Optimo

presumptuous? never

What is it about this song? Erol Alkan (of Trash) namechecks it in this month's Jockey Slut. I really must try to make it sometime. I missed thema at Auto too, despite being there. I was probably stuck in the murderous beer queue. Unfortunately whenever I'm up in Glasgow I'm usually travelling back down south on a Sunday. I will get there though.

that's what really struck me about the night. the crowd went mad whether they knew a track or not. there is no way to manufacture that kind of enthusiasm, and it's really exciting to see.

gygax, how's the old fmbb doing?

i was in thinking today of crazy things: optimo global tastemaker early 2000s nostalgia. but in a very chris marker exotica way. crazy things.

yes it is.

(i thk i know wht she looks like, really pretty, bowl cut, i thk i saw her at the latest 'mars hotel' gig.)

Next Optimo for me: The Go! Team one, I think. Would like to do Clinic too but don't think I will.

New Year too.

So, when they confirm I have to find somewhere to live and move. And do NYE Optimo. I am sure it is possible somehow...

take the megabus, ronan.

i attended the 1999/2000 hogmanay optimo at the art school..... i don't remember a single thing except a friend of mine stealing an entire case of mini tonic bottles.

(they do play Limp Bizkit at Optimo right?)

http://www.optimo.co.uk/killthedj.htm

bah, forget it then.

Haha he just dropped Super Sharp Shooter boh

i fairly stupidly still have a paid Soundcloud account - I can put them up if you send them to me somehow

We are working on a repository of Optimo Mixes. I may be able to share here later. If you send me a message, I can give you access to it and anything missing can be linked to from there.

Hopefully be able to open it out more people soon.

!!!

please keep us abreast, would be nice to have some of these!!

Yes, just waiting on a couple of permissions.

Here you go. This is a list of over 200 Optimo mixes with links to listen to nearly all of them. You might need to request access, but I can turn this around pretty quickly. If you put a note on the request to let me know you are on ilm, then that'll help.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Xr1i9z4hFOlm9v6dNofku0IuHsHClGa4FSa05i-ztZE/edit?usp=sharing

If you've got something that isnt on the list, then drop me an email and we can add it. We're missing recordings of Tape 1 and Tape 2 and Welcome To Studio Mule. Although Tapes 1 and 2 might be updated in the near future.

amazing! thank you :)

:O

whooooa!

Thank you to those compiling the mixes. I have been listening again to the commercially available ones I have on CD: How to kill the DJ (part 2),
Psyche Out, Walkabout, the Betty Botox edits compilation and Sleepwalking. Floods of fond memories come to me on each.

Wow this is wonderful to see!

here's the Weatherall 6Music tribute mix, bundled with Jonnie's tribute mix to Keith.

I have a bunch of 2017-2024 mixes not on the spreadsheet too, Griff, including 20-odd NTS shows. Drop an email to K1t who you recently approved if these might be actual holes, not just "not added yet."

thanks for sharing, much appreciated.

This is an incredible resource, thank you so much for compiling it. Sent a request to view if that's ok

Thanks, Griff!

i keep forgetting that the betty botox comp is an optimo collection.

Ah yes, Betty, stir's most attractive creation.*

https://beatsinspace.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Betty20Botox.pictClipping.jpg

I note that photo didn't make it into any of the tributes or memorial! :-)

haha .. wow, never seen that before ..

I had to defend her honour once on Last.FM when someone called her 'ugly'. It's still there actually, just looked.

https://www.last.fm/music/Betty+Botox

iirc those betty botox edits are essentially just the original track but with the tempos (tempi?) regularised to be mixable (a great service!)

Some of them are more re-edited or extended than others.

Yes you're right ^

absolutely love this new song from two Optimo Music alumni...

https://huntleyspalmers.bandcamp.com/album/tony-morris-isa-gordon

likewise, Tony Morris and another Optimo associate frenchbloke...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNEhluvPtGU

very Weatherall esque

New album on the Optimo label coming:

https://naturalmagic.bandcamp.com/album/ii

With this note:

It’s with great pride that we announce the long-awaited sophomore album from Portland-based duo Natural Magic on Optimo Music. This was the final vinyl release that Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch put into production before his untimely departure in late September this year.

Having been a long time lover of everything krautrock, space rock, experimental and psychedelic it seems more than fitting that he leaves us this LP as his parting gift; because this sublime album is all these things wrapped up into one…and much more.

Today we proudly present the first of two singles from the album. Clocking in at almost 8 minutes, “Don’t Look Back” is a uniquely transportive blend of shoegaze, psychedelia and ethereal electronics.

The album, available for pre-order now, will be released on 30th January 2026.

Thanks must go to Kompakt for helping get the album over the finishing line and letting it see the light of day on Optimo Music as Keith would have wished.

Much love x

Oh that's cool. I had to double-check but part of Natural Magic is Matthew Quiet who I met when I visited Portland in 2010. Just looked at my message history with him and the first message was me noting I was visiting a week after Twitch was due to play his party there.

good to see them carrying on that part of his legacy, look forward to hearing it

saw jonnie play again last weekend in london, hope he gets to rest up at some point cos he must be shattered tbh, but it was great and felt like not quite such a heavy emotional thing as seeing him a couple of months ago

I have a natural magic 12” it’s quite good

A lovely tribute mix to stir from his good friend CLAIR.

https://www.nts.live/shows/peace-2025/episodes/peace-2025-peace-for-jd-twitch-w-clair-30th-december-2025

Glorious new mix from Jonnie here: https://soundcloud.com/pdaberlin/optimo-pda-25

Lol how he lets "Domina (Maurizio Mix)" just go ahead and play through to the second part. Whenever I played that I'd always feel like I had to mix out before that happened. It's great to hear the hard part though. Maybe Jonnie went for a quick smoke :D

As linked a few posts back by me, today is the release date of the second Natural Magic album, and the final album stir oversaw for release on Optimo:

https://naturalmagic.bandcamp.com/album/ii

It's a lovely listen this evening, and a good way to think of him once more -- a last gift from him to us all.

That is is a very lovely release.

Does anyone have a copy of Tape 1: Essential Optimo Espacio? Cover photo below. I am willing to drive, within reason, to whoever has one to ditigise it for the Optimo Mixes repository. It is incomplete without it!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10D9WJhQt4AjTmQOILAWNlCbUsHDBhC0T/view

I don't, but I had a great time yesterday at the Optimo day of Queens Park Weekender and the tribute at the end to stirmonster was beautiful

I’m off to Watching Trees again at the end of the month, anyone else joining?

A new release that is a partial legacy from stirmonster:

https://invisible-inc.bandcamp.com/album/darkness-within-darkness

Per the liner notes, from the label owner, then from the artist:

Firstly, I'm very aware that I started the year saying I would take a break from releasing music on Invisible Inc. This release, however, could not be passed up.
"Darkness Within Darkness" was originally intended to be released on Optimo Music. However, this sadly was not to be, after my friend and Optimo Music driving force, Keith McIvor, died of a brain tumour last September.
Having been entrusted by Keith to 'tie up' loose ends with Optimo Music accounts after his death (a job I was unfortunately unable to complete) it became apparent that there were a couple of releases finalised and waiting in the sidelines to be released. One of these was the Natural Magic II album which was already in production and which felt right to release on OM posthumously, the other being "Darkness Within Darkness", which, with Optimo Music's closure, was left hanging in the aether.
Having worked with Feon aka Fionn Macdiarmid in the past, it felt like Invisible Inc would be the ideal alternative home for the album.
And for me it couldn't be a more appropriate body of music. Completely different to the kind of music Feon has been known for, this album has a 'spiritual' feel about it which very much resonates with me, in the same way as I could imagine Keith being attracted to it too: combining elements of ambient, jazz, folk, post rock and experimental which, together with song and spoken word, elicit in me a feeling beyond merely "bittersweet". Perhaps in part due to the circumstances of its release, for me the album captures a sense of grief and pain on one hand, countered by a luminous transcendence and acceptance of mortality on the other. Yet, we are transported to a realm where these seemingly conflicting feelings become profoundly harmonious.
The closing track "Shanti (For Keith)", a guttural, primal expression of the spirit, would have been the last track to come out on Optimo Music. To bring the label to a close this way would have been the perfect epitaph. Alas, it was not to be. Instead, having been given the honour by Optimo's Jonnie Wilkes of playing some music at Keith's memorial on 30th October 2025, I played the piece as though it were his final call to all those whose lives he changed and impacted for the better.
Now with pride, sadness, honour and, hopefully, Keith’s blessing, I present the music to you.
Love is the message, GKMx
_____________________________________
Feon’s original liner notes for Optimo Music:

“In late 2019 Keith asked me if I would be interested in writing an album for his label. I leapt at the chance and was filled with grandiose ambitions for the masterpiece I was about to make. I failed to make that album. But whilst I wrestled with my own pretensions to greatness a different more humble piece of music was being constructed, more by psyche and the unconscious than by my inflated ego, and as we moved through and out of the pandemic this meditative and experimental work gradually coalesced from field recordings, found sounds, dreams and studio sessions. In 2025 I had something that both Keith and I felt was good to release. Then Keith announced his diagnosis and everything changed. It is only as I write these words after Keith’s passing that I can understand more about what this was all about.

So the final release on Optimo Music is a meditation on death and rebirth, and was created, I feel, through me by some deeper force beyond my own personal ambition. The person who commissioned its creation is now gone and the world at large seems to be going through some sort of system death. You could call this turn of events synchronistic, or tragically poetic or even just random, but my sense is that some teleological impetus informs the kaleidoscope of life on this planet. Drawing reference points from Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, Taoism, the Tibetan bardos of dying, Jungian alchemy, Peruvian shamanism and ‘The Godfather’, the piece begins with the death of the sun, expressing the loss of the guiding and sustaining light - the light of consciousness that guides us through the darkness. Designed to be listened to as one whole, the work traverses through carnal pleasure, into madness, death, an encounter with the Tao and a resurrection in infinite ohm space, much in the same way the process of enlightenment occurs in yoga. But it is ego death (structural collapse) that must occur for this transition to take place, much like my own egoic ambitions died during this creative process. The cathedral roof must collapse inwards to reveal the stars above it before new structures can be made.

The death of the sun could be understood symbolically as the death of the good father. I know of some, including myself for whom Keith held a paternal quality in their lives. After Keith’s passing I found myself reading the innumerable stories from those people who had their lives changed by him. Those stories expressed so many aspects of his character, but one quality that I kept noticing the most was of his generosity. Keith’s generosity for people was endless, he just seemed to have so much time for others. Keith was a giant in his community, and was always looking for ways to lift up those around him. This stands in stark contrast to the huge extent of greed and fear that is being collectively unmasked at this time. My own Glaswegian father (who died when I was a young man) wrote that the true battle in this world is not between good and evil but rather between generosity and fear. As we enter into what feels like major upheavals in our society, as structures collapse (ego death) and all seems as chaos, I believe we could do well to remember Keith’s huge generosity of spirit as one of those guiding lights of consciousness to see us through this collective death and rebirth.
A new world is waiting for us…” (Fionn Macdiarmid, 2026)

Meantime, I wanted to share something that, in a real sense, I learned about from stirmonster. In its own strange way, I consider my being able to learn and plan around this to be an indirect, but real if sad, gift from him:

https://nedraggett.tumblr.com/post/818607627035607040/so-let-me-tell-you-about-my-meningioma