OUT TODAY!

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e7bd6c08e4cf772fd5a101cf914073b4d2181f8e396ef6b2

Featuring: Circuit Breaker, The Abberlines, The Real Burnouts, Wino Riot, Allan Douglas & The Tragedies, Fig Mints, Cody High School, Reels, Drum Machine Dating Service, Dead Canaries, Hopeful Monster, Artback Baker, Uberfuzz, My Electric Love Affair, Telescope Vehicle, Strangers, Jerry Kaline, Tofu Delux, Sleep School, Zebra Mu, The Hoborchestra, The Space Between Things,The People, John Ludington, Michael Wookey, Madison Acid, Becky N, William Carpenter’s Family Troubadour, Meghan Geiss, The Revolutionary Patriots, Wisdom Tooth, Nik Rayne, The Sugar Skulls, Ukelilli, Kaleidonauts, Sucks To LaLa Land, Warchalking, The Depravations, The Soft Sunflower, Dylan Gough, Rough Giraffe, Otis Liddy, Ghodbane, Isokon Flats with Uncle Jim, James P. Page, The Red Plastic Buddha, The Orange Drop, The Shivas, Rollercoaster, The Hoa Hoa’s, The Myrrors, The Six Barrels, Cassettes, The Cherry Tree Parade, Bren, Motherbird, Brigadier General, Martians, Tin-Town, Rocketships Of Love, and Jane Gilmore.

Q. How many daydreamers does it take to change a lightbulb?

A. As many as we can get around the bulb baby.

I’m starting to lose count of the number of times I’ve kicked off a post with the words “So here we go again”. But, erm, here we go again. Daydream Generation 5 – even by our own quantifiable standards its a monster of a compilation – a three headed quixodelic monster breathing melodic fire to be precise. 62 bands/artists, 4 action-packed hours of music, an alternative soundtrack for your summer and hopefully at the very least, a handfull of songs for you love for every summer of your life to come. It’s reached a stage now where I’m getting uncomfortable using the words “undiscovered music” – for a start each contributor is no doubt well discovered in their own circles, but moreover if you’ve been tuned in to the DG for the last 16 months then you’ll already be familiar with at least half of the names. But as always there is much that is new (and naturally well worth checking out) to show that the mining skills are still as accidentally honed as ever, and there are several old friends from previous compilations that have been warmly welcomed back into the collective king-sized bed. You’ll forgive me this time around if I don’t do the traditional list of exact names, it was a lengthy enough excorcize at 2 discs, but with 3 to get through the day is short and seconds are precious. You’d only be skim-reading it anyway. As you probably are this.

DG5 hasn’t been without its inevitable hitches, but what do you expect with a daydreamer at the wheel? They said about Kerouac that he acted like “once it was dreamt up, it was as good as done…” Dreaming up stuff like “I know, let’s make a mix-tape of mostly unsigned bands” is the easy part. Getting down to orchestrating it is a steep learning curve everytime with just enough knocks and bruises to want to do it again. After DG3 I tried to be clever and cut the dreaded stress-inducing deadline-day out of the equation, setting up the Singles section, the idea being that when there were enough songs to fill 2 discs, the compilation would be deadlineless and thus done when it was done. It worked well on DG4 and it would have worked again on DG5 if I hadn’t made the near fatal mistake of adding up the total time of all the songs we’d mined incorrectly. I’ve overshot the 80 minutes by a track or two before, but somehow this time I managed to run over by 7 whole songs totalling a terrifying 37 minutes. But just to prove that I really do learn from one project to the next, once I’d climbed out of the initial hole of horror I remembered that previous DG fuck-ups have often produced some positive results, so I said to myself “Fuck it… let there be 3 discs…”. 2 days later and 3 discs there were. And it sounded so fucking good that I was relieved to have fucked it up in the first place. I’ll not bore you with the rest of the gremlins that sees this thing coming out a week later than planned – let’s just say I don’t want to think about “bitrate” again for a long, long time, nor will I trust Windows Media Player to calculate 80 minutes ever again, will make sure the engineer is stocked with Vitamin C before burting out a release date, artwork pedantics, overshooting the songs a second time, overshooting the 100MB limit on Mediafire, spelling mistakes and other assorted obstacles left me feeling for 24 hours like I never wanted to touch one of these projects with a barge-pole from a crouching position behind an iron hedge ever again.

And I might not. I guess it all depends on you. If you dig it then I’ll keep on doing it, but if I don’t see messages flying back and forth across MySpace to say that you loved The So And So’s song, or comments on the DG site, then I’m going to finally reach the logical conclusion that we’re all just pishing in the wind here. The Daydream Generation is not some super-slick corporate record company, nor is it even some financially viable super-cool independent record label fuelled by the oil of money, it is a hand-made Prankster bus that journeys on love & comradeship. So I’ll keep driving, but you folks have got to keep it filled up. Post a blog. Post a bulletin. Tell a friend. Or else it breaks down. In the middle of nowhere. And we don’t even know where we’re going yet.

And so here we go again (again) – the part where I say thankyou to everyone who got on board this time and gave their songs to the cause to get us moving in the first place. First and foremost a massive thanks to Tim who like that bald-headed guy at Glastonbury continues to host the DG and make nearly everything you see technologically possible. Secondly, thanks to Kris who has played the inevitable role of sounding board the last 2 months & did some creative back-slapping whenever I was choking on the making of DG5 (much needed and appreciated man). Cheers as well to the people who psychologically broke me out at various crisis points and did some of the dirty work – Jon (coffee wakes people up, and when people wake up they fall in love), Bobby (“yeah it was really easy putting together the Cozy Home comp” haha), and Loudon (good to have someone in the same time-zone as me typing recommendations bleary-eyed after midnight). Big CHEERS for Joe Bockerstette kindly doing the Pepperland cover for us (let’s start a country). Thanks of course to all the individuals and organisations behind all the music who make and continue to make this possible – Tara, Paul Burnout, Gil De Ray, Scout, Paul Le Keux, Helter Skelter, Dylan, Allan, Jared, Edd, Chris, Tim trumpet, Tim Buddha, Steve, Nik (twice!), Sommer, Tanya, The lovely Hoa Hoa’s, Griffin, Max, Joe & Jonny, Jed, all the Marcs and Marks, Becky NNN, Meghan, Jason, Bill, Kenji, Celina, T, all the Nicks, David & Otis, James, both the Michaels, Moppy Gav and Simon, Madison, Dan, Lil, Keith, Bren, CTP, Spendid Isolation Podcast, Your Psych Tunes, Pigeon Hole Records, Optical Sounds Records, Hijacked Records, World In Sound Records, Transatmospheric.com, and of course the brilliant Cozy Home Records. Ta also to Mrs Smally and Smally Jr for etting me get lost in the music factory from time to time and time again.

Finally cheers to you for reading this, for downloading the compilation, and for listening.

Daydream On.

Smally

CATEGORIES:DAYDREAM GENERATION, DG COMPILATIONS, RELEASES