This Saturday (1/28), Sockets Records holds its 2012 Showcase at the Black Cat, featuring performances by Protect-U, Imperial China, Buildings, and Cigarette.
The prodigious local indie label, specializing in “experimental, incidental, minimal and arranged sounds” since 2004 (anyone ever heard of those Bluebrain fellas?), will be joining us all week at The Vinyl District. Artists who will be playing the Sockets showcase will be sharing their love of vinyl and music as a preview to Saturday’s blowout.
Today, Mike Petillo from Protect-U shares the best vinyl karma story you will ever read.
Aaron [Leitko] and I started playing music together again when I moved back to Washington from Philadelphia in 2007. We had played together in the DC band A Day in Black and White. After ADIBW cooled down after several years of touring, Aaron and I were both eager to experiment with some samplers and drum machines recently purchased on Craigslist. We didn’t really know how to work any of the gear, and we didn’t really have any preconceived notions of what sound we wanted to produce, although we had been swapping dub tracks, some early Chicago house, and European synth music with each other over our iPods while hunkered down in the tour van.
Sitting in a closet in my apartment in Mt. Pleasant, which served as our first practice space, we always joked that we wanted a “swimming pool” sound to our music, which we tried to achieve by running our synthesizers and drum patterns through several delay, pitch shifter, and space echo effects pedals strung together. During the genesis of Protect-U’s sound, we also found ourselves referencing parts of certain songs by people like the Talking Heads, Arthur Russell, and other ’70s/’80s “post-punk” that was rhythmic, melodic, and heavy on the reverb. (Simon Reynold’s classic account of this era, “Rip It Up and Start It Again,” was a big read on tour.)
By this point in our lives, we had amassed a vast vinyl collection of music from this period, but there was one mysterious record that had eluded us. It was an LP called For a Reason by a band named Lifetones. I first heard Lifetones when I downloaded a seriously low-bitrate mp3 of a song called “A Good Side” from a blog upon reading that it was a project of Charles Bullen, the guitarist and singer from a seminal UK act called This Heat. Aaron and I were huge fans of This Heat, who according to Reynolds’ book had a mantra during their relatively brief career—“All possible processes. All channels open. 24 hours alert.”
These words were something that Aaron and I could definitely relate to in the nebulous early days of collaborating together, when we were trying to be open to as many musical influences as possible. (“OK, what if we tried to make this synth sequence sound like an underwater gamelan orchestra was jamming together with a hi-life band in 1986 Detroit?”)
Lifetones sounded like This Heat… Well, kind of. But Bullen had taken some of the complex, more progressive rock structures of This Heat and bulldozed over them with shimmering—and simplified—bouncy dub stylings. The music was rooted in patchworks of music from around the globe, with traces of West African guitar licks and reggae basslines sifted through the “mutant disco” production sound of other contemporary post-punk. The For A Reason LP sounded bright and super-lush to us at a time when we were fatigued by dissonance. It sort of pointed the way forward—that one could hit this sublime feel sans aggression.
Lifetones – A Good Side
Eventually, the whole record was posted on another blog, and we were able to hear all six songs in their entirety. It was an amazing audio trip to hear Bullen and drummer Julius Cornelius Samuel (“Was that an alias of Bullen, too?” we wondered) groove in such an economical way—a minimal Minutemen at half the tempo and without the guitar solos.
The Lifetones LP—released on what was seemingly Bullen’s aptly-named private press label at the time, Tone of Life–became a holy grail of record collecting for us. Both of us looked for it in the “L” section of any shop we went in to, but we were consistently disappointed. We scoured the internet and it just didn’t seem like this record really existed. Of course, that drove us in a serious frenzy to locate an actual copy of it.
One day, my friend and fellow vinyl fiend Chris “C-Rob” Robinson (who also was on a serious lookout for the LP) grabbed a copy off of the Discogs website for a terrific price of $25 from someone who obviously didn’t know what they were parting with. All of us who were starving for this record were worked into a frenzy; Chris had amazingly succeeded in finding his copy.
He received the record in the mail a week later and offered to come over and jam it. In typical record nerd fashion, Aaron and some other friends congregated at my apartment for a listening party. We examined the artwork while we listened to the LP off the vinyl. It sounded amazing, one of those true perfect albums where every song is great, and there isn’t anything resembling a dull or wasted moment.
Lifetones – For a Reason
Lifetones – Travelling
About a week later, something even crazier happened. Aaron was looking up the record on Discogs, and there was another one for sale overseas for a very reasonable price. He immediately added it to his virtual shopping cart and checked out in a mad dash. He called me to tell me about his score—gloating a little but mostly shocked. Was it really possible that two copies of this rare record surfaced a week apart from one another?
Aaron received his LP and would bring it over to jam before Protect-U rehearsal. While listening to the actual wax helped alleviate some of my jealousy, part of me was still curious whether I would ever get my own to add to my record shelves.
A few weeks later, I randomly checked eBay and found a copy listed for auction in the States (for some perplexing reason, my saved search never triggered that friendly email announcing my prized possession was located). I was ecstatic and nervous—would I be able to fend off e-snipers? Was anyone else other than my friends and I even hunting this thing? Was I being paranoid? I decided to not tell anyone else that the record was up for grabs while I debated how much I was actually willing to pay for it.
It’s Lifetones, yeah, of course, my own personal holy grail, but there was a limit to how much I could afford to pay. I settled on a modest amount of dough, entered my maximum bid amount, and tried to convince myself to not get into an escalated auction war, assuming others were out there on the prowl, too.
I let it slip during the final day of the auction to my friend Andrew [Field-Pickering] that the record was up online. Looking back, perhaps a dumb move, considering how much I wanted the record, but I knew that he really wanted it too and that maybe our bank accounts just had to duke it out. I told him what my max bid was for it, and he told me flat out, “Sorry, but I’m gonna go for it, dude.” He outbid me in the final moments of the auction. Andrew and cold-ass capitalism triumphed that day, and I was now in the minority of my friends as someone who did not own this crazy rare record.
Flash forward to a few months later. I get a call from Andrew while I’m at work at my office in Silver Spring. He tells me to meet him downstairs really quick. He sounds kind of troubled and in a rush, so I hang up the phone and run downstairs. He pulls up in his car, and thrusts his hand out. It’s a brown paper bag, definitely square. LP-shaped. I peek inside. It’s the Lifetones. “Here you go, dog. Enjoy!” he said, and I just stood there in shock while he sped off.
He called me later that afternoon to explain. It turns out that before Andrew outbid me in the auction, he had found a copy for sale on the Internet during a deep Google session, buried in some distribution catalog from the Netherlands. The website was entirely in Dutch, but Andrew was able to fumble his way through the check-out process and attempted to place an order for the album. He never knew what happened, as he apparently didn’t receive a confirmation email, a charge on his debit card for the purchase, or any evidence that the order went through. After several months, he gave up. But literally a couple days after he got his auction copy, a mysterious package showed up at his home from the Netherlands. Inside was a pristine unplayed copy from the Dutch distro of the Lifetones LP. He decided it was only good karma to hook me up.
Wally Badarou – Endless Race
Upon leaving work that day, still pretty frazzled at the cosmic turn of events that had blessed us all with this awesome piece of vinyl, I stopped by a record shop in downtown Silver Spring like I do most Fridays. In the jazz section, I found a second copy of one of my all-time favorite LPs by keyboard guru Wally Badarou called Echoes. It’s a mostly instrumental album full of drippy synth textures (total “swimming pool vibe,” as Aaron would say) and slow-mo Afro-pop drum machine programming. I knew Andrew had been on the hunt for this one for a while, and seeing as I already owned a copy myself, I scooped it up for him as a trade for the Lifetones.
Protect-U Official | Soundcloud
Photo by Shawn Brackbill
