Antigen Records

15 songs of solitude, supercontainers, service stations and extra-terrestrial encounters… a Christmas message from the Queen and an 18th century carol penned by an atheist amputee. Festive entertainment for all the family.

Dead Rats Dan and Nathan have composed a soundtrack to the public construction of a giant, five ton sculpture made of clay. Hear (and see) it performed live by the Melodians Steel Orchestra here...

El-Wekala UK brings Egyptian prog to Trafalgar Square and more...

C Joynes and Dead Rat Orchestra present the first fruits of a new collaboration at the New Wolsey Studio in Ipswich.

Robin and Dan led a procession of revellers to the ceremonial burning of a 30 foot wicker man at the climax of the Dead Rat Orchestra set at the Sin-Eater Festival in Shropshire on Sunday. No Christian policemen were harmed in the incident.

Tour dates for Nathaniel Robin Mann and The Great Park are now available, only a day after the tour started, which is pretty efficient for us. The two remaining Dead Rats, Daniel Merrill and Robin Alderton, play A Festival of Untidiness in Reading on Saturday, in their Ghostband incarnation.

Regular visitors to this site (if indeed they exist) may have noticed a slightly slack attitude to regular news updates and a disappointing lack of fun-packed events to enliven those idle moments of downtime. Well, no token gesture of appeasement is too much trouble for us here, so here's an event:

26th June brought the Sons of Joy to the Ipswich Fringe festival for what was widely rumoured to be their final performance... for a while at least. Matt Simpkins (voice, fiddle and drum) heads off to Oxfordshire in August, to study to become an Anglican priest. Daniel Merrill (backing shouts, violin and stomping) is also leaving the fair county of Essex, to study in London.

"Twin-fiddles, from the lush to the distorted, backed up by the world's oldest big drum, lead this set of lo-fi Christian tunes and songs. Lou Reed, Nick Cave and backwoods preachers are all in there, bless 'em. Magnificently loopy." fRoots

Having sat on their arses for a whole month, Sons of Joy finally get around to releasing their long-awaited second album. With their debut from November 2011 now a distant memory, Messrs Merrill and Simpkins approached BBC Radio Suffolk's David Butcher at 8pm with a plan to learn, play, record, digitise and release their second album in 4 hours.