaleidoscopic hybrid of precision electronics rendered boldly and beautifully live by an eclectic four-piece band; personal twists with a global perspective and psychedelic excursions interrupted by impromptu all-night parties in the parts of the city you can only reach by bike. Kristian Craig Robinsons first two albums as Capitol K, Sounds of the Empire (Planet Mu) and Island Row (Planet Mu/XL), secured his reputation as a cutting-edge studio producer melding innovative sampling and electronics with rock dynamics and a pop spirit."
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12"
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XL 138EP
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2002 release, 12" vinyl version. Last copies, reduced price.
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CD
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XL 138CD
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2002 CDEP, last copies, reduced price. "The man behind the Capitol K moniker. Kristian Craig Robinson, after two warmly-received and limited edition vinyl releases on XL last year, is finally ready for his full assault on the mainstream with his new single, 'Pillow'. It's a work of cut-up and off-kilter pop genius, and is suitably accompanied by remixes from fellow leftfield artistes, Wagon Christ and Leafcutter John. As an added bonus, the full vocal mix of album track, 'Capitol Beat Sticky', is included on the vinyl release, having only previously been available on The Cosmic Forces Of Mu compilation double CD on Planet Mu."
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