The original BOC cassette EBAY drama

Was listening to some of the old Skam 12"s tonight, decided to pass by WATMM for old times sake and answer any questions regarding the the whole bullshit drama of having my tapes nicked and put on EBAY if anyone cares.

I'll be around until my 3$ sub runs out

Herr Jan's verified me, am willing to verify further if need be.

So it's YOUR fault the box set never came out?

No, not directly, I am the poor sucker that left the cassettes at the home of the person that stole them from me.

How did you obtain the tapes?

How did you come into posession of the tapes originally?

So who was behind the Ebay auction? You, or the thief?

I used to do art for SKAM, did all the MASK series label art, the boards chinook single labels etc.. shared a house with Jega, met M&M a few times.. the tapes arrived as a christmas present..

Prince Murat, (incidentally the name of a hotel in Tallahassee Florida, where ex WATMM mod OctaveKitten lived) was responsible for the auction - I put a request in to stop the auction with a stolen goods report.

Had any interesting conversations with M&M about their music or any older stuff they've done?

Not spoken to them since their first gig in Manchester @ The Phoenix nightclub.

  On 9/15/2015 at 5:15 PM, Datathief said:

I used to do art for SKAM, did all the MASK series label art, the boards chinook single labels etc.. shared a house with Jega, met M&M a few times.. the tapes arrived as a christmas present..

Prince Murat, (incidentally the name of a hotel in Tallahassee Florida, where ex WATMM mod OctaveKitten lived) was responsible for the auction - I put a request in to stop the auction with a stolen goods report.

Ah, yeah - forgot about all that drama... didn't know you did artwork for SKAM - how'd you get that gig?

Met Sean and Rob 'techre at their 1st gig in Manchester, knew a few people they did through the graffiti / bus tagging scene in the 80's, (one of our more prolific crew members got a shout out on the back of "sounds of machines our parents used") - conversations happened and people were introduced as time went by. I was a total old school electro head at the time and they reinvigorated my interest. In fact they were responsible for me getting an ASR10 sampler and messing about with music.

I was doing skate tee design in my spare time, showed a few to the Skam people, I did the 0161 CD sleeve in an all nighter with Andy Maddocks giving art direction and arranged Daz Fittons art onto a CD template for the 1st editon of the Bola CD "soup", It wasn't my art or fonts BTW.. really wasn't my style, but that's what they wanted.

Back then hardly anyone was online or even had photoshop, so I was their guy at the time before their designers Ingy and Bhati came on the scene.

I was using the name "studio moo" at the time..

I was posting to the old IDM group at that point and SKAM were always paranoid about info getting out, I think it's due to that need for anonimity and privacy that having these tapes get out upset me so much. Probably one of the reasons why I gave such a lengthy explanation on discogs.

Datathief as a musical outfit were always a bit of an underdog in the manchester scene, and it was because of that we ended up going to other labels such as V/VM, Orange, starting my own label and Finally doing stuff for BetaBodega / Mass Transit, which in turn brought me to Miami. Which in turn also got me in contact with the ex mod that stole the tapes.

In a post RDJ soundcloud world all of that ol' tape drama seems a bit petty. Nobody except for a few neckbeards have downloaded the old tapes off slsk, remaster them up nice and put out that box set already!

Nice work on the SKAM art btw, text minimalism done right, TDR should take some notes

what skate tees were they?

thanks for clearing things up.

bocboc, where are you?

Octave Kitten sounds vile, didn't a few people on here meet her and get their hearts broken? That's not really a question, just me pondering on watmm lore. Are you still doing the music yourself?

Have you ever owned or seen a copy of the 'Random 35 Track Tape'? If I'm not mistaken the ones you had were AFOT and OTV2(?)

Additonally, does Prince Murat still have these?

Did she spend all the money on racing cars and that ....

  On 9/15/2015 at 6:07 PM, Datathief said:

Met Sean and Rob 'techre at their 1st gig in Manchester, knew a few people they did through the graffiti / bus tagging scene in the 80's, (one of our more prolific crew members got a shout out on the back of "sounds of machines our parents used") - conversations happened and people were introduced as time went by. I was a total old school electro head at the time and they reinvigorated my interest. In fact they were responsible for me getting an ASR10 sampler and messing about with music.

 

I was doing skate tee design in my spare time, showed a few to the Skam people, I did the 0161 CD sleeve in an all nighter with Andy Maddocks giving art direction and arranged Daz Fittons art onto a CD template for the 1st editon of the Bola CD "soup", It wasn't my art or fonts BTW.. really wasn't my style, but that's what they wanted.

 

Back then hardly anyone was online or even had photoshop, so I was their guy at the time before their designers Ingy and Bhati came on the scene.

 

I was using the name "studio moo" at the time..

 

I was posting to the old IDM group at that point and SKAM were always paranoid about info getting out, I think it's due to that need for anonimity and privacy that having these tapes get out upset me so much. Probably one of the reasons why I gave such a lengthy explanation on discogs.

 

Datathief as a musical outfit were always a bit of an underdog in the manchester scene, and it was because of that we ended up going to other labels such as V/VM, Orange, starting my own label and Finally doing stuff for BetaBodega / Mass Transit, which in turn brought me to Miami. Which in turn also got me in contact with the ex mod that stole the tapes.

I enjoyed reading this. I hope e-Bay can maybe get those stolen goods back to you.

Who's taller, Mike or Marcus?

What tapes exactly got stolen? Just the Old Tunes, or were some of their earlier albums in there as well? Did they actually get sold to people?

  On 9/15/2015 at 6:09 PM, cult fiction said:

In a post RDJ soundcloud world all of that ol' tape drama seems a bit petty. Nobody except for a few neckbeards have downloaded the old tapes off slsk, remaster them up nice and put out that box set already!

Nice work on the SKAM art btw, text minimalism done right, TDR should take some notes

While it's a bit petty now, the problem is there's always someone that for some reason has to be a hero and upload the tracks, wether those uploads were sourced from my tapes, I dunno, same kind of peoplle that uploaded Jega's leaked album and AFX's Melodies from mars.

For me it's about theft, for those people it's about losing potential revenue.

Happy to hear you liked the stuff I did.

  On 9/15/2015 at 6:23 PM, Chesney said:

what skate tees were they?

Stuff I was trying to get printed.. it never panned out.

  On 9/15/2015 at 9:08 PM, tec said:

Octave Kitten sounds vile, didn't a few people on here meet her and get their hearts broken? That's not really a question, just me pondering on watmm lore. Are you still doing the music yourself?

I knew one guy that was trying to get stuff back from her, we exchanged a lot of notes. None added up.

I heard drama continued once she decided to jump to a new scene.

I have wrote a few things, nothing released for a very long time now.

I concentrate on game development nowadays. I had some music in a Nintendo published game and spend most of my time doing my art/design dayjob now.

  On 9/15/2015 at 10:02 PM, Goiter Sanchez said:

Have you ever owned or seen a copy of the 'Random 35 Track Tape'? If I'm not mistaken the ones you had were AFOT and OTV2(?)

Never heard of that one.

Did you name your cat ... hah, sorry, it must've been a real pain in the arse at the time.