Plaything posters: Black Mirror goes full Designers Republic

The Plaything episode of Black Mirror is a love/hate letter to video games and artificial intelligence. It is also a tribute to the graphic genius of The Designers Republic.

In the episode, future national treasure Will Poulter plays visionary game designer Colin Ritman. At one point in the episode, we visit Ritman's office. His shelves are cluttered with framed posters featuring the work of the TDR graphic design studio, which is beloved of techno heads and console gamers.

While he talks to Lewis Gribben's games journalist character Cameron Walker, you can spot the following works:

○ An Aphex Twin poster
○ the cover of Polygon Window's Quoth
○ a rare poster for The Orb's Blue Room
○ the cover of Autechre's debut album Incunabula
○ a circle thing which I haven't identified yet
○ a "laugh vote die" poster referencing a previous Black Mirror episode
○ and, hidden behind Cameron, the cover of Warp's first volume of Artificial Intelligence.

In another shot, you can spot Autechre's album Amber.

There are The Designers Republic works elsewhere in this office. Notice the one with the pigtails? That's from a TDR takeover of Emigre magazine – issue 29, to be exact. The pigtailed mascot featured here is called Sissy. The poster further left with a similar colour scheme is a collage for the same publication and contains stream-of-consciousness gibberish such as "design or die!", "g7oba7 7anguag3 for th3 mazz3z" and a Sheffield '94 football ident.

On the same shelf, there's an impenetrable sheet of black and white logo designs. This is their Visual Symbolism Vol. 94 (1990-1994) collection of "new and used" logos which contains Pop Will Eat Itself icons, Sun Electric's typeface, and a tonne of visual blaps saying things like "have a nice day" and "e by gum" and "I love my DR".

There is more, of course, but if I delve further into this, I'll fall into some kind of Black Mirror plot matrix and I'll grown USB sticks for fingers or something. Anyway, it's smashing to see such an iconic design outfit represented on the telly.

Further Fats: The Designers Republic vs B12 Records – are the 1990s dead? (2009)

Further Fats: Chosen Words – D is for Design (2010)

Stand back because Lone's in a Crush Mood

Following his hyper-jungle twelfth best album of 2016, Lone is returning to the safety of a 4/4 beat.

Nottingham's biggest dance act since, er, KWS is about to drop four Ambivert Tools EPs directly focussed at the dancefloor. Listen to Crush Mood taken from volume one below. "Free your mind, free your mind..."

This series is coming out on the legendary R&S label who, at one point in the 1990s, released every good thing ever to have existed (Selected Ambient Works, CJ Bolland, Sun Electric, Biosphere, Seabrook crisps, Dave Angel, System 7) (I lied about the crisps).



Further Fats: Anski updateski onski myski campaignski (2005)

Further Fats: CJ Bolland's Spring Yard scared the pants off me (2016)

Painting 2010 beige: Eno, Orb, Hardfloor and Seefeel

It's not sepia: it's beige. When you look back on the past, you're looking through beige-tinted glasses. Don't go romanticising it.

A clutch of recent and upcoming releases offer several shades of light brown for those with nostalgia in mind. Let's start with The Orb, who have teamed up with 90s uber-producer Youth to put out a retrospective of the acid house label WAU! Mr Modo, called Impossible Oddities.

You may think you've never heard of WAU! Mr Modo, but you surely do remember their biggest hits Zoe's Sunshine On A Rainy Day and The Orb's Little Fluffy Clouds. Both tracks are here, albeit re-jigged. I'm more excited by the Orb's remix of Sun Electric from back in the days when an Orb remix was always called an 'Orbital mix', thereby confusing them with the famous but unconnected head-lamped techno duo that brought us Satan.

Also, ambient sandal-gazers Seefeel are to release their first album in 14 years (artwork pictured). The band was relaunched by their original pair of guitarists a couple of years ago and, after releasing the summer-crackled Faults EP (the title track is lovely) in September, they have slated an eponymous long-player for a February 2011 release on Warp Records.

And there's more. Hardfloor are back, this time with their eighth studio LP. Two Guys Three Boxes (the boxes referring to their beloved acid-making machines and not record boxes) will be out on bonfire night. And finally, we are moments from the launch of the Small Craft On A Milk Sea, Brian Eno's album on Warp Records and, for many, the most anticipated release of the year. Eno's album will be out on November 15th and you can listen to bits of it here.

The old school is very much alive, well, and unashamedly beige.

Reviving my shrivelling grandma and getting out of my depth with Mahler

Just because I've been adjusting to a new job for the first time in nine years, that's no excuse to leave my blog shrivelled on the edge of the pavement like an old forgotten grandma.

Still, there's nothing better to distract you from your blogless disappointment than some nice charts. Above is a bar chart interpretation of Jay Z's 99 Problems, and you can see plenty more here. If anyone can tell me the collective noun for charts, tell me using a graph.

Because blogging is the way I speak, I've kept silent about lots of music. Not least Sun Electric's Lost & Found (1998 - 2000). The tracks were rediscovered on an old CD-R, as the title suggests, and it's a welcome reminder of a band that have been dormant for donkey's.

Sun Electric always lacked the crunch of their techno peers Orbital, and perhaps the production talent of some-time Orb dabbler Thomas Fehlmann lent their music too much whimsy.

When it's not trying to be Brian Eno's Nerve Net on a little too much horse tranquilizer, Lost & Found works wonderfully, not least in the flapping rhythm of Echelon which sounds as though the whole thing was recorded inside a pipe.

A hop over to the Leaf Label now, and Murcof have thrown a curve-ball with their new album Cosmos.

Their glitchy precision has been buried in favour of ambience sweeping from Mahler-inspired moodiness to Wagner-inspired pomposity. (All the other reviews have mentioned György Ligeti, but I don't know who he is and I'm bloody useless at classical comparisons).

It's either quiet, or it's the ambient equivalent of a guitar solo. It's certainly not worth buying it on its own, which is good because apparently it'll be fully realised as an audio-visual project.

In fact, stuff all this lot. Screw it. If you're looking for something on which to spend your hardcore pimp wage, plump for Luke Vibert's Chicago, Detroit, Redruth. Playful acid rave has never been so listenable, and it's the first album I've owned dedicated to a Cornish town.

mpSunday: Pole's Stefan Betke remastered the newly found gems on Sun Electric's Lost & Found. Pole are seriously underrated, so here's a free track. Grab it while you can, because as soon as I post another mpSunday, this mp3 will be kicked to the kerb like gran. POW! This mpSunday is no longer available - click here for the latest mpSunday