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.

Want to know the difference between a lathe-cut record and a 'normal' vinyl record? Then read on...

Merry non-denominational season’s greetings! Our dislike of queuing at the Post Office normally means we don’t encourage people to buy more records from us in the run-up to Christmas. But, it wouldn’t be Christmas without some form of cynical purchase incentive scheme, so we are offering people the chance to acquire vast quantities of CDs for ludicrously low prices. We have a big pile of unsold stock to shift, to make room for more unsold records next year. So take a look at some of our festive bundles and solve all your present-buying dilemmas with the minimal hassle of navigating…

UPDATE: Hilariously, our e-commerce plug-in has stopped working, so it's currently impossible to buy anything! If you can't wait for this to be sorted, please e-mail your order to info (at) antigenrecords (dot) com and I will sort it out personally. Thanks for your patience. Welcome to the antigen records winter sale. There's 50% off everything* in the webstore until the end of January!

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

Still feeling disappointed that we reached the end of the Mayan Long Count calendar without a global catastrophe? Fear not, a new calendar has been discovered! This one ends ominously on 31 December 2013 – so we probably only have one year to live!

As you may have noticed from reading our Facebook page, the first pressing of the Caveat Emptor 2 compilation CD had defective disc art and is being repressed. Rather than chuck them all in a skip, we gave out a shedload at the Godspeed You! Black Emperor / Dead Rat Orchestra gig at the HMV Forum on Monday night.

We are privileged to be in a position to reissue the first three EPs by the Dead Rat Orchestra, to celebrate 10 years of free-folk freakery from this trio of wood-worrying beardies. They have been merrily exploring the outer reaches of acoustic music for the best part of a decade, and have recently received long-overdue national recognition for their soundtrack to the BBC documentary The Guga Hunters of Ness.

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