complete sets

there are still a couple of copies of the complete sets left - this is currently the only way to get your physical copy of the Flowers track

embroidery for the bands

each pf the copies for the bands is embroidered

a spaceship video

from one Robert to another

yep - amazingly, Robert Wyatt sent this postcard to Robert Rotifer about his 77 minute track

a review in Electronic Sound

here's a nice review from Electronic Sound:

release day - Spaceship

release day - Flowers

release day - Solar Bones

release day - Yukka

release day - Darren Hayman

release day - 23 Hanging Trees

release day - Robert Rotifer

preorder A Transect of Shackleton Knoll by Spaceship

"I wanted to create a piece along the route from Lumb Hole to Blake Dean, two popular and beautiful spots in adjacent river valleys. The route took me past a ruined farmhouse marked 'Coppy' on the map, a collapsed shooting butt on Shackleton Knoll itself, what appeared to be an overgrown Victorian landscaped waterfall valley, a section of woodland river and finally to the stone supports that once held up the railway which moved the stone for local reservoir construction.

I could not complete the recordings all at once so, over a period of four evenings and one morning, I would start at Lumb Hole and venture a little further to my recording location, before returning. On the Thursday I walked the entire distance to Blake Dean and back, a round trip of a coincidental 7.7km.

The sections of the piece reflect the atmosphere of the locations. All the parts were recorded in the field using an iPad, a midi keyboard, a blue tooth speaker and a portable multi-track recorder."

Art by Maxim Peter Griffin

releases July 13, 2018

preorder Long Song by Flowers

pre-order 7GONG7 by Solar Bones

"Solar Bones formed as collaboration between electronic composer Patrick J Baxter and Paul Rains (Tigercats) in response to the wiaiwya 77 project.

Working with a graphic score containing only emotional scenarios, environments and illustrations, the timeline of 77 minute ‘7GONG7’ was divided into 7 movements. To coincide with the release date soon after the Summer Solstice, Solar Bones initially set out to harness the power of the Sun in sound. The result is a meandering journey through sonic territories exploring electronica, live drums, electric guitar, kalimba, synth and guitar drones.

Produced by Solar Bones in London, the track enlisted services of drummer Mike Collins and Kalimba player Duncan Barrett to feature in the opening, ‘Bounce’ and the penultimate movement, the house inspired ‘Floaty Arp’. The highlight, third movement ‘Buffalo’ is 7 minutes of groovy electronica."

releases July 11, 2018

preorder Arctic Tern by Yukka

"The piece was written mostly on the underground during my 4 hour round trip to work, sometimes falling asleep with my headphones on as a idea plays round on loop. I wanted to capture the monotonous repetition of travelling but also the small glimpses of the simple pleasures such as morning sunrises, or just simple getting home and having dinner! I wanted to explore the process of resampling, taking an idea from one section to form the basis for another, so a lot of the audio is recycled throughout the piece.

The track is named after the bird with the longest migration known in the animal kingdom, the Arctic Tern, with an average annual roundtrip lengths of about 44,100 miles -

So not quite Walthamstow to Uxbridge!

The artwork is by South London artist Lee Mundy. Cut and paste shapes representing different sections of the track, put together by hand during a 7 hour studio session in Bermondsey as I was mixing the track."

releases July 10, 2018

preorder Get Out Of The Way by Darren Hayman

"In 2017 I was asked to provide some music to accompany an exhibition by Finn Thomson. Finn was working as artist in residence in Harlow and was looking at public sculpture and how it was read and used by the Harlow community. That isn't to say, what people thought of it but also how people decorated, stole and climbed all over it as well.

The connection between us was made via my own earlier conceptual album about Harlow, 'Pram Town'.

I decided to make music based on found sounds and the actual incidental music the town provides as you walk around it.

The tempo and pitch of the whole piece is dictated by a lone beep that emanated out of a closed branch of British Home Stores but you will also here church bells, buskers, muzak from shops, roundabouts, announcements in council offices and the sound of the sculptures themselves. The only musical instruments used are bass guitar, wurlitzer piano and saxophone.

The bold idea of the piece is to perhaps place you in Harlow with me but also to have people think about the unintentional rhythms and sounds that constantly surround us.'

releases July 9, 2018

pre-order Palimpseste de Fréquences by Twenty-Three Hanging Trees

"A palimpsest of frequencies. Fleeting melodies, snapshots in time, each disappearing to reveal one another. Wait until everyone is asleep. Prefer the immediacy of direct recording over multitracking. A modular synthesiser, an old piano, a 3 meter long tape loop, a violin (thank you Rachel Watkins) and a Juno 6. Plug things in, see/hear what happens. It's all the same thread... Why not go on a journey? Maybe book some train tickets, travel for 77 minutes or more. The Brecon Beacons are beautiful in July. Open the window, feel the breeze. Close your eyes, listen. It's all the same thread..".

releases July 8, 2018

pre-order They Don't Love You Back by Robert Rotifer

"How I accidentally made my new album:

A good cause can be a really good cover for musical self-indulgence.

For my part, I've always wanted to do one of those long-form psychedelic song suites with playful bits, recurring motifs, extended hypnotic bits and found sound segués.

So when John "Jerv" Jervis of Wiaiwya Records asked me to contribute to this year's edition of his "Seven at 77" series of 77-minute tracks by seven artists compiled in a 7-CD set (or as a single CD or as poster with a download or just as a download) in aid of Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), I took that as my chance to fulfill that teenage dream, if a few decades late.

In order to get my piece done by the deadline, the plan was to record everything at the moment of writing, don't overthink, always use the first idea, then when I was about half the way through, I would see how it all fits together and write some more to make it all join up.

So I didn't plan for what it was going to be about, but apart from the one tune in it that is about Jerv (you'll have to spot that one yourself), inevitably, it turned out to be a piece about my experience of Brexit from the perspective of a European immigrant.

I wrote most of it in between my working on my journalism and trying and partly failing to translate last year's German, equally Brexit-themed "Über uns" album (on Charlie Bader and Ernst Molden's label Bader Molden Recordings) into English.

I'd like to think it's not moany or self-pitying, and to counteract the bitterness in the title I've drawn a completely non-Brexit-related picture of our rabbits for the cover/A3 poster.

Because you always think they love you back, and then they eat all the most beautiful flowers while you're not looking.

Anyway, it was going to be just a project on the side, but it's turned out to be my new album. A double album, really. So I'd love you to hear it." 

releases July 7, 2018

choosing buttons

sleeve design

here are the designs for this year's CD sleeves, the idea was taken from a line in Robert Rotifer's 77 minute tune - thanks Alexandra!

seven at 77 is available to pre-order

the full seven song, each 77 minutes long, album is out on 7/7, and you can pre order it here:

the final line-up for this year is:

Robert Rotifer  Twenty-Three Hanging Trees  Darren Hayman  Yukka  Solar Bones  Flowers  Spaceship
it's all available digitally, and there is a very special, extremely limited CD version of seven at 77:

that's seven 77 minute long songs on seven full length CDs, in a numbered edition of 49

and the proceeds go to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)

if you just want a couple of the tracks, they will all be made available individually later in June


you may notice there are a couple of final mixes still on their way (as you can imagine, tracks this long take a LOT of work to get just right) -

seven at 77 2018

Sketches in D Minor by The Hardy Tree

the Hardy Tree track from last year's Seven at 77 is being released on tape by the fabulous Clay Pipe

it's happening again

in 2017 seven bands recorded seven seventy-seven minute songs to raise money for Médecins Sans Frontières

we raised £1460 on the Just Giving page

so this year we doing it all over again - seven more bands, seven more seventy-seven minute songs, and (hopefully) we'll beat last year's total raised for MSF

we have some amazing bands who have undertaken this herculean task (one hour and 17 minutes! for one song!), but more of that soon enough

in the mean time, brace yourselves, and they'll be released, one track a day, for a week from 7th to 13th July 2018