Finders Keepers Records

The very first Buchla synthesiser performance by revolutionary composer Suzanne Ciani finally makes its fifty year journey from its switch-on New York art gallery to its long deserved and discerning global phonographic audience.

With this previously unheard vinyl pressing, Finders Keepers Records are proud to present an archival project of ‘art music’ that not only redefines musical history but lays genuine claim to the overused buzzwords such as pioneering, maverick, experimental, groundbreaking and esoteric, while questioning social politics and the evolution of music technology as we have come to understand it. To describe Italian-American composer Suzanne Ciani’s resurrected Buchla concert records as genuine gamechangers would be a gross understatement. These records represent a musical revolution, an artistic revelation, a scientific benchmark and a trophy in the cabinet of counterculture creativity. This sonic installation album, alongside her recently liberated WBAI / Phill Niblock 1975 sessions (FKR082), are triumphant yardsticks in the synthesiser space race and the untold story of the first woman on the proverbial musical moon. While pondering the early accolades attached to these golden era New York recordings it’s daunting to learn that these records were in fact not even records at all.

What exists on this disc now was a manifesto and a one-time gateway to a new world, which somehow was only partially pushed ajar. Captured here is a genuine live act exploring new territories with a fully performable music instrument. If the unfamiliar, modernistic, melodic pulses, tones and harmonics found on these 1970’s artistic gallery collaborations / live presentations (then soon to be followed by academic grant applications and educational demonstrations) had been placed in a phonographic context alongside the widely marketed work of Morton Subotnick, Walter Carlos or Tomita, then the name Suzanne Ciani and her infectious influence would have already radically changed the shape, sound and gender of our record.

With the light of Buchla and Ciani’s initial flame Finders Keepers continues the journey through the vaults of this increasingly celebrated music legacy, illuminating these ‘non-records’ that evaded the limelight for almost half a century. You can’t write history when you are too busy making it. With fresh ink in the bottomless well, let’s start at the beginning. Again.

Andy Votel - Music To Watch Girls Cry (2003) by Finders Keepers Records

EUROPIUM ALLUMINATE - ANDY VOTEL JANE WEAVER MIXTAPE 2010

ANDY VOTEL - MONDO CARNE VAL MIXTAPE 2016

The August 2022 episode of Andy Votel's monthly show for NTS RADIO which was sadly never archived. This show is dedicated to the tragic passing of Dan Dwayre AKA Black Lodge. Check out the NTS website for a further 80 x 1hour long episodes of Randomonium which can all be streamed in full.

Andy Votel says "Exactly TWENTY FIVE years ago (when I was 20) I did a remix for the band Texas whose “Say What You Want” track was yet to be released. After the record had been cut I made the grave mistake of telling the major label that I had used samples from records by Elephants Memory, Dave Grusin, Don Ellis, Kraftwerk (1st LP), Fear Itself, Arc 2 and the unreleased soundtrack to Valerie And Her Week Of Wonders (off video tape) and needless to say, they panicked and shelved the whole project. Bizarrely the label even paid me to design and manufacture an obi-strip (based on Argento’s Deep Red) and it got a really nice review in The Face which lead to plenty of remix requests throughout the following years… even though very few people really got to hear the very limited white-label. A few years later (after the original song became a global hit) they re-did the song with Wu Tang Clan, sampling Leicester's very-own Engelbert Humperdinck. Original copies of my version are scarce but inexpensive, I’d love to find a copy with the artwork one day"

Volume 2 of Andy Votel's Brazilian Psych Mix (following Volume 1 that was originally released by Far Out Recordings) featuring MORE rare vintage vinyl from the Som Livre / RGE catalogue.

Originally broadcast on Worldwide.Fm on International Womans Day. 8/3/2022

Also appeared on a very limited run of screen-printed cassette tapes

REST IN PEACE - PETE MITCHELL(11 December 1958 – 12 March 2020)

RARE FILM MUSIC ON VINYL LIVES HERE !!!

Stepping out of a six month hibernation with our best foot forward, Finders Keepers Records Radio Show returns from our beauty sleep to a breakfast of French toast, croissants, strong coffee and a refreshing pint of petrol with-a-rag-stuffed-in-the-top! Marking 50 years exactly since the Mai 68 riots in Paris, your faithful hosts take you on a two hour journey in recognition of the huge and immediate cultural shift in French art, literature and music including the rise of forward-thinking, philosophical, thematic pop music which made France the forerunners and undisputed maverick masters of the concept album. Discussing a genre that arguably peaked with Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier's notorious Histoire De Melody Nelson, your faithful FKRR hosts, Andy Votel, Doug Shipton and Pete Mitchell dig much much deeper into their vintage vinyl vaults to trace the sonic origins of feature-length French Psychedelia while they attempt to authenticate the first French concept album and trace a bloodline of existential spoken word French Funk and gritty fuzz-fuelled symphonic rock which would go-on to shape the future sound of all French pop and its inimitable sprawling legacy. Punctuated with tracks from the insanely rare Popera Cosmic LP (an LP devised by teenagers Francois Wertheimer and Jean-Michel Jarre) which formed the foundations of the Gallic galactic narrative psychpop phenomena, this two hour special hopes to open your eyes and ears to a world you always wanted to explore, but perhaps never knew existed, with an interchangeable cast and family tree that eventually branched out to the start of French cosmic disco and synth pop while influencing the sampled sound of progressive European pop music for almost a semi-century.

From science fiction to malediction... From astrology to astronomy... From hypnosis to psychosis... via stone faces to cabbage heads...this show hears a fine return to form for Finders Keepers, celebrating controversial lost-pop and a bygone political hotbeds which they might call their perfect comfort zone. It's gonna be hard to cram it all in into one show but "The Revolution Will Not Be Sequelised". Ceci n'est pas une POP.