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Camberwell Now: All's Well
Code:6911
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$15.95
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| This definitive edition collects the entire released output of Camberwell Now (two EPs and an LP), newly re-mastered by the band and repackaged with full notes, lyrics, additional photographs and artwork. Chronologically, Camberwell Now immediately succeeded This Heat, Charles Hayward continuing to work with This Heat's last bassist Trefor Goronwy, and the two of them joining forces with Stephen Rickard who, for the new band, designed his unique 'cassette switchboard', a kind of proto-sampler - though that's not the half of it (Steve's article fully explaining the device is reprinted in the new, expanded booklet that comes with the CD).
Musically, Camberwell both followed and departed from the style of This Heat. Formally and gesturally there are common elements, but there is far greater transparency and the sound palette is quite different: the music is more placed than grown, as the slow accumulation and evolution of material in This Heat gives way to a more immediate and orderly development of the material in Camberwell Now. The songs - nostalgic, scary, and quietly desperate - peer into the future to find harbour but confront only fragments of ruin.
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Cutler, Chris & Steve Maclean: Year of the Dragon
Code:7798
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$16.95
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| A collection of 5 songs and 4 instrumental pieces that explore equally - and simultaneously - spontaneous performance values, close compositional detail and extensive processing. Made out on the rocky coast of Maine with just a TV eye keeping tabs on a world skidding to hell in a handcart, all the basic work was done by MacLean and Cutler with Julie Thompson (voice) added later alongside additional parts played by Frank Gross (bassoon), Michael Bierylo (laptop, samples, circuits) and Titus Abbot (bass clarinet and saxophone). These are complex, focused pieces, some highly rhythm-rooted - mostly at rapid bpm rates - generally wide open with a close receptivity to timbral nuance and non-linearity.
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Drake, Bob: What Day Is It ?
Code:5338
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$15.95
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| What Day Is It ? is the re-issue of Bob's very first solo disc (originally self-manufactured in art packaging – here tho, professionally packaged for mass market sales). It already exhibits Bob's characteristic traits: golden fingers, hi-wire vocals, eyebrow-raising country-picking, loose-but-right-in-the-pocket drums, eccentric chord inversions, and a bass-guitar sound to die for. Sitting happily with the fantasy 'Yes' Euro-progressive surface is the rather more substantial depth of a bluegrass and rooted-rock American culture; an almost unique combination and one hard to imitate (or even imagine, until you hear Bob do it). But then, Bob has always marched to the beat of a different drummer, manifestly careless of the fashion or of the easier, more superficial aspects of the music he has absorbed.
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Frith, Fred: Impur II
Code:7708
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$15.95
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| Impur II is totally different from Impur I - which was a deconstructed, spatialised simultaneity of musical events that could only be heard through open windows or by wandering through rooms - Impur 2 took the form of an unannounced performance across which audience members had to stumble by chance (and then collect their friends - or not). Both events formed part of a commission by L'Ecole Nationale de Musique de Villurbanne in May 1996.This recording, painstakingly edited and re-mastered by Fred, appears as a full-on concert by a large 19 strong ensemble with Fred conducting as well as playing. It's built on rhythm, harmony, rock noise, exotic instrumentation, power, complexity and melodic writing - with intermittent stretches of chaos, eccentricity and theatre, and fits comfortably into the aesthetic of his earlier performing ensemble projects, like Gravity, Skeleton Crew and Keep the Dog.
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Frith, Fred: Nowhere, Sideshow, Thin Air
Code:7709
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$15.95
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| This is Fred's sixth CD of music for dance, featuring three commissions by three different choreographers each sharing, as Fred says ' a certain obsession with melodic deconstruction.' Two of them feature - and were especially written for - the remarkable violinist Carla Kihlstedt. Fred and Carla perform one of them (Fred playing a huge array of instruments here as on all pieces), are joined by Fred Guiliano, (samples) and Gail Brand (trombone) on another, while the third features Fred, Hande Erdem (violin) and Threresa Wong (cello). These are complex studio compositions characterised by a deceptive simplicity, layers and plateaux, rhythm and colour.
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MacLean, Steve: GPS
Code:7790
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$16.95
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| Careful compositions converse with focused improvisations under the precise direction of Steve MacLean who, on this CD, after various excursions that took him through experimental works for piano, interactive insect/guitar compositions and pure electronics, returns to a performing band and a journey through complex polyrhythmic compositions imaginatively intercut with careful, atmospheric inventions, for guitar, bass, keyboard, percussion and various objects.
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N.I.M.B.Y.: Songs For Adults
Code:5336
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$15.95
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| James Grigsby – Bob Drake – Jerry Wheeler – Dave Kerman
"Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY)is James Grigsby (of the legendary Motor Totemist Guild) and left-field luminaries from Thinking Plague, Hail, The 5UUs and Giant Ant Farm. The official story is that an electrical storm temporarily deranged their faculties while leaving their musical abilities unaffected, leading to this unaccountable recording, made more or less live in a barn in Southern France, with only a handful of overdubs (mostly vocals & some soloing) added by engineer and bassist Bob Drake at the mixing and mastering stage. Instead of making the cutting edge contemporary post rock record they planned, they wound up musically reverting to their youth while mentally indulging in the whiny frustrations of middle age. Could it be worse? Yes. This is not just an album of songs, it's a concept album and it documents what happens when a bunch of spoiled baby-boomers - mostly from Southern California - get old & grumpy.
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Pere Ubu: London * Texas
Code:7710
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$15.95
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| A missing piece of the Ubu jigsaw, and a fine memento of a great band, London Texas is a satisfyingly hi-fi live recording of the sadly short-lived line-up that toured briefly between the arrival of Eric Drew Feldman and the departure of Chris Cutler. Certainly it's the best recording of the Scott, Cutler, Maimone rhythm section - though the whole band is on lean-back-intense concert form. Coming back to it, this was the end of a particular era, of a certain kind of band: the songs are economical and tightly arranged but harmonically elaborated - with strongly performative and musical underpinning (there's a new aesthetic in place now); it's an approach that takes no prisoners. Then there's the bonus of that scary live energy. Studio recordings just can't do this. London Texas stings like a bee - in a beret.
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Pox: Borgnine
Code:7772
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$12.99
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| POX (not to be confused with the French pop group that bears the same name) is the long-standing project by CHRIS BLOCK, ex of Cheer Accident. A few years in the making, this recording goes well beyond the group's previous offerings, and will enthrall fans of C.A., Star Period Star, Flying Luttenbachers, Hail, Fortrangt Hushallsarbete, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, This Heat, Combat Astronomy etc. There's a lot of juicy, hard-hitting tunes here, and a great amount of variety in their approaches. A few guest musicians too, including four different drummers: Thymme Jones, Brad Schlueter, Jim Widlowski and Dave Kerman. This is a disk that takes pleasure in breaking many rules of "Rock" music, while somehow managing to be ultimately fun and listenable. Certain elements of instrumental harmony are just so "wrong", but that was the point; and hence they become idiomatic certainties by means of purposefully re-writing the musical language explored. Though self-produced, it doesn't sound DIY or cheap, and with these old hands at the helm....well, experience is speaking loudly here. Give it a shot, wontcha ? Think Ernest Borgnine; no Star Trek references, please.
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The Hat Shoes: Differently Desperate
Code:7630
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$15.95
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| Ad Hoc Records' new, four-panel digipack reissue of THE HAT SHOES' debut album will be especially welcomed by lovers of intelligent and thoughtful Progressive music, with a hint of Romanticism. Originally released in 1991, "DIFFERENTLY DESPERATE" is a studio offering of diverse avant-pop songs by a "Super-group", comprised of members BILL GILONIS (The Work), CATHERINE JAUNIAUX (Fluvial), CHARLES HAYWARD (This Heat, Camberwell Now) and TOM CORA (Skeleton Crew, Curlew). There's also a slew of well-known guest performers: David Thomas, Amos, Chris Cochrane, Tim Hodgkinson, Hahn Rowne and Rick Brown, among others.
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VRIL: The Fatal Duckpond
Code:7700
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$15.95
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| After a break of six years, Chris Cutler, Bob Drake and Lukas Simonis, now with added ingredient Pierre Omer, present the second volume of recordings by the elusive VRIL - a band who revive and update both the great institution of the guitar instrumental and the now sadly neglected practice of collective arrangement, intense rehearsal and live studio performance. Appropriate to the half century that has passed since the birth of the form, these hits dodge about, get bored easily and blend both concentration and complexity with the still indispensable traditional qualities that made the genre great: hummability, crafted sounds, nifty arrangements, ridiculous gimmicks and ensemble playing. 'Neither tribute nor parody, these enigmatic pieces are never more nor less than exactly what they are'.... wrote Lothar Preen in his Melbourne concert review....'but perfectly realised'. With film stills, misleading sleeve-notes and storyboard by the Diogenesian recluse Frank Key.
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