Tortoise-Mosquito

Torsion Music

1993

I just recently pulled out Tortoise's first album and was reminded of how amazing this band was back in the day.  This is their very first record, released on (if I remember right) Jesus Lizard bassist David Sims' Torsion Music in 1993.  These guys get an unfair shake from a lot of folks these days.  But they deserve, in the words of John Fahey, neither "the credit nor the blame" for the deluge to tepid "post-rock" that followed in their wake.  Fact is, when these first couple of records showed up there was nothing else like it going on.  I mean, there were touchstones for sure- Faust, Liquid Liquid, fIREHOSE, African Head Charge, CAN, etc.- but from the beginning they were able to incorporate a wide range of influences without being beholden to any set style or paradigm.  At this point though, they're still a band finding their voice and, as such, this record, upbeat and almost outright funky, is unlike anything else in their catalog.  

Mosquito

Ativin-Modern Gang Reader

Secretly Canadian

1997

The Ativin on record here is a band that had progressed light years from the debut ep released the previous year.  Whereas that album relied heavily on more pedestrian distortion pedal off/distortion pedal on dynamics, the writing here offers a subtle complexity that takes into account time, space, volume, and timbre.  A nice prelude to their follow up LP German Water- their strongest effort which I highly suggest seeking out, and Modern Gang Reader in fact resurfaces there.  These sorts of bands always worked better in small doses I always thought, and this is a great example of how the single can still be a great format.  A simple but effective package and two songs that serve as a perfect distillation of what it is a band does.

Modern Gang Reader

Gastr Del Sol/Tony Conrad

Table of the Elements

1995

Two titans of the modern Avant-Garde.  This record coincided with a 1995 series of concerts put on by Table of the Elements.  

Gastr del Sol wasn't the first or only band to employ methods and techniques taken from the world of modern avant-garde composition, but few other bands sought so explicitly, at their core, to create music based in that tradition.  While O'Rourke claims to cringe at the more abstract for abstracts sake aspect of those records, the fact is that they remain as some of the most singularly unique records not only of that particular time, but of the whole history of Experimental/Art rock.  I was always a particular fan of David Grubbs' piano playing.  His voicings and use of space at times recall the proto-minimalism of Satie or the later, sparer works of Feldman.  Here we have a fragment of song that floats in and out of a haze of subtle electronics and tape manipulation that perfectly exemplifies the Gastr del Sol modus operandi.

Tony Conrad does what Tony Conrad does.  Qualitative judgements can be hard to make with this sort of stuff, but perhaps this is at least an easier to digest portion for folks who find an albums worth (or a 4 cd boxsets worth) daunting.  Over the years Conrad's searing violin drone has rubbed shoulders with folks like La Monte Young, the Velvet Underground, and Faust.  But it's been in the last decade or so that his reputation has been rescued from obscurity and he's returned to somewhat regular performance.

The first 500 copies of this record also included a second record with an excerpted performance of a Conrad composition, Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plane,  performed with Grubbs and O'Rourke.

The Japanese Room at La Pagode

Labradford- Everlast

Retro 8

1992

In 1992, the independent/underground music stratum was pretty much, top to bottom, rockist in nature.  Even those who looked to expand, destroy, or just piss on conventions were still working with the tools and language of Rock N' Roll.  The music was overwhelmingly guitar based, abrasive, and usually relied on sheer volume to make its point.  Obviously, there was no shortage of bands who incorporated, to varying degrees, a number of the same influences (Sonic Youth, Spacemen 3, Glenn Branca, Swans, My Bloody Valentine, etc, etc), but those elements were almost always absorbed into a more or less traditional rock band setting (guitars, drums, verse/chorus song structure).  But Labradford seemed to jettison most overtly "rock" influences in favor of thick washes of analog synthesizer, delay drenched guitar, and simple bass ostinatos whose only analogous contemporary was perhaps Talk Talk.  On this and their full length follow up Prazision (which, fittingly, launched the Kranky label) the sound owes a serious debt to the pioneering German electronic musicians of the 1970's- Ash Ra Temple, Popul Vuh, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk (Their 2nd album in particular) and Cluster.  Other folks at the time though were starting to sniff out those old Krautrock albums and as such Labradford was banded together with a disparate group of artists- usually Stereolab, Tortoise, Cul de Sac, Ui, and Trans Am- and thus the concept of "Post-Rock" was introduced.  While the term is often met with derision now, at the time it referred to bands who were genuinely pushing music into new territory.  Being the least "Rock" of the fold spared Labradford the hordes of cheap imitations that plagued some of the other groups and their records remain unburdened by over saturation.  Both of these tracks were added to the recent reissue of Prazision.

Everlast

M/Monade

All City

1996

  Sorry folks.  I ran into some technical difficulties here around the house and it's put me a bit behind on posting.  I'll try to keep things at least somewhat regular around here.  I have a whole stack of records sitting here that are going to have to be re-ripped though.  Damn it.  I'll try to be quick about it at least.

M is Dave Pajo.  We all know who he is, right?  He used to play with King Kong and a bunch of other bands.  Nice cut here that also features Rick Rizzo of Eleventh Dream Day on the traps.

Monade was at this point a solo project of Laetitia Sadier. Her main group, Stereolab, is a pretty adequate point of reference, but the music here is a bit more stripped down and looser in structure.  uh, you know, like a solo project.  

M/Monade