Radio Khartoum is a small record label specializing in sophisticated, left-field pop and imaginary soundtracks. Artists include the Hepburns (Wales), Cessna (Finland), Testbild! (Sweden), Cavil (England), Anthony Rochester (Australia), the Cat Box Quartet (Denmark), and Gypsophile (France). Although rumored for many years to be located in Sweden, Radio Khartoum is, in fact, based in Northern California and is also responsible for North American distribution for labels including Friendly Noise (Sweden), Quince (Japan), and Vespertine & Son (UK). Radio Khartoum is bicycle powered.
Originally released: 2010. Have you ever wondered what your friends say behind you back? Not the edited version, the spin or the pitch, but the backstabbing, the barb and the bitch? The Hepburns (Wales) have returned with an album championing the ordinary, the downtrodden and the broken. That said, HOW THE FALLEN ARE MIGHTY also just happens to represent The Hepburns at their cattiest, as they skewer couch surfers, hack writers, sexual taxonomists, civil servants, store greeters and (more often ...
Mares' tails-known to cloud watchers as cirrus uncinus-are feathery strands of frozen cirrus cloud. Beautiful from afar, they signal the approach of a warm front, forecasting change and turmoil. Cavil's MARES' TAILS captures life lived under the presence of prevailing south westerlies in a Pennine town in a series of folk nocturnes, filled out with brushed drums, trembling bass, glockenspiel, and the occasional waves of echoing guitars. Delivered with a calm assurance, the major chords never ...
New in new packaging. 2009 "Aquatint", the most ambitious Testbild! project to date, is a conceptual piece coloured by the sea. It comprises a short story-observations of a lighthouse librarian-and a short film, which is a look at our world from under the sea's surface. The music is a dream-like descent into steam fog and black swirls. Layers of cinematic pop and 60's jazz mix with sea shanties, Mexican trumpets and vibraphones. It is the echoes from a forgotten harbour, where the ropes never ...
Format: CD
Label: Radio Khartoum: khz205
Date: 06/27/2005
UPC:664449202120
Description: Timeless pop artistry out of Tasmania. Two and a half years in the tinkering, Anthony Rochester's second long player is a producer's album: densely layered melodies and sounds, sounds, sounds! Start with that classic bass sound of the French 60s (think Serge Gainsbourg or, more recently, Bertrand Burgalat). Add a truckload of keyboards (piano, Hammond, classic synths...the portamento button even gets a mention in the album thank-yous), guitars galore, strings, operatic "Star Trek" backing ... Read More
Format: CD
Label: Vespertine & Son: Vespertine & Son 102
Date: 09/14/2009
UPC:5055300309518
Description: New in new packaging. 2009 Before You Left underlines Roger Quigley's credentials as an expert purveyor of slowly unravelling melancholic pop. Over more than a decade, both on his own and as leader of Manchester's Montgolfier Brothers, Quigley has developed a distinctive style of composition and delivery. The voice, increasingly rich and sonorous, presides over a backdrop of delicate, repetitive guitar arpeggios and sweeping cello. The mood-soporific, hypnotic-recalls Spiritualized's woozy ... Read More
Format: CD
Label: Radio Khartoum: khz203
Date: 01/05/2004
UPC:664449201826
Description: New in new packaging. 2004 The long awaited follow up to 2000's "Champagne Reception" (the vinyl edition of which sold out on the day of release) continues the wayward travels of songwriter Matt Jones and The Hepburns. The Hepburns' Welsh landscape is alive with ghosts, rife with drama, and stamped with the footprints of pink elephants. The album weaves a wobbly path through gardens and derelict hotels, eavesdropping on tales of beer bubbles, Turkish delight and TV oblivion. Jones sketches this ... Read More
Format: CD
Label: Radio Khartoum: khz107
Date: 11/06/2007
UPC:664449202328
Description: New in new packaging. 2007 Pearly guitar pop in the finest UK tradition, albeit skewed sideways by cinematic caprices and elliptical narrative. Probably the Hepburns' lightest album, "Something Worth Stealing" was written as a romantic fling with no skeletons in the closet...well, unusually few skeletons by Hepburns standards, discounting the up-tempo duet with the dead guy who comes back to woo a former lover, the ghostly coal mine choir in the jazzy shadows on the ditty about the strongman's ... Read More
Edition: 7" vinyl + 3" CD in 7" gatefold sleeve
Format: 7" single (45 rpm)
Label: Radio Khartoum: mhz103
Date: 06/06/2005
UPC:664449201710
Description: This single is just a bit of magic that happened when no one was looking. "What If Everyone Got What They Wanted, " The Hepburns' whimsical ode to letting it slip through your fingers, is pure A-side, a song that begged to be released on its own. A single, a song heard in isolation, the kind of tune that justifies the pause between songs to stop the turntable and flip the record. Matt Jones claims to have recorded the song in all of 10 minutes but the resulting first take is timeless (and could ... Read More
Format: CD
Label: Vespertine & Son: Vespertine & Son two
Date: 05/23/2005
Description: New in new packaging. 2005 A collection of vintage recordings from Otto Smart, the mysterious third Montgolfier Brother. Like labelmate/bandmate Quigley, Otto's sound is almost uncomfortably intimate. And even more fragile: a little rough at times, and frequently toy-like. Although generally grounded in guitar, the instrumentation is diverse, ranging from glockenspiel to harmonium. The style is totally out of synch with the 80s (when these songs were reportedly recorded by a teenage Otto), ... Read More
Format: CD
Label: Friendly Noise: fyn33
Date: 10/16/2006
UPC:7320470071311
Description: New in new packaging. 2006 Utterly lovely new album from Swedish outfit Testbild! , now a quartet, with Petter and Mattias joined by Douglas Holmquist (Dr Higgins, Rodriguez) and film maker Pontus Lundkvist. Lacking most of the jagged postpunk edges of the second album or their recent 7" split with Anthony Rochester, the new Testbild! make good with gentle melodies and layers and layers of tasty keyboard, metallophone, lullaby vocals and atmospherics recorded in that house...you know, the one ... Read More
Format: CD
Label: Bendigedig Recordings: bdg001
Date: 03/17/2009
UPC:5016700122626
Description: New in new packaging. 2009 A curiously contemplative album from Welsh guitar pop maestros The Hepburns, recorded with Charlie Francis (High Llamas, Robyn Hitchcock, R.E.M., etc. ) at the desk. Despite the banishment of acoustic guitar from the studio, this album's warmth wraps you like a blanket, even as it contemplates madness, painkillers, paperboys, hairdressers, divorcees, and Roger Federer's backhand. Curiously, after a spate of recordings for Radio Khartoum, "Trojan Hearse" feels closer ... Read More
Format: CD
Label: Friendly Noise: fyn50
Date: 02/26/2008
UPC:7393210306011
Description: New in new packaging. 2008 "Differnet's 2007 album finds the Swedish quartet again grappling with compositions that don't quite comfortably fit into any obvious form of popular music-crackling sounds of insects and general everyday noise meshes with slow cascades of synth strings and an extremely slow, deliberate rhythm before suddenly breaking into a vocal and drums break that could be a nervous soundtrack to a car chase. And this is all on the first song "Pattern of Parklands, " which still ... Read More
