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Available on 180gm black vinyl.Visit product page →
LA trio The Entrance Band (ft. members of Pixies, A Perfect Circle, QOTSA) are the latest addition to the Fuzz Club Sessions'series - the warm, analog recording allowing their tripped out blues to shine in all its lysergic glory. As with all Fuzz Club Sessions the album is recorded live and onto 2' tape.
The LP is made up of three brand new improvised jams that see their warped groove-ridden psychedelia at its best, as well as a woozy downtempo rendition of The Seeds'Can't Seem To Make You Mine'. These new jams mark a distinct difference from the howling acid-rock numbers seen on previous albums, instead offering a totally hypnotic and dreamy journey through their majestic psychedelic prowess.
Tracklisting:
1. Can't Seem To Make You Mine
2. Seedless Easy Peeler
3. Thunderstorm in Ladbroke Grove
4. Orange You Glad -
Available on 180gm coloured vinyl w/ gatefold cover.Visit product page →
Las Cobras are a duo hailing from Canelones, Uruguay. Despite being a totally new band, forming in the summer of 2016, this album is certain to pin the duo firmly on the radars for psych-heads across the globe.
The album itself is influenced as much by psych/krautrock greats a la BJM and Suicide as it is wildly immersed in the lysergic sounds of South America - at times delving into lush and textured afro-beat and tropicalia influences.
Fully immersed in their Latin roots, their groove-ridden and mystical psychedelia is utterly enthralling - it's a hypnotic journey through warped synths, tropic percussion, lysergic bass-lines, smoky vocals and chiming, fuzzed-out guitars.
Tracklisting:
1. Dark Waves
2. Beating Hard
3. The Time Has Come
4. Our Love Will Grow
5. Al Mas Alla
6. Nothing Against You
7. So Much Love
8. Same & Again
9. Temporal -
vFire Soundtracks / Lakeshore Records
Paul Haslinger 'Halt & Catch Fire Original Soundtrack'
£11.99
Visit product page →'AMC knows the show is something special; so do we' The Guardian
'Any well-produced period piece can recreate bygone days. 'Halt' lets you see them as the cusp of bracing change.' New York Times
'Intelligent eighties drama is essentially Mad Men for techno-geeks.' Telegraph
'An incredibly sexy, high-octane drama about all of the genius and ego behind the (80s) tech boom that changed the world.' Paste
AMC's hit series Halt And Catch Fire'captures the rise of the PC-era during the early 80s and the technology revolution. Nominated by Vox as the best show in 2016, it's 'a potent look back at the earliest days of the internet that also glimpsed, through some hazy curtain, the world we live in right now.'
Acclaimed for its exceptional soundtrack by former Tangerine Dream musician and award winning composer, Paul Haslinger has created a period-appropriate synth score that admirably sets the mood and tone of the bygone era.
Revisiting his time in the pioneering electronic band during the mid-80s, the Austrian composer writes with a uniquely knowledgeable yet less overtly nostalgic ear that keeps the show's current audience in mind.
Acknowledging the time in which the series itself has been created alongside when the show is set, Haslinger's bold and innovative scores have seen his Hollywood career escalate over the last two decades.
The man behind the music for Blow, Resident Evil and Death Race has become one of the industry's most sought after composers.
Tracklisting:
1. Golden Gate
2. A Wolf In Unix
3. The Scenic Route
4. First Day On The Job
5. It Speaks
6. Reverse Engineering
7. Security Is A Myth
8. The Morning After
9. Rooftop Fireworks
10. I Need A Little Time
11. Western Arrivals
12. The Slingshot
13. 10broad36
14. The Way In
15. Run Time
16. Last Nerve
17. Gordon Steals A Cabbage Patch
18. The Cost Of Doing Business
19. Joe's Truth
20. Go Get The Bike
21. The End Of Donna's Day
22. It's Not Right
23. MacMillan Utility -
Visit product page →LP Single sleeve printed inner but note no download card. CD Single CD in a 20 page DVD sized book.
The Time Has Come'is an absolute master class on words and guitar twisting into one another - the poetry goes beyond simple observation into deeply personal and profound lore. A timeless document of sweet and haunting melodies. My favorite record of all time.'Ryley Walker.
"I've never written songs, regularly, because I never considered myself a song-writer. I've only ever really considered myself a ballad singer, which is what is most important to me. The stories... the ancient nature of the situations and the human condition. And obviously, it's changed so much over the centuries that those songs have been sung, but it always retains that essence of something that's universal... to humanity, and I've always wanted to touch that. I think I wanted to understand people; I think I wanted to understand myself. It's a way of finding the truth. I felt I belonged to that music.' Anne Briggs
Offering some of her first original compositions, The Time Has Come'was a break from tradition in more ways than one for Anne Briggs. Where previous recordings displayed the unaccompanied melodies of her voice, this album - originally released by CBS in 1971 - brings additional instrumentation in the form of guitar and bouzouki.
The result is that her vocals are not submerged, but heightened - the plucked strings providing the perfect foil for her crystalline inflection. The Time Has Come'is a mix of Anne's own songs alongside some notable covers (Lal Waterson, Steve Ashley, Stan Ellison, Henry McCulloch). All are graced with the quietly self-assured elegance of Anne's playing, with sounds ranging from the breezy Clea Caught A Rabbit'to the terrible beauty of Wishing Well'- each song typifying the bouzouki or guitar style.
To say that Anne was an accomplished picker is to do her something of an disservice - the intricacy of her finger-work rivals - and more often than not eclipses - any number of her contemporaries.
Tracklisting:
1. Sandman's Song
2. Highlodge Hare
3. Fire and Wine
4. Step Right Up
5. Ride, Ride
6. The Time Has Come
7. Clea Caught A Rabbit
8. Tangled Man
9. Wishing Well
10. Standing On The Shore
11. Tidewave
12. Everytime
13. Fine Horseman -
"Jim is a great guitarist and a tremendous, empathetic listener." Richard ThompsonVisit product page →
Drawing from British folk, avant-rock, and jazz traditions alike, Wintres Woma-- Old English for "the sound of winter"-- is James Elkington's debut solo record, but you've likely heard his masterful guitar playing and arranging, even if you didn't realize it.
Elkington (an Englishman living in Chicago) is an inveterate collaborator who brings his lyrical compositional and improvisational sensibilities to any group. He has toured, recorded, and/or collaborated with Jeff Tweedy, Richard Thompson, Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, Joan Shelley, Nathan Salsburg and Brokeback, to name just a few of his many enthusiastic admirers.
His assured album, recorded at Wilco's Loft, is baroquely detailed and beautifully constructed, featuring both his baritone vocals and some of Chicago's finest, including Tomeka Reid. Elkington was brought up in England during the '70s and '80s'a time when traditional and acoustic music was largely shunned in favor of the new wave (to which his largely-destroyed copy of The Fall's Perverted By Language will attest)'but found after his first forays into songwriting that some semblance of the folk music vernacular had crept in and wouldn't leave. Elkington's music, however, is anything if retroactive, and anything if folk music: 'It's not folk music,' he asserts. 'I may use the mechanics of folk music to put across my own ideas at times, but it really doesn't fall into any specific community or songwriterly tradition.
The album's lyrics do seem to have a preoccupation with unseen powers at work and other dimensions, both of which seem to show up in traditional English music, but it's based on my own experience and understanding, not anyone else's.' Wintres Woma was recorded at Wilco's studio, The Loft, in a five-day sprawl with engineer Mark Greenberg.
Elkington played and arranged all the instruments, with the exception of upright bass from Nick Macri, percussion from Tim Daisy, and string performances from Macie Stewart and Tomeka Reid, all of whom are veterans of Chicago's collaborative improvised music milieu. At times the results conjure Kevin Ayers delivering a Dylan Thomas or Gerard Manley Hopkins poem over a Bert Jansch song, all the while speaking in Elkington's singular voice, and shot with indelible melodies.
Each of these songs wrangles with memory, and even prophecy, in its knotty language and elegant, unpredictable progressions, drawing on the uncertain past'both personal and historical'in order to negotiate the uncertain future. In that sense, despite James'protestations, perhaps it is folk music.
RIYL: Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, Kevin Ayers, Bert Jansch, Ryley Walker, Jim O'Rourke, Scott Walker, Talk Talk.
Tracklisting:
1. Make It Up
2. Hollow in Your House
3. Wading the Vapors
4. Grief Is Not Coming
5. When I Am Slow
6. The Parting Glass
7. The Hermit Census
8. Greatness Yet to Come
9. Sister of Mine
10. My Trade in Sun Tears
11. Any Afternoon -
Lifetime of Love is the debut album by Moon Diagrams, the solo recording project of Deerhunter co-founder and drummer Moses John Archuleta. Gradually pieced together over a ten-year period, it finds Archuleta processing various stages of love, loss and regeneration via forlorn outsider pop, minimal techno and warm, weightless experimentation.Visit product page →
Hymnal opener 'Playground' has echoes of Eno and Grouper; lengthy workouts such as 'The Ghost and the Host' recall long-lost Harmonia outtakes, or something from one of Warp's Artificial Intelligence compilations; the bitter pill pop of 'End of Heartache' has the scratchy guitar of New Order circa Brotherhood and the square pegness of Dazzle Ships-era OMD. Several songs are instrumental, while 'Bodymaker' features Sian Ahern (Eaux, Sian Alice Group).
Subtly grandiose and quietly epic, Lifetime of Love really does live up to its title: a hopeful and curious beginning makes way for a morose middle, before a bittersweet, optimistic end.
Tracklisting:
1. Playground
2. Moon Diagrams
3. Nightmoves
4. Blue Ring
5. The Ghost and the Host
6. Magic Killer
7. Bodymaker
8. End of Heartache -
Three boys from the civilized centre of an isolated landmark that is sometimes considered part of Australia - Hobart, Tasmania.Visit product page →
These young men have spent most of their formative years in this regional city; a cold, windswept town built on convict labour and a strong maritime tradition. The band hold their strength in a surprisingly heartfelt and unashamed guitar sound, full of emotional, gut wrenching sing-alongs - then transposing this into a contemporary Australian scene.
Their colleagues range from popular sensations like Gold Class and Royal Headache to the darker sounds of Kitchen's Floor and The Native Cats, and to this they bring a true honesty and simplicity that is hard to find in today's world.
They are interested only in their music and the reaction it sparks in their audience. Nothing could make Treehouse smile more than a packed and sweaty basement, swaying to distorted melodies and yelling themselves hoarse with joy.
Whether this honesty is a production of regional isolation, a musical heritage or simply a reminder of good human behaviour, it makes for some seriously catchy and uplifting music.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Centre of Their World
2. Slave
3. Stop The Ocean
4. Hammer On The Door
Side B:
1. Between Two Shoulders
2. She's A Mystic
3. Tidal Wash -
Visit product page →Recorded, produced and written by Richard H. Kirk, founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, the album was constructed at Western Works, Sheffield, over a three-year period. Work began with recording on midi and analogue synthesisers before guitar and vocals (Kirk's first use of vocals in 10 years) were added.
Kirk explains, 'A lot of time was spent on post-production, editing and then living with the material and I think it benefited from stepping back and then revisiting after doing other things.'Although not an overtly political album, it's hard not to hear a reaction to recent years'world events in the overwhelming urgency of Nuclear Cloud'or 20 Block Lockdown'or in New Lucifer / The Truth Is Bad'. When questioned Kirk admits, 'It's not really a political album, but over recent years - during the recording - all manner of horrorshow events have cropped up and now we seem to be in a rerun of the Cold War with Russia back as the Bogeyman.'
'Kirk was toying with distorted realities from 1970s onwards' - Record Collector
The album's title, Dasein (a German word meaning 'being there' or 'presence', often translated into English as 'existence'), is a fundamental concept in existentialism. Kirk explains 'culture succumbs to nostalgia in much the same way that an individual looks back wistfully to adolescence or childhood - the nostalgia is partly for a time when he or she wasn't nostalgic, just lived purely IN THE NOW.'
In 2014, during the recording period, Kirk began work on Cabaret Voltaire live and so the two projects coexisted in tandem. Although Kirk's varied projects have always existed separate to one another, says Kirk, 'in the past some solo works served as a blueprint for what I did later with Cabaret Voltaire'.
RECENT PRAISE FOR RICHARD H. KIRK:
'One of the UK's pioneering electronic agitators' - Electronic Sound
'In five decades of key-bashing and knob-twisting, Richard H. Kirk has remained at the vanguard of electronic music' - FACT
' - ¦decades of electronic innovation, forged in Sheffield' - Uncut
Tracklisting:
1. Lets Jack
2. Lear Jet
3. Nuclear Cloud
4. Do It Right Now
5. New Lucifer / The Truth Is Bad
6. Radioactive Water
7. Invasion Pretext
8. 20 Block Lockdown
9. Sub / Antartic / H20 -
Sold outThis time, the root of Biafra's frustration-- aside from the threat of global terrorism, the Bush administration's response to the threat of global terrorism, and, uh, yuppies in Cadillacs-- is personal: The Melvins approached him about a possible collaboration after witnessing the supposed Dead Kennedys "reunion," which-- after a series of inter-band legal disputes-- occurred without Biafra at the helm.Visit product page →
The Melvins are ideal musical foils to Biafra's maniacal persona, and show an admirable willingness to subdue and camouflage their normally obtrusive sound.
The band members' great admiration and respect for Biafra's work are evident in the album's malleable arrangements, which strike a perfect balance between the Melvins' grimy post-alternative metal and classic Kennedys-style California punk.
Tracklisting:
1.Plethysmograph
2. McGruff the Crime Dog
3. Yuppie Cadillac
4. Islamic Bomb
5. The Lighter Side of Global Terrorism
6. Caped Crusader
7. Enchanted Thoughtfist
8. Dawn of the Locusts -
Visit product page →Graciously welcoming the second full-length lp from Philadelphia's Jesse Dewlow, recording under the moniker People Skills. The follow-up to 2014's Siltbreeze set Tricephalic Head. Ten sunken songs, derisively adorned with rhythm and rudimentary dub effects. Bedroom elegies for the lost and irretrievable, last-ditch spells for transformation and renewal.
Thurston Moore and Byron Coley likened the previous record to 'South Island NZ pop played inside of an armored car', and that description holds here: underneath the hoods of these wracked and weather-beaten recordings are melodies of disarming beauty and optimism, bordering on the (wilfully) mawkish, bubblegum ground underfoot. Each piece as time-stopping and evocative as an old photograph of someone who used to mean something.
Whether speaking through stately keyboard pastorals (Mint Julep'), rat-arsed rock n roll slur (89¢ Public Render') or sulphurous aggro-electronics (the two-part title track), Gunshots At Crestridge exposes, then seeks to redeem, all our tiny acts of self-sabotage, all our sins against time. When to stay, when to go - ¦you never got it right, not once.
Vinyk LP Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Obstinate Truss
2. Gunshots at Crestridge
3. In the Mulch and Trimming
4. A Chain Undressed
5. Mint Julep
Side B:
1. Town of Diana
2. Gunshots at Crestridge II
3. 89¢ Public Render
4. Dust In The Old House
5. The Clock Player -
Though my eyes got gradually accustomed to the darkness I was almost on top of the outhouses before I saw the thick blur of the deadly nightshade. It was like a lady standing in her doorway looking out for someone. I was prepared to dread it, but not prepared for the tumult of emotions it aroused in me. In some way it wanted me, I felt, just as I wanted it; and the fancy took me that it wanted me as an ingredient, and would have me.Visit product page →
The spell was not waiting to be born in my bedroom, as I meant it should be, but here in this roofless shed, and I was not preparing it for the deadly nightshade, but the deadly nightshade was preparing it for me. Come in,'it seemed to say; and at last after an unfathomable time I stretched my hand out into the thick darkness where it grew and felt the shoots and leaves close softly on it. I withdrew my hand and peered. There was no room for me inside, but if I went inside, into the unhallowed darkness where it lurked, that springing mass of vegetable force, I should learn its secret and it would learn mine. And in I went. It was stifling, yet delicious, the leaves, the shoots, even the twigs, so yielding; and this must be a flower that brushed my eyelids, and this must be a berry that pressed against my lips - ¦
It wasn't till quite a while after recording the piece I was listening and felt yes this was a cathartic indulgence of a lost fantasy. You see I fell in love once with a scientist (a rational thinker) who taught me almost everything about listening. I was forever trying to get her to make music with me - and she would to an extent - singing like a laconic Julie Andrews or fluttering on a recorder with melodic aplomb. But if ever I tried to turn on the red light and roll tape the moment would disintegrate - as would, after nine years, our relationship.
She grew up playing the violin and she was brilliant, although I only ever heard her play once, I was struck by her fervour, her posture and her jaw jutting out - awful, awkward things to play they are. My best instrument is the clarinet - I cut my teeth playing Roma tunes, a story for another time.
As I was editing the music I imagined the clarinet and the violin as star-crossed us - talking, arguing, trying to outdo each other, there's that section about six minutes in where the violin is exasperated (she always deserved better) with brittle strikes of glockenspiel, children thankfully never granted.
Look I'm not claiming anything as ridiculous as me channeling her that day, but I had never before played violin - ¦
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Sassafras Gesundheit
2. Fortunes Past
3. Fortunes Begun
Side B:
1. Perfect Scorn
2. Blackest Frypan -
Great Many Arrows' is the 6th studio album from Damien Dubrovnik, the Danish duo of Loke Rahbek and Christian Stadsgaard. It is also the 200th release on their Posh Isolation label, marking 8 years for both the label and project. The label's inception came with Damien Dubrovnik's debut album, and since then the two have been inseparable. Without Damien Dubrovnik there would most likely have been no Posh Isolation, and vice versa.Visit product page →
'Great Many Arrows' is undoubtedly a high point in the varied discographies of both Rahbek and Stadsgaard. It is the most realized Damien Dubrovnik recording to date, and a standout in Posh Isolation's troves.As a record, 'Great Many Arrows' manages to translate the intensity of the duo's often unrestrained live shows in to carefully crafted studio productions. Unlike the pair's earlier and largely electronic recordings, the compositions on 'Great Many Arrows' set organs, cellos, violas, wind and other acoustic instruments against the backdrop of an electronic landscape.
The new toolset is as apparent on the surface as it is in the enclosed detail, taking the project further from its noise roots than it has ever been. This is not to say that Rahbek and Stadsgaard have traded ferocity for formal constraint. It is rather the opposite. While 'Great Many Arrows' is certainly the pair's most 'musical' work to date, its veneer of accessibility might also make it their most terrifying.
The strength of the recording lies here in the interaction between the melodic, acoustic instrumentation and the bulldozing electronics. Moments of beauty and light are transfigured into utter chaos and rage, the mesmerising change an expression of the equal and opposite form's natural sway as it beckons and slips between its own passing.
'Great Many Arrows' takes its name from a historic archery competition in Kyoto, Japan, in which archers would shoot as many arrows as possible for a 24 hour period. On April 26, 1686, Wasa Daihachiro from Kishoe« successfully shot 8,133 out of 13,053 arrows, averaging 544 arrows an hour, or 9 arrows a minute, becoming the record holder.
Tracklisting:
1. Arrow 1
2. Arrow 2
3. Arrow 3
4. Arrow 4
5. Arrow 5
6. Arrow 6 -
Blackest Ever Black's last release of 2013 comes from Secret Boyfriend, the solo project of North Carolina's Ryan Martin, who is also one half of Boyzone (not that Boyzone, unfortunately) and founder of the Hot Releases label - a catholic endeavour that has seen him release records from the cream of the contemporary N.C. underground as well as reissuing classic sides by the likes of Maurizio Bianchi, Ghedalia Tazartes and Ashrae Fax.Visit product page →
To date, Secret Boyfriend's presence has been felt largely in the shape of live performances and short-run cassette releases (including Carved At Birth, Furnishing The Void and Skin On The Clock), as well as vinyl splits with Russian Tsarlag and Horaflora.
This Is Always Where You've Lived is SB's first LP release and unquestionably his most potent, fully realised work to date. Twelve songs from under the floorboards: a heart-rending but hard-edged synthesis of downer folk, tape experiments, noise etudes and basement-mildewed pop for edgeland fuck-ups, loners and wanderers; recommended if you like Peter Jeffries, Flaming Tunes, Storm Bugs, etc.
Arguably comes closer than any previous BEB release to articulating the 'mesmerised suburban daydreams of our youth".
Tracklisting:
1. Summer Wheels / Mysterious Fires
2. Silvering The Wing
3. Form Me
4. Flashback
5. Remarkable Fluids
6. Beyond The Darkness
7. Dream Scrape
8. Glint And Follow You
9. Have You Heard About This House?
10. Last Town
11. Deleted Hill
12. This Is Always Where You've Lived -
Retrieval is the debut collaborative album from Faith Coloccia and Alex Barnett. Artist and composer Coloccia was a founding member of Everlovely Lightningheart, and is perhaps best known as one half of Mamiffer. She has contributed to recordings by House Of Low Culture, Boris and William Fowler Collins among others, and collaborations with Circle and Daniel Menche are forthcoming.Visit product page →
Alex Barnett played in Oakeater but since 2009 has been active primarily as a solo artist, with releases on Catholic Tapes, DRAFT, Nihilist and others.
Following an initial exchange of ideas, the bulk of Retrieval was recorded over three intensive days at Otic Sound in Vancouver, with Coloccia contributing treated vocals, tape-manipulated acoustic recordings and AM radio sounds, and Barnett adding an array of synth instruments to create further loops, drum sounds and other rhythmic elements.They then reconvened at AVAST! studio in Seattle for a final session of mixing and editing with engineer/producer Randall Dunn.
The resulting LP is about time and place, synthesis and environment. It's an invitation into the woods, to find that which reveals itself only to the lost. A grave, deeply introspective work, pastoral in essence but cosmic in scope.
Opening with the stately, medievalist sequences of 'Harbor', Retrieval's narrative takes in subdued techno abstraction ('Hallway'), chrondritic psychedelia ('So, How Much Do You Know About Me?'), saw mill gear-grind ('Repeating Pit') and eldritch noise invocations ('Retrieval', 'Bird's Eye'). Throughout, it invigorates without consoling.
Tracklisting:
1. Harbor
2. Switch
3. So, How Much Do You Know About Me?
4. Hallway
5. Repeating Pit
6. Retrieval
7. Birds Eye -
Visit product page →Two new tracks by Burial, rendered in his singular ambient style.
Total running time of seventeen minutes and thirteen seconds.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
Subtemple [ 07:23 ]
Side B:
Beachfires [ 09:50 ] -
Visit product page →Visibility Is A Trap is the new EP by Dalhous, comprised of four originals together with a masterfully understated Regis remix of He Was Human And Belonged With Humans'. The EP heralds the arrival of the Edinburgh-based project's sophomore album, Will To Be Well, due out on Blackest Ever Black in early Summer 2014.
Dalhous first announced its existence in 2012 with the Mitchell Heisman 10', and last year released its debut full-length: An Ambassador For Laing.
Both Visibility Is A Trap and the upcoming Will To Be Well LP reflect writer-producer Marc Dall's continued interest in the language and imagery of self-help, R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement. Though recorded after Will To Be Well, the tracks on Visibility Is A Trap at first appear to have more in common with the blue ethereal drift of Ambassador.
While Information Is Forever'and A Change Of Attitude'are firmly in the ambient mode, Active Discovering'fizzes with arpeggiated energy, and a battery of percussion disrupts the calm surface of Sight Of Hirta'. Something is up. All is not as it seems.
The Regis remix of Ambassador highlight He Was A Human And Belonged With Humans'finds Karl O'Connor in unusually pensive mood. In fact this near-beatless, dubwise version is unlike anything he has put his name to before.
Discarding the rhythmic skeleton of Dalhous's original, he gives their weeping saxophone more space to roam and resonate, adding off-beat, sleep-deprived keys, murmured vocal fragments and swells of sub-bass pressure.
It could be construed as a love letter to his former home in West Berlin; certainly it evokes and effortlessly updates the drugsick grandeur of later Neubauten or Low side 2.
Tracklisting:
1. Active Discovering
2. Information Is Forever
3. Sight Of Hirta
4. A Change Of Attitude
5. He Was Human And Belonged With Humans (Regis Version) -
Blackest Ever Black presents to youDead Unique, an album by Officer! recorded in 1995 but - outrageously, inexplicably - never before released into the public domain. This then is not a reissue or a revival; it's a new record that just happens to have been maturing in the cask for, oh, a little shy of 20 years. It also happens to be a lost classic of English art-rock, and the crowning achievement in the career of its mercurial creator, Mick Hobbs.Visit product page →
Londoner Hobbs'roots are in the fecund RIO scene of the late 70s and early 1980s, initially as guitarist in The Work (alongside Bill Gilonis, Rick Wilson and Henry Cow's Tim Hodgkinson), and subsequent related groupings The Lowest Note, The Lo Yo Yo, and The Momes. Over the course of the decade he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage studio in Brixton, working with the likes of Flaming Tunes, Family Fodder, Catherine Jauniaux and Zeena Parkins, to name but a few.
Officer! - the project that this incorrigible collaborator and connector calls his own - surfaced in 1982 with a cassette tape entitled Eight New Songs By Mick Hobbs.
It marked the blossoming of a singular writer and improvisor, with a gift for plangent melody, ingenious arrangement and lyrics at once caustic and courtly, playful and profound (two songs from this tape, Life At The Water's Edge'and Dogface', have been remastered for a limited edition 7' release on Blackest Ever Black later this year).
The Cold Storage-recordedOssification LP arrived a year later, followed by Cough (1985) and Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes (1988). Megaphone Records, responsible for Ossification's recent 30th anniversary reissue, rightly describe it as 'one of the most unusual, pleasurable and character-filled pop'records anyone has heard - ¦a timeless anomaly in the history of recorded music.'
By the start of the 1990s Hobbs had joined Jad Fair's Half Japanese (he continues to play in that group as well as Strobe Talbot, a trio with Fair and Benb Gallaher). In the early months of '95, Half Japanese were in Baltimore to record their Hot LP; Hobbs stayed on to cut the bulk of the songs that comprise Officer!'s Dead Unique - songs drawn from a rich store of material written and refined in the seven years since the band's last outing - with a talented assemblage of local and visiting musicians.
Returning to the UK, Hobbs brought the tracks to producer Julia Brightly to mix at her 16-track home studio in Bethnal Green; by the end of the summer,Dead Unique had taken shape. And then? Nothing. For reasons that no one, least of all Hobbs, can remember, Dead Unique was shelved, all but forgotten about until 2012, when Blackest Ever Black chanced upon it while trawling the Officer! archive maintained for Hobbs by Andrew Jacques. Finally, rightfully, on May 26th, 2014, the album will be made available to all for the very first time - on double-vinyl, CD and digital formats.
A complex but thrillingly immediate avant-pop song cycle that charms and confounds at every turn, Dead Unique will give immense pleasure not only to Officer!'s existing cult following, but to anyone with an appreciation of piquant, idiosyncratic songcraft - fans of Kevin Ayers, Flaming Tunes, Art Bears, Woo, Dislocation Dance, R. Stevie Moore, Robert Wyatt, Cleaners From Venus, Lol Coxhill or The Monochrome Set should especially pay attention. It touches upon ragged-raw rock n roll, sumptuous chamber music, pastoral folk, blowsy prog-jazz and paranoid dub-space, effortlessly shifting from skronking abstraction to rousing harmonic refrain and back again.
Dead Unique is also the culmination of Hobbs'lifelong collaborative impulse: his visionary ability to bring musicians together, galvanise them and wrestle coherence out of the collective free play of ideas, arriving at something far more than the sum of its parts.
The tension between composition and improvisation is key to the LP's power, with Hobbs abetted by an extraordinary supporting cast that includes Tim Hodgkinson (bass clarinet), Pleasant Livers'Fred Collins (vocals), Legendary Pink Dots'Patrick Q (violin), filmmaker/animator Martha Colburn (vocal), Gilles Rieder (drums), Jad Fair (vocals) and Jason Willett (bass, keyboards, trumpet).
Special mention must go to John Dierker, whose superbly expressive clarinet and saxophone parts are a fixture throughout, and to Joey Stack, who takes lead vocals on Good'and the show-stopping Elephant Flowers'. Nonetheless it is the voice of Hobbs - as principal writer, performer and protagonist of these songs - that resonates most powerfully. Blurring the roles of storyteller, poet and prankster, he turns memorable line after memorable line, booby-trapping them with mischievous puns, fleet-footed literary allusions, sudden digressions and shifts of register, nonsense rhymes and other wordplay.
But his acute wit and flair for the absurd is moored by a deep romantic sensibility, and though it delights in the minutiae of the human comedy, Dead Unique ultimately addresses its biggest themes: love, loss, commitment, independence, the mutability and inconstancy of all things. 'You lose, you learn, you advance - ¦but you always go back.'
Tracklisting:
1. Nest
2. Elephant Flowers
3. It Goes Up / Revenge
4. Go Back
5. Cows Hum In The Fields
6. Shrug / Good
7. Biteman
8. Nardis
9. Someone At The Door
10. Stewed Fruit
11. All I Got
12. V.I.M.
13. Bugs In Amber
14. Guess
15. The Pony Was Contented
16. Lilac And Orange
17. Clint -
'Six Harmonies', the febrile opener from Killing Sound's recent EP double-pack (BLACKEST028), refashioned as a shapeshifting, shark-eyed junglist wrecker.Visit product page →
Nine minutes of pure dread at 180, cut by Matt Colton at half-speed for maximum dancehall pressure.
A one-sided 12" release.
Tracklisting:
1. $ixxx Harmonie$ Version
