Browse by Artist: FUN YEARS, THE

Artist:	FUN YEARS, THE
Title:	Life-Sized Psychoses
Label:	BARGE RECORDINGS
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	BRG 002CD

"The Fun Years' new full length CD entitled Life-Sized Psychoses is a 50-minute composition combining drones, textures and stretched-out progressions. Split into five tracks (although we at Barge prefer listening all the way through), Life-Sized Psychoses is a perfect balance of soundscape meets song. A duo of turntable and baritone guitar, The Fun Years have disguised their instruments with atmospheric textures comprised of obscure samples and blissful repetition. The result is a stream of audio magma, filled with dreamy sound washes and subtle phrases that effortlessly tumble over one another. The Fun Years could be called experimental, but Life-Sized Psychoses is very well mapped out. As artists such as Stars of the Lid and William Basinski achieve, The Fun Years use time as a musical tool without pretense. They concoct thick layers of rich drone and underlying harmony that artfully conjure notions of memory, space and the subconscious. While Isaac Sparks' sampling creates a thick haze of pops and crackles from abstracted vinyl recordings, Ben Recht's guitar work of arpeggios and open tunings draws the listener into the world of The Fun Years."

Artist:	FUN YEARS, THE
Title:	Baby, It's Cold Inside
Label:	BARGE RECORDINGS
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	BRG 005CD

"In 2007, The Fun Years released their first album with Barge Recordings. Life-Sized Psychoses was well-received by a diverse fan base of drone junkies, post-rock nostalgics and picky ambient collectors. It was clear that across the board, The Fun Years had struck a nerve; they were able to successfully reach different listeners while jeopardizing zero artistic merit. Audiversity.com put it well: "They understand the pros and cons of being at each polar end, inspired by both the classics and the unknown, and aim for a balance between idiosyncrasy, unpredictability and accessibility." True, yet their music is far from being crossover; more so a unique salient musical language which Ben and Isaac continue to utilize and a developed creative style that almost every type of underground music fan can find beauty in. Forged at the peak of The Fun Years' musical abilities and a significant broadening of raw musical sentiment, Baby, It's Cold Inside is not a record to be taken lightly. Once again 'exploring the pleasures of slow evolution, repetition and decay,' as music writer Susanna Bolle perfectly put it, but this time there is a much wider dynamic range, spanning from massive swells of guitar distortion to microscopic pulses, almost inaudible fragments. They harness compositional energy, focus it and release it in powerful blows, while exercising their innate sense for timing and restraint. The sense of artistic control achieved on Baby, It's Cold Inside is extraordinary, so much as to say The Fun Years have transcended the preconceptions of drone music as both a genre and scene."

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