Together they created an entire back catalogue of 80s-inspired album cover designs for a series of fictional musical artists – including the radly-nomenclatured Bobby Coolfinger, Hank Doom and Les Trois Anoraks. After these faux sleeves (ten of which you can see here) had been created, an array of local musical illuminati were commissioned to spread the eyegasmic smirk across to your lucky ears, with each actual artist adapting one of the faux personas and creating a track as if it was off the imaginary album.

Owen Brinley (Department M), Katie Harkin (Sky Larkin), James Mabbett (Napoleon IIIrd), Paul Marshall (Lone Wolf) and Tom Hudson (Pulled Apart By Horses) are a few of the notables names who got involved, and the compilation album Mock ‘n’ Roll Volume One showcases the original songs penned by these peeps after being inspired by the outré, out-there artworks.You can hear the album here, and buying it will also help support the next stage of the project, with plans afoot to take the exhibition to London and bring the project full circle by getting the album pressed to wax.

You can also see some cool photographic outakes from the project and exhibition launch party here.

Curated by the good folk at local fanzine-come-DIY-empire Rhubarb Bomb, you’ll need several trembling hands to count all the decent acts appearing at the event this year. The Fall, Ghostpoet (pictured), Jeffrey Lewis (with Peter Stampfel, rather than The Junkyard or The Jitters) and Nine Black Alps are amongst the 70+ acts who will be playing across eight stages in the centre of the ‘Merrie City’ between 7-9 June. Also returning to the fray after triumphing at the same event several years ago will be Negative Narrative uber-darlings The Wave Pictures (check out their video for Eskimo Kiss below).

As well as the aforementioned artists the perma-caned Howard Marks will also be speaking about his latest and/or greatest shennanigans in his usual stoned tones, and Negative Narrative alumni The Chapman Family, This Many Boyfriends, Soulmates Never Die, Witch Hunt, Skint & Demoralised and Middleman are also on the bill. Local acts are well represented and anyone who lives in the wild, wild west of Yorkshire will no doubt recommend checking out Mi Mye, Eagulls, Imp, St Gregory Orange and Blacklisters too.

So what are you waiting for? Get yourself a ticket quick sharp (try here) and reap the dividends. At a mere £20 each you don’t need to have an internal abacus or aptitude for numbers to realise you’re onto a winner.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Phantom are currently working on their debut album and will play at The Great Escape festival in Brighton this weekend. Until then, you can hear their cover of Bon Iver’s Skinny Love in our in-site boombox. The video for Kisses is below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wrap your ears around their first single (We Can Dance Alone) in our in-site player. Out next month and produced by The Nexus (Hurts, Lana Del Ray), it’s a crossover pop song that tells the tale of a secret, unrequited love between two friends. The video – which was shot in Cumbria – is below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Led by songwriter Fredrik Eckhoff, the band finds strong points of affinity with the historic outpourings of New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco. A dedicated crooner, the spontaneity of Fredrik’s vocal contribution is often what makes a song gel on Space Junk – the band’s latest album, out now on cassette-come-vinyl label Crash Symbols.

You can download Halasan Bazar’s track Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad  from us for nowt. The ear-tickling, eye-tingling, brain-taunting video for How Did We Get here In The First Place is below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Opening for bands such as Frightened Rabbit, The Maccabees and Joan As Police Woman, as well as supporting kindred countryman Villagers at a sold out show at London’s Village Underground, the duo have quickly found their stride. To capitalise on this swift ascension their debut album got a UK release last month and this was preceded by the single Go Easy, which was mixed by Ben Hillier (Depeche Mode, Blur, Elbow).

Check out the video for Yet below and download The Leopard here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Until the band resurface for air, you can check out the audio death-roll that is Crocodile in our in-site player and pick through the bloodied bones of these photos in search of carrion.

The concept is relatively simple: take a photo documenting people obscuring or augmenting any part of their body with one or more record sleeves, causing a visual illusion. The best examples go far further than that though, as you will see from this collection of our favourites which feature fine alignment, forethought and creativity, as well as some outstanding album covers.

Photos by Johanna Páramos Santalucía, Elien Copermans, Johan Copermans, Toby Gilbert, Christophe Gowans, Nick Moffatt, Ben Donnelly, Carsten Ostendorf, Jonas Bergstrom, Zack Wright and Japp Hermans.

Fiction’s multi-instrumentalists have honed their live performance with a number of high profile support slots (Warpaint, Metronomy, Everything Everything) and are currently touring the continent. To find out whether truth really is stranger than Fiction you can check out the video for Museum below and peruse these photopixels they have arranged for us in response to some questions we put to them. You’ll also find their track Careful in our in-site player.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My staunchly atheistic Dad always warned me as a kid, NOT to fool around with the occult.

“You don’t believe in spirits Dad, you dick. Fuck it, let’s commune with Lucifer via the medium of this deck of playing cards.”

As I got older, I realised that he didn’t have to believe in anything, he’d just seen enough to know how easily a fertile mind could quicksand up to its nostrils in shit.

Despite having decoded this warning, I unwittingly waded into the disquieting tape hiss of Daniel Johnston’s expansive back catalogue around the same tender age he was swept away by the ‘Laughing Rapids’ of the aptly-named fairground ride he compered at Astroworld aged 22: ‘The River of No Return’. Daniel inadvertently documented his descent into mental breakdown on the Yin & Yang of his cassetteography – ‘Yip/Jump Music’ and the notorious Hell Ride ‘Hi, How Are You?’. Ping Pong-ing in and out of success and failure, depression and mania numerous times over the ensuing 20 years (including rampaging around New York ‘King Kong’-style pursued by babysitters Sonic Youth, signing briefly for Atlantic Records in ’92 and exorcising an old woman right out the window of her first floor apartment), the greying Daniel, belly pregnant with Psych Meds, defied his Demons and the name of the aforementioned carnival ride managing to find some of the adulation he had always sought, and more than deserves. Which unfortunately, as with everything in Daniel’s life, comes at a price.

The ‘Space Ducks: Soundtrack’, is yet another entry in the well-meaning, family-mismanagement of Daniel’s still considerable, albeit now diminished talent. Unfortunately this is probably the only version of his now fading incandescence we’re ever going to get, and the price we pay for him staying alive, productive and comparatively sane (his webstore sells iPad cases for practically the same amount I paid for an original piece of his art ten years ago).

Despite having written and illustrated his own comic books since childhood, ‘Space Ducks: An Infinite Comic Book of Musical Greatness’ was released only last year, funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Added into the bargain of an online pass to view a digital copy of the comic for minimal contributors was the download of MP3s of “accompanying songs”. Tellingly, the extent of these songs’ relationship to the ‘Space Ducks’ comic book, seem tenuous at best. Other than the title track and a few of the guest artists’ songs’ celestial preoccupations, this doesn’t seem to be the concept album about a troupe of anthropomorphic ducks liberating Space that you’d be forgiven for assuming it is.

Which isn’t to say it’s all that bad; Daniel seems to be enjoying himself, when he’s involved that is, being as this album echoes so much of his recent appearances/output in that he’s being steadied by famous friends (Johnston’s contributions account for seven amid a tracklist of 12 on the US release, 14 on this, the ‘European Volume’). Thankfully Daniel’s recordings seem a lot less patronised production-wise than on recent releases. Adrian Quesada of Austin Texas’s funk/mambo/merengue/cumbia band Grupo Fantasma ironically seems to ‘get’ Daniel’s necessity for a Lo-Fi environment better than Mark Linkous, who incongruously saw fit to sonically dress the mad and flabby Daniel in the Disney Cinderella mess of 2003′s ‘Fear Yourself’. Given that he eventually did himself in, you’d have thought he’d have known better.

So idiosyncratic and baggage-laden is Daniel, that the appearance of these other contributors – Fruit Bats, Jake Bugg, Eleanor Friedberger, Die Mason Die, Lavender Diamond and Deer Tick (Unknown Mortal Orchestra are exempt because their ‘Satanic Planet’ just sounds like a fucking awesome, galloping outtake from the sublime ‘II’) is more than a little diverting, (especially considering Daniel is absent for the last four tracks) despite Quesada’s admiral attempts at keeping proceedings cohesive. While not a bad addition to Daniel’s modern output, a concept album this isn’t. Which is especially apparent given how it pales in narrative-comparison to the bulk of his discography; itself a series of living concept albums fleshed-out with fully formed bit part characters, an angelic love interest and the eternal (internal) struggle between good and evil for their larger than life protagonist.

A confluence of events saw fit to deliver Daniel’s back catalogue unto me at the right time and thematic juncture in my life as to be able to wholeheartedly empathise: Demon semen pumping through my temporal arteries, and deliberations on whether or not to lance my throbbing temples with Wilkinson razor blades, or snip my wrists with nailclippers. I heartily recommend the experience to anyone frivolously wearing a ‘Hi, How Are you?’ T-Shirt, or Jake Bugg and I’ll even supply the lysergic.

Suicide or survival could only improve the two immeasurably.