We wish you all a Happy New Year from all at Loca Records. It has been a quiet year in 2007 due to all sorts of crazy external pressures but thanks to everyone for bearing with us whilst we got our collective acts together. We are looking forward to some cool new releases this year and lots of exciting new collaborative projects. In the meantime some new tracks for 2008:

1. MEME - Dangerous
2. MEME (featuring Arecee) - Cartoons
3. ML - Daisy Cutter

Good luck for 2008!

A free and participatory comedy show for the web called "Where are the Joneses?" that uses the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike licence (BY-SA) and therefore we are very happy to be part of the show. We were asked if our music could be used and, of course, as it meets our definition of Free Culture we are excited to see where it may lead. Kudos to David from Imagination for experimenting with the ideas of Free Culture.

David Meme was interviewed on Radio 4 as part of their Law in Action programme on the limits and challenges to copyright from digital technologies. Broadcast on the 27th February 2007 the feature was broadly sympathetic to the brave new world of copyleft creativity and the advantages of sharing that we support.

We are looking to launch a very exciting new range of Tee shirt designs (I am told by Marcus). He is currently all excited trying out new fonts/designs/logos and no doubt will be spoiling for a fight over the costliest materials known to man in Tee production. More news and early looks in as soon as we get more from the Design Department...

Loca met Burt Jansch, the respected singer and songwriter backstage at his recent gig in Brighton.. Great gig but very difficult to explain copyleft to him backstage...He agreed that the system was broken, but was cautious about our plans for copyright...

A strange meeting today with the UFJ Institute from Japan, complete with Japanese interpreters and very dodgy English food ;-) more shortly...

We were invited to the Tate Britain give a discussion about the Loca and talk about what we were up to in terms of copyleft (open source) for the Open Congress. Whilst we were there we took the opportunity to show some of our videos and music. Here they have all been nicely archived by Kelli Dipple and the others involved in Tate Online so anyone can download and view them. We had a great time and hope you get chance to check them out.

PS A very MERRY XMAS and HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone who has supported us during a hectic 2005. :-) We have LOCA010 under production and it will be out early in 2006 so keep you eyes peeled!

New video for Ward which is a crazy animation featuring Karl Marx, a yellow monster and others. There are two versions a small one (15Mb) and a large one (26Mb). They may need to be downloaded to disk before they will play... (Right click, save to disk/Mac - Ctrl+Click Download file). We also have it hosted at archive.org

UPDATE We just heard that WARD have a very nice review in the latest issue of The WIRE June 2005, on page 65, and we know that Ward are very excited about it... :-)

We have finally got around to creating a news and updates mailing list which we promise we won't spam. Its mainly to keep you updated with releases and to let you know about news etc. Join the list in the mailing list area

We've uploaded some of the videos that we have had made for our releases. [Update: WARD video added]. Which include:

- Meme: Invisible
(director Dan Knight)

- Meme: Beautiful
(director Laurent King)

- ML: Heavy Artillery
(director Pedro Inoue)

- ML: Automotive Hydraulic
(director Matthias Hilner)

- WARD: Generating Civil Society
(director David Meme)

LOCA features in an article in Sound on Sound magazine in the January 2005 Issue. Anybody who is visiting the site after reading the article is very welcome!

We are currently working on a release schedule for 2005 (which is always a bit random and made up at the last minute) but we can confirm that the new WARD album - It might be useful for us to know - will be our first release in the new year.

Speaking of which we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported us this year and wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

It has been a long summer, with Loca pretty much moving temporarily to Oslo, Norway for the duration. Its been lovely, met some cool people, seen some new music and swam in perfect unspoilt lakes but back in Brighton and quite a bit of catching up to do. We've a release from ML to sort out, a Meme EP, a MEME vs XAN album, some WARD stuff to showcase and most importantly lots of recording to do!

Oh and finally we have got around to uploading our How to run an open-source record label guide... enjoy!

We're all just back from a festival conference in Slovenia called HAIP. Meme DJ'd on the night playing a crazed electronica set that filled the dancefloor at 3am. The Slovenians certainly know how to party!

Most of the LOCA back catalogue is now available online at Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk and soon Amazon.fr or buy direct from us in the LOCA store. We are now also available on iTunes...

Loca was interviewed in Svenska Dagbladet, the national Swedish newspaper. The full article is available here sans the photography on the Swedish site Copykatt..

Check out the Downloads page for the latest MP3s from MEME vs XAN's 24 EP... Including the new track 24 featuring amazing vocals from Lisa.

LOCA will be at the Neuro music/arts/open-source conference in Munich at the end of February. Look forward to meeting everyone there!

Due to the sheer incompetence of our webhosting company, dot5hosting, our website vanished over christmas - together with all our mail! Well in an emergency action we sacked them and have now moved to lunarpages and I have to say how impressed I am with their webhosting service. Please note that all our mail etc was lost so please resend if you haven't heard a reply...

LOCA was invited to a meeting with Stelios and Phil from easy.com (the owners of easyJet) who expressed an interest in copyleft and our business model....

MEME supported Cosmic Sonic Triple Tag Team (Cotton Casino from Acid Mothers Temple solo project) at the Sanctuary Cafe in Brighton last night. As usual the Sanctuary limiter caused havoc with the musicians attempts to play music even though band member monolab valiently tried to steer the volume around the limiter's overly sensitive met...

LOCA records is discussed on Wired.com today in a really good article about what we are up to. Welcome to anybody that drops in from that link and feel free to take a look round and check out the Downloads section to get a taster... More uploads soon!

LOCA and it's open-source copyleft mission was discussed in the Financial Times yesterday (04-11-03) in an article debating the future of music.

MEME vs XAN five track EP '24' is nearing completion and will be sent off to press very soon. We hope to upload some MP3's for you to sample asap.

In the meantime you can catch a very rare gig at the Radio One Live Alternative series of nights in Brighton on Thursday 30th October 2003 at the Sanctuary Cafe (Off Western Rd).