Monthly Archives: September 2015

Initially a solo affair combining harmonium, oscillators, tape delays, and processors, Jaime Fennelly’s Mind Over Mirrors blends aspects of prime experimentation with the vigor and warmth associated with generations-old traditions. Since 2014 the Chicago-based sonic explorer Haley Fohr, most notable for her own solo outfit Circuit des Yeux, has added vocals and lyrics to Fennelly’s project; The Voice Calling is Mind Over Mirror’s latest, and its impressive growth gets a virgin vinyl release September 18th through Immune Recordings.

In addition to the venture discussed here, multi-instrumentalist Jaime Fennelly is a third of the free jazz + electronics trio Acid Birds and alongside Chris Forsyth and Fritz Welch constituted part of the defunct Brooklyn group Peeesseye. Having relocated to an island in the Salish Sea of Washington State (he now lives in Chicago), Mind Over Mirrors gained traction between 2007 and ‘10.

In 2011 two releases emerged, The Voice Rolling and High & Upon, the latter originally a cassette on Gift Tapes with a vinyl edition appearing the following year via Aguirre Records. Its three tracks include a pair of long pieces firmly establishing Fennelly’s contempo edginess; by album’s end the keyboard of “Mountain Convalescence” seems to be ruminating from inside a jet engine.

By contrast, the seven selections comprising Digitalis Recordings’ The Voice Rolling offer a heightened focus on celestial drone; opening cut “Brickfielder” even conjures fleeting visions of boating down a river in the company of a white suit and Panama hat-clad Klaus Kinski. The edge in evidence across High & Upon is reasserted throughout.

Read More »

“Let me start by saying that going to a record store is one of the most grounding things I know. No, change that. It is THE most grounding thing I know. I know some folks like to sneak off to the bar for a beer when things are tough, I can be found usually in the record store bargain bin looking for something I’m not looking for.”

If others are there, they’re usually not talking (which is nice in an all too loud world) but quietly thumbing through album after album. You can feel the intense passion in the silence. I imagine everyone’s head is filled with both music they know and music they’re craving while they’re milling about the store. Time doesn’t exist at a record store. Yet there’s never enough of it. Someone’s always waiting for you in the car or at home. It’s like it’s too good to be allowed to stay too long.

I was born into a house with records always in my sight. My dad had a lot of Hi-Lit collections. I think they were compiled by a DJ named “Hi-Lit”? It’s kind of a blur. They were kind of like an old bible or something. It just lived there under some other records. Maybe from my dad’s younger days before I was born. I’d drop the oh-so-sensitive needle and all of a sudden some guy was singing “Sunny, yesterday my life was filled with rain.”

Read More »

When it comes to testifying to the power and glory of rock’n’roll, very few bands have topped The Kiss Offs on their sophomore LP, 2001’s Rock Bottom. It’s a veritable love letter to the “sweet, sweet, sweet rock’n’roll” in which they place their “faith, love, and hope,” as they sing in “Broken Fingers for Talented Singers,” which they dedicate to “young girls age 10 to 21/Singing screaming the words to ‘Born to Run.’”

Lead singer Philip Niemeyer’s snotty vocals may lead to suspicions of irony, but he’s in deadly earnest. He’s a believer in “The Power of Rock’n’Roll” as a life force, and the band’s legendarily chaotic live shows proved he and the rest of the band were ready, willing, and able to fold, spindle, and mutilate themselves to demonstrate their allegiance to smart but primitive garage punk. “I can rock like a mountain!” cries fellow vocalist Katey Jones in one song, and by God, she can.

Everybody has one: a band they love that absolutely no one else knows about. Trying to spread the word is a hopeless endeavor, leaving said poor solitary missionary to lead a lonely existence, embittered that no one else is struck dumb by a genius that is self-evident. Well, that’s how I feel about The Kiss Offs. I don’t remember where or why I bought the Austin, Texas quintet’s 2001 LP Rock Bottom, but I love them and think everyone else should love them too. I think they should be bigger than the Rolling Stones. I’ve told people this. “The Kiss Offs should be bigger than the Rolling Stones!” I’ve cried. They just look at me like I’m insane.

But I don’t care. I know what I know. And what I know is that Rock Bottom is a great album, from the guy on the cover showing off the ass of his black pleather pants to the relentless drive and great handclaps of “Love You Hardcore,” to say nothing of the wonderful vocal give and take of Niemeyer and Jones. If nobody understands you, they sing, rock’n’roll does; “So you can’t sing/Then scream and shout/Cuz if it’s in ya, its gotta come out/Three chords are great/But one will do,” sings Niemeyer, and as a rock aesthetic it’s unimpeachable.

Read More »

Press Play is our Monday recap of the new—and FREE—tracks received last week, provided here to inform your next trip to your local indie record store.

Beach Fatigue – Deathproof
Pony Time – Really Nice Guys
YAST – Together Forever
Annabelle’s Curse – Brother In Arms
Heyward Howkins – Forecasting
Calgary James – So Long
Chris Dupont – Forgiveness
Jojee – Unravel Me
Chromatics – Shadow
McClain Sullivan – Happy Anniversary

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Youth Man – Pigs

Ethav – Warrior (Niels Holgerson Remix)
Shannon and the Clams – It’s Too Late
GUIDES – Pictures On Pictures
French Kiddiz – Stratosphere
Amy Winehouse – Valerie (Tep No Remix)
Supastition – Black Bodies
Gallant – Weight In Gold (LEFTI Remix)
Duko – Fumar
The Digital Connection – When I Miss You
Eche Palante – Voices (Radio Edit)

“My first associations with vinyl come from that proto-musician phase of life known as childhood. Crouched over a Playskool turntable with my proto-girlfriend, listening to proto-music. Like a gateway drug for the under-ten crowd, album versions of Hollywood movies, like novelizations in sound, were the first recordings to catch hold of my small ears. They dragged me down into a life-long addiction to recorded music, the grooves in vinyl like tracks on a user’s arm.”

“Planet of the Apes was a great album, dialogue from Charlton Heston and cast alternating with orchestral interludes, or sometimes overlain. I never saw the movie itself! The sonic images were lucid enough to seduce my imagination; I knew the story back to front and the grandiose music penetrated deep in my subconscious, laying the groundwork for years of imitation.

As years went by, proto-girlfriends became girlfriends. Proto-music became music. Or sort of. I was still fascinated by the allure of a good story and, as I grew, just graduated to a little more grown-up stories. A huge favorite of my pre-teen years was Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, narrated by David Bowie. “Are you sitting comfortably?” David would ask in his most White Duke of voices…”Then let’s begin.”

Read More »

On May 23 of 1963 a trio of bebop originals joined up with a worthy European compatriot and visited CBS Studios in Paris. The comeback of tenor giant Dexter Gordon was well underway, but the Continent was a relatively recent change of scene. Pianist Bud Powell and drummer Kenny “Klook” Clarke had been living in France for quite some time however, and bassist Pierre Michelot was born there. Together this quartet agreed upon five standards and executed them with utter brilliance. Blue Note titled it Our Man in Paris, and 51 years later it remains a classic.

They ate voraciously as Dean, sandwich in hand, stood bowed and jumping before the big phonograph, listening to a wild bop record I had just bought called “The Hunt,” with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray blowing their tops before a screaming audience that gave the record fantastic frenzied volume.
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Much deserved praise gets heaped on Dexter Gordon for his comeback(s), but it can be occasionally overlooked that even if he never came back at all, he’d be a hugely important figure anyway. To begin, he’s the most distinctive tenor saxophonist to emerge from the ‘40s bop scene, extending the influence of Lester Young and quickly adapting the innovations of Charlie Parker, recording with Bird and Dizzy Gillespie and as a leader for Savoy before heading back to California and cutting those tenor battle 78s for Dial, the very sides that impacted Kerouac and Neal Cassady (i.e. Dean Moriarty) so massively.

It was heroin that nearly ended Gordon’s career for good; the ‘50s were a lost decade, though he did cut two records in ’55, Daddy Plays the Horn for Bethlehem in September and Daddy Blows Hot and Cool for Dootone two months later. After kicking the habit, he commenced his return with The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon, a minor session (some would call it a false start) for the Jazzland label.

Read More »

“I was raised around hymnbooks, sheet music, and cassette tapes. My dad was raised on a farm and didn’t have luxuries like vinyl, and my mom was raised conservatively enough that she grew up around hymnbooks, too. Vinyl just wasn’t part of how we listened to music. I used to think that was a musical disadvantage, but getting to do my homework and explore a massive world of music as an adult has been a blast.”

“I didn’t discover vinyl until I moved to Los Angeles in 2008. There I was, almost predictably, a new resident of Los Angeles, digging through the vinyl fortress of Amoeba Music on Sunset Boulevard. I didn’t have a record player, but my roommate did, so shopping for vinyl seemed like the right thing to do.

As I was flipping through row after row of records, a stranger standing a couple of feet away held a record out to me, and with no introduction, said, “You should buy this one. It’s my favorite.” It was Bruce Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent, & the E Street Shuffle. I said a simple, “Ok,” and I bought it.

Read More »

Psst? In search of some real dada, daddy-o? Some musical shit that busts the scale of the absurdist meter? Well have I got the thing for you. Follow me into this dark alley and I’ll show you. It’s a toss-off LP recorded by producer Bob Johnston and some of the crack Nashville sessions musicians (e.g., Kenny Buttrey on drums, Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano and keyboards, and Henry Strzelecki on bass to name a few) who helped Bob Dylan record Blonde on Blonde, and who inspired by “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” decided to one-up Bobby D by creating an artifact so strange and hilarious I’m positively certain Dada’s creator, Alfred Jarry, would give it three thumbs up.

This may well be the oddest LP ever released by a major label, and it’s virtually indescribable. I can only assume that large quantities of alcohol and drugs were consumed. It’s less an album than a beautiful example of self-sabotage, with the band taking popular songs of the day and folding, spindling, and mutilating them. It’s great fun and should definitely be spun at parties that have gone out of control. Bob Dylan, what hath thou wrought?

Opener “Bang Bang” (a Nancy Sinatra tune) is sung by one of the female vocalists—the credits are sketchy—and features a Eastern European lilt, a Romanian violin riff by Brenton “Ping-Pong” Banks, and lots of machine gun sound effects. It’s a miracle that nobody cracks up laughing until the end, when somebody shouts, “Bang!” If that isn’t weird enough, the band takes the classic “Monday, Monday” and reimagines it with a staccato lead singer, deranged backing vocals, an uncredited and lunatic slide whistle, a trumpet fanfare by Charlie “Bugs” McCoy, and God only knows what else. The album’s greatest downfall is the failure to list who’s singing what: the vocalists are listed as Durl Glin, Princess La Mar Fike, Mort “Mortuary” Thomasson, and Tummy “Mole” Hill, while “The Swamp Women” include The Incomparable R. Lean (aka Arlene Harden) and Luscious Norma Jean Owen.

Read More »