Pip Proud & Alastair Galbraith- Me & Gus

Emperor Jones

1998

Alastair Galbraith adds some violin ache and backwards guitar to these already fragile tunes from Australian beat hippy hermit Pip Proud.  The late '90s saw a brief return to music for Proud, who had been living in a hut without electricity out in the middle of who knows where Australia, after a 25-30 year hiatus.  That "comeback" however was cut short by a stroke that left Pip blind and/or dumb (or both maybe) and unable to perform.  The music is itself fittingly beat down and tragic.

Me & Gus

Stinking Lizaveta/Regulator Watts

Frenchlick

1998

Stinking Lizaveta/Regulator Watts

Sonic Youth- Helen Lundeberg

SYR

2006

Rock N' Roll is a young girls game, many will tell you.  And sure, there's plenty of evidence to back that up.  But hey, it ain't necessarily so and Sonic Youth is a textbook example of how to age gracefully as a Rock band.  That they have remained relevant for nearly 30 years is even more impressive given the bands roots in No Wave, a scene that was hardwired to self-destruct and ended up with about the same shelf life as shellfish.  

There are plenty of naysayers out there who write off everything the band did after Sister, or Daydream, or Evol, or after they signed to Geffen, or whatever.  Bollocks I say.  The band has managed  the highwire act of growing without losing what made them great to begin with.  The more nihilistic noise tendencies of their earlier work have morphed into emphasis on songwriting and drawn out pastoral soundscapes, but overall, the major components of the Sonic Youth sound have changed little over the years.  Few bands have been able to maintain a sound for so long without becoming a boring caricature of themselves.  Hell, 28 years in, even the Stones were starting to lose it.  The Fall, maybe, But overall Mark E. Smith's output hasn't been anywhere near as consistent over the years.  

These two tracks come from the Rather Ripped sessions and are quite a bit rawer than anything that showed up on that album.  A lot of people found the record to be a bit too mellow and there was talk in some circles that they  where getting old, going soft, or getting boring.  I can't help but wonder if the  simultaneous release of this single wasn't meant as a reminder, to anyone who might doubt it, that the Youth ain't lost shit over the years.

Helen Lundeberg b/w Eyeliner

Strapping Fieldhands- Neptune's World

Siltbreeze

1995

Lo-Fi indie skiffle rock from the pop end of the classic Siltbreeze catalog.  A way underrated band, the Fieldhands traded in an idiosyncratic brand of faux-anglo pop   complete with, at times, fake accents and feigned cheekiness.  The theme here is nautical and the sea-sawing strings add to the overall shanty feel.  Well, heave-ho friends.  And watch for scurvy.

Neptune's World

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

Matthew Shipp/Loren Mazzacane Connors Split

Halana

1996

This record came with issue #1 of Halana magaizine.  In addition to the Shipp and Connors cuts, the record features 5 lock grooves from sculptor and furniture designer Harry Bertoia's Sonambient LPs.  Bertoia created huge sound sculptures in a barn in rural Pennsylvania and self-released a series of 10 beautiful LPs in the '70's that with their homemade sounds and stark black & white cover art fall somewhere between Partch's Gate 5 and Jandek's Corwood Industries.  Overall, a beautiful reminder that by the end of the 20th century, American folk/sound art was still very much alive and well.  

Matthew Shipp/Loren Connors

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

Sun City Girls- Eye Mohini

Majora

1992

Most people that care about such things consider the early 90's Majora releases to represent something of a high water mark in this band's long and storied career. It was also a particularly productive period- this is one of four singles released that year.  The music here works well as an addendum to the amazing albums of the era (Torch of the Mystics, Bright Surroundings, etc).  None of this stuff turned up on the fairly recent singles compilation,  but I suppose future releases of that nature will be forthcoming.  The brothers Bishop played a mere hour down the road last week and I didn't go.  No excuse.  But I'm seeking solace in the Girls' back catalog.  

Eye Mohini

Mantis- Drüler

Drag City

1993

Early 90's Chicago band that only did three singles and a couple comps.  Great records though.  The A side here is really one of the great tracks of the era.  Features Drag City's ubiquitous Rian Murphy.

Drüler

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

Tyvek/Cheveu Split

S-S Records

2007

A split release to coincide with a joint US trek last summer.  Detroit's Tyvek deal in the sort of attitude heavy, no fidelity scuzz that the midwest seems to spew out every 15 years or so.  It takes some cajones to flog a past dead horse like Punk Rock anymore, but Tyvek have managed to turn out a few singles worth of greatness that should be enough to placate even the most jaded curmudgeons out there.  I haven't heard enough from Parisian Art-Rock weirdos Cheveu to completely wrap my head around what exactly it is they do.  The handful of tracks I've heard haven't provided any real answers, just raised more questions.  This go around they come across like a team of Mexican wrestlers trying to cover Chrome tunes or something.  That description would probably sound retarded without a record like this to back it up.

Tyvek/Cheveu

Dos- Bob Lawton EP

Ecstatic Peace

1991

Kira from Black Flag and Mike Watt of Minutemen/fIREHOSE.  Two basses, occasional vocals.  Old friends in intimate and playful conversation.  A side is a Patsy Cline cover  while the B features an arrangement of a tune that appeared as "Song for Dave Alvin" on fIREHOSE's "Flyin' the Flannel" earlier that year.  The instrumentation imbues in the music a subtle majesty and the warm bass tones highlight the sublime beauty of these melodic miniatures.  Let's hope that new recordings are forthcoming from this combo that has remained active for the last 20+ years.

Bob Lawton EP

Urinals- First EP

Happy Squid

1979

First release from the seminal LA band released on their own Happy Squid label in '79.  I first heard about these guys via the Minutemen's version of Ack, Ack, Ack, and a great track on the Homestead Human Music comp, but it was years before I was able to track down any of their albums proper.  Started in a dorm room in 1978, these guys took punk primitivism  to an extreme.  Their songs usually clocked in at under two minutes and rarely consisted of more than a single chord or two.  They were barley competent on their instruments and their setup was so stripped down that initially the bass and guitar were run through the same amplifier while the drummer banged away incoherently on a toy drum set.  But damn did it sound good.  Eventually they learned to play their instruments and adopted a sound that was something like a lighter Mission of Burma or Wire c.Pink Flag and changed their name to 100 Flowers (which was still great, btw).  But man, there's just a real charm to these early Urinals records.  This stuff sits very comfortably with a lot of the stuff on those messthetics comps which is, of course, a compliment of the hightest order.  

Urinals First EP

Trumans Water- Hey Fish

Drunken Fish

1994

Nice early single from this very  prolific band.  It's a name you don't hear that much these days, which is a shame.  Their output, which includes, christ, I think like a dozen singles or something in addition to a bunch of EPs, full lengths, and compilation contributions,  is all over the place.  When it works though it can be quite a nice bit of racket.  A couple of particularly great tracks here make this one of their stronger records for sure.  This is on Drunken Fish out of L.A.which for awhile put out some great records. Most notably was probably the Harmony of the Spheres triple LP set, but the whole roster was pretty solid.  lots of gems from the noisier fringes of the indi world of the time.  One of these guys was born again and left the group to start the christian-themed Soul Junk.  Now that's something you don't hear about everyday.

Hey Fish

Dadamah- Scratch Sun

Majora

1991

Music scenes are by nature incestuous.  But the word still seems wholly inadequate when applied to the heyday of the New Zealand post-punk underground (c. late 70's- mid 90's).  There is an amazing body of work from that corner of the world at that time spread over a myriad of cassette, 7", hyper-limited lathe cut, compilation, and LP/CD releases.  Delve in and you'll immediately start to notice a handful or so names that seem to pop up everywhere.  everywhere.  With Dadamah we have Roy Montgomery, Peter Stapleton, and Kim Pieters who had been in or would go on to a number of bands like (but certainly not limited to) The Pin Group, Terminals, Flies Inside the Sun, Victor Dimisich, band, Dissolve, Scorched Earth Policy, etc.  Montgomery also eventually went on to release a number of solo and collaborative records and garnered something of a cult following by the late 90's.  

As far as the pantheon of Kiwi Rock goes, Dadamah is a near perfect example of a particularly virulent strain of NZ noise weaned on equal parts White Light era Velvets, Kill Yr Idols era Sonic Youth and the darker corners of UK Post-Punk a la Joy Division, Wire, and the Fall.  They didn't last long, but what they left behind still resonates pretty strongly.  This record along with everything else they ever recorded (a scant 2 singles, an LP and a single comp track in all) were compiled on a CD collection by Kranky back in the mid-90's.  Amazing.

Scratch Sun

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

Michael Hurley- National Weed Growers Assoc.

Carnage Press

1993

Ol' Snock's been in high rotation around the house this week so I thought I'd post this- 2 live cuts from '91.  It's a little unclear as to who put this out.  On one hand it appears to clearly have been released by Carnage Press.  However the label on the record itself suggests that it is a W.D.T.C.H.C./Father Yod/Amphinomics/Egon/Shagrat/Carnage Press split release.  Whewww.   Anyways, while the A sides ode to the ups and downs of herbal indulgence is plenty sweet, the real treat here is is when Hurley busts out the fiddle on the flip.  Also includes "Tales of Boone & Jocko Vol. X" mini-comic book.

Hit this, Dude

Sugartime- Awestruck b/w Gemini Enemy

Simple Machines

1992

This is the last of the first records I bought when I first got a record player.  A decent enough record, but, to be honest, I was never super into this type of stuff.  This came out on Simple Machines which was a label that embodied the whole early 90's indie/DIY ethic.  Based out of Arlington, VA, the label existed-geographically and musically-between Merge down in North Carolina and Dischord and Teen Beat up in D.C.  While I wasn't that into everything they did (I never cared much for Tsunami for instance), their insistence on making things happen for themselves and the palpable enthusiasm for the bands and labels they worked with was always pretty right on.  Don't know a whole lot about this band.  I just saw another single of theirs a few months back at a record show, so they had at least a few records out.  I think there was a Nice Strong Arm Connection somehow.  Guitar pop that is a little too clean for my tastes, but it's got a big guitar sound and that very up front bass that gives this record a bit more meat than a lot of bands milking this teat.  This is one of those records that when on the rare occasion that I pull it out it always sounds a little better than I remember it.

Awestruck/Gemini Enemy

Table- Gag Box

Spangled Records

Edition of 1000

1992

Another of the first batch of records I bought after I got ahold of my first record player.  I'd have to say that this one is probably the pick of the litter.  I believe I picked this up on account of a staff description describing it as "slintish".  At this point I was still years away from fully recovering from my first exposure to Spiderland and was on a desperate, and ultimately futile, search for anything that might measure up.  By decades end the Slint tag got thrown around pretty easily, and usually meant basement bush leaguers doing soft/loud, talk/yell in 5/4 that at its best was going to play out like Mogwai-lite.  But when I picked this up in '93, there was still a chance you might find something that was at least cut from a similar cloth.  The Slint comparison is fair enough, but this stuff really probably falls a bit closer to the Rapeman or Bastro end of things.  The hallmarks of the genre are all here- odd-metered, bass heavy riffs, angular guitar noise, precision drumming, and obtuse lyrics in that half spoken delivery that are all but buried in the mix.   At the time, every third band in the world was trying to pull this sort of thing off, but still nothing quite sounds like those Table records.  Despite making truly unique records these guys were fairly unknown. Some of Table's obscurity no doubt though lies in the fact that, well, they never really did much. They apparently existed for around a year, played, maybe,  a dozen shows around Chicago, and did two recording sessions before the bassist split town (apparently under shifty circumstances) and the band fell apart.  This record comes from the first sessions done with Albini in January of '92.  A second 7" appeared in '93 on Homestead by which point I think they might have already been kaput.  After that, these guys pretty much disappeared and that was that.  Though I recently found out that the bassist, Warren Fischer, popped up a few years back as one half of the electro-pop duo Fischerspooner.  hmmm...  At some point in the mid-90's, there was a posthumously released CD collection released on Humble that contained both records as well the remaining tracks from the two sessions done with Steve Albini and Brad Wood.  If you can find a copy, the CD is amazing and well worth taking the effort to track down.  I haven't seen it in years, but i still come across the records from time to time.  Cheap usually too.  In the meantime, dig on this gem here:

Gag Box/Unwind