Browse by Artist: GATE

Artist:	GATE
Title:	Live In Boston, NYC 1994
Label:	POON VILLAGE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	PV 001CD

Gate is Michael Morley (Dead C., Precious Metal Inc.) and whoever he feels like working with. This CD features performances from the 1994 Gate tour, when Morley travelled around with Keiji Haino & The Thurston Moore Male Slut trio. Lee Ranaldo (who recorded a ton of studio Gate stuff with Morley around the same period that has yet to surface), joined him for a single-song 30+ minute guitar duo instrumental extravaganza in Boston, which is reproduced in its entirety here as the first track on this CD. Building layers of feedback, sonic delay and looped drones, this is a mesmerizing work of organic power. It's followed by six shorter tracks, recorded a few days later in NY, with a trio lineup of Morley, Ranaldo and electric harp improviser, Zeena Parkins; densely organized sectors of gloriously abstract noisic combinations are faded in & out for appraisal. Packaged in Poon Village's elegant trademark screenprinted card-folio.

Artist:	GATE
Title:	The Dew Line
Label:	TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	TOE 022CD

"Twenty years is long enough: It's time to acknowledge Michael Morley as an indie-rock patriarch. And why not? As the guitarist and vocalist for New Zealand noise-trip trio The Dead C and the man behind Gate (ostensibly a solo project, although Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo makes frequent guest appearances), Morley is the rare artist that record-hounds love to unearth: an isotope in the body Pop, radiating an invisible influence. With scores of micro-batch releases and an unmistakably intimate performance idiom, Morley ranks in the company of Jandek or Loren Connors, but it's geographic isolation rather than social disengagement that has deflected his work from reaching more ears. Still, if you don't recognize his name, you've heard his reverberations, in the ambient post-rock of Flying Saucer Attack and Labraford, the neo-psychedelia of Bardo Pond, and the fidelity-challenged whorl of Pavement and Sebadoh. Recorded in 1993 and out of print since, Gate's The Dew Line is the first part of his 'rock trilogy' (followed by The Monolake in 1996 and The Wisher Table in 1999). Rock it does. Typical Gate/Dead C no-fi guitar subduction and Morley's locked-in-the-car-trunk vocals are prominent, but there's also a hefty amount of scraping synthesizer menace and paleozoic riffage. The crust of noise is there, but crack open the sonic geode and you'll discover some nifty songstyling. In someone else's universe, the gem of an opening track, 'Millions,' gets play on AM radio, while 'Have Not' climbs the FM charts. Full of brooding atmospherics, The Dew Line is the most -- dare we say it -- accessible of any of Morley's records, and it stands on an equal footing with his Dead C high-water mark, Harsh 70s Reality, as an anti-rock rock classic."

Previous Page Index of Artists Next Page