PJs – ‘Family Talks’ $6
Recorded to 4-track in Schaerbeek, Brussels. Yamaha Portasound PSS-290, two guitars, male duets. Bram Devens (Ignatz) and I started recording at his place in March. I would buy a Turkish roll and eat it on the 92 tram from Saint-Josse towards Schaerbeek Gare. We would drink coffee and then record downstairs in Casper’s room until it was time to pick up Casper from school. Bram would put the 4-track away so Casper wouldn’t know we had used his room. The songs sound a lot like a little boy’s room. They’re small and funny, sometimes irrational or confused. I definitely felt like a child when we recorded, looking up through the sidewalk grill at the shoes of passersby. These songs are dreamy in a pensive way and in a distracted way: riding in the backseat at night, watching your friends at a pool party. Pop songs at their core, with all of the melodies and guitar licks to prove it, filtered through reverie and uncertainty.
Tracey Trance – ‘Noise Hippie Trimmer’ $6
Tracey Trance, self-proclaimed noise hippie trimmer, trans-American road urchin and 100% chilidog. This tape listens like an autobiography, meandering through Tracey’s kaleidoscopic campfires and sleep outs, singing on the side of the road, soaked in his peculiar lexis of burpanomics. It’s hard to think of anyone currently rawdogging the 4-track quite like Tracey Trance. Recording is so integrated into his way of being that it could hardly be called a vocation. Noise Hippie Trimmer was logged in Monteville, Main and Hollywood, California. What happened in between? It’s fair to assume he drove from one to the other, jamming (burping?) along the way. “Mixed on tape for the trimmers.”
Old Growth Cola – ‘Fossicking for Frogs’ $6
Recorded to computer with federal bills (pineapples, lobsters), guitars, drums, voices, keys, hi-fructose atmospherics. Old Growth Cola, band from Brisbane, brainchild of Lewis O’Leary, play flush pop. Their songs sparkle with preteen, part Paisley Rock romantics and part energy drinks. There’s something that reminds me of watching cartoons: short attention spans, relentless squints and squeezes, and Lew’s classically bashful whisper. At first I’m fooled by OGC’s melodic brightness. Then I catch onto a languid ambivalence. Only near the end do I start to hear something really sad sitting just beneath the surface.
Untitled – ‘CDr 8/CDr 3’ $6
Recorded at Real Bad Music, Magic Mile, Moorooka. I went to Matt’s house, there was an old synthesizer and a tape-delay caked in mud. Matt told me that they were found after the summer floods. He said they worked. Then he said no, they don’t work, but that you could still get a signal if you wanked around for long enough. Matt gave me two CDrs of this music. One-offs packaged and penned in delivery slips. The first was a “techno” CDr and the second was a “House” CDr. They definitely aren’t club standards. They also aren’t liberal-arts-cum-urban revisions to “real” dance music. I’m not even sure it’s dance music.