Browse by Label: BLUE CHOPSTICKS

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Interrupteur/Tautologos 3
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 001CD

1999 release, repressed; the debut release on Dave Grubbs's reissue-oriented label (moving forward from where Dexter's Cigar left off). "Ferrari -- along with Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Henry, François Bayle, and others -- is one of the pioneers of the particular style of tape music known as 'musique concrète'. More significantly, he must be counted as one of the most complexly, most idiosyncratically compelling of post-War composers. Ferrari has time and again ranged far afield of musique concrète, and Interrupteur/Tautologos 3 is one such foray into instrumental music. But what a setting-forth! Mon dieu! These particular realizations came about through Ferrari's directed improvisations of Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble, and the recordings were originally released in 1970 by EMI in their 'Perspectives Musicales' series. 'Interrupteur' is largely static music, a music of long tones periodically interrupted by aleatoric events. If it references musical minimalism (particularly Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Robert Ashley), this surely counts as an intuitive, very personal result. 'Tautologos 3' pursues the idea of the superposition of cycles of different lengths that, once set into motion, will continually result in new events. Conventionally understood, a tautology is a redundancy in which the same meaning is expressed in different works; the same things are 'said' repeatedly in 'Taulologos 3', but as the context shifts through the displacement of the various cycles, how could there be no gain, no furtherance of both logic and sensation? In a world: exhilarating.""Interrupteur" is from 1967 and features the following instrumentation: English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, French horn, trumpet, violin, viola, cello, two percussions, two electric organs. It is one of the most outright powerful and devastating recordings within the avant garde realm. "Tautologos 3" is form 1970 and features: flute, oboe, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, viola, cello, double bass, electric guitar, electric organ & vibraphone.

Artist:	GRUBBS/MATS GUSTAFSSON, DAVID
Title:	Apertura
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 002CD

"Cheerful Mats was dragged into the studio last year by David Grubbs for the ostensible purpose of contributing to a Thicket-in-the-works. The pair instead became terminally sidetracked with recording the two lengthy duets for harmonium and tenor saxophone and harmonium and fluteophone (Mat's invention -- a flute with a reed mouthpiece) that make up Apertura. Listening to Apertura, the first question is 'who is doing what?' It's not certain that even the artists themselves know." Two long tracks (65 minutes total) of deep, evolving drone, in what has to be the most lovable/likable Grubbs concoction to date.

Artist:	VAN OEHLEN
Title:	We Are Eggsperienced
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 003CD

"Van Oehlen is the duo of Albert and Markus Oehlen. Albert is best known to listeners for his heavy, integral participation in the Red Krayola, while Markus is the drummer of the legendary German punk group Mittagspause. We Are Eggsperienced features contributions from the Red Krayola's Mayo Thompson (singing the album's hit, "Hitrocking") and Tom Watson, as well as German jazz legend Rüdiger Carl (COWWS Quintet and numerous recordings for the FMP label) and Goldenen Zitronen's frontman Schorsch Kamerun. A draft of Albert's New Stream Manifesto was circulated before the Red Krayola's first live performance of Fingerpainting. What is 'new stream' music? New stream is not dissimilar to 'cold jazz', but counts among it's illustrious progenitors the Red Krayola's free-form freakouts, "Revolution No. 9". Sun Ra's most bracingly alien synthesizer solos, and the Deep Freeze Mice at their least musical."

Artist:	GUSTAFSSON, MATS
Title:	Windows
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 004CD

"Windows: The Music of Steve Lacy takes us somewhere altogether different. The first thing you may notice is that only half the collection's six pieces are Lacy compositions. Or that Mats does Lacy via fluteophone and tenor and baritone saxes -- no soprano. The fluidity and swing of Lacy's compositions (add to this Cecil Taylor's 'Louise', which Lacy recorded in 1961) frequently give way to the monumental stasis of a single gesture, the damn-the-world focus of which strongly recalls Gustaffson's singular playing on his previous Blue Chopsticks release Apertura."

Artist:	GRUBBS, DAVID
Title:	The Coxcomb/Avocado Orange
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 005CD

"Responding to the invitation of Quentin Rollet and Noel Akchote to make an LP for their Rectangle label, Grubbs penned 'The Coxcomb,' an adaptation in song of Stephen Crane's short story 'The Blue Hotel.' This seventeen-minute moritat is scored for three voices: The Narrator (Stephen Prina, white-hot on the heels of Push Comes to Love); The Swede (Grubbs, wild-eyed and singing through gritted teeth); and The Cowboy (played to perfection by deep-voiced Sasha Andres, singer of the group Heliogabale). Grubbs's engrossing guitar-yarn is gorgeously fleshed out by the saloon band of Didler Petit (cello, voice), Yves Robert (trombone), Thierry Madiot (bass trombone), and Quentin Rollet (alto sax). The original LP and picture-disc LP version of The Coxcomb featured as its B-side 'Aux Noctambules.' In its place is 'Avocado Orange,' recorded during The Spectrum Between sessions."

Artist:	BAILEY/NOEL AKCHOTE, DEREK
Title:	Close To The Kitchen
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 006CD

"Welcome once again to the kaleidoscope of scrapes and soundings that was, is, and still could be the electric guitar. Close to the Kitchen is forty-seven minutes of thrust-and-parry string abuse and obstinate, simultaneous guitar glossolalia with the occasional breathtaking view -- the dazzling spaces created by an open string. Much of it registers as a blur. A rapid-fire series of perfect -- perfectly strange -- punctuation. Close to the Kitchen is crackling, volatile improvisation -- an energy music of unfamiliar, not-to-be-repeated gestures."

Artist:	WORKSHOP
Title:	Es Liebt Dich Und Deine Körperlichkeit Ein Ausgeflippter
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 007CD

"Workshop's first US release in their decade-plus existence. 'You and your physicalness is loved by a dropout' is their translation of the title. On this, their fifth album, Workshop is the duo of Stephan Abry and Kai Althoff, currently divided between Hamburg and Cologne. With the current record, they have cut their cloth into shorter sections (the previous one, Meiguiweisheng Xiang, consisted of three long pieces), emphasized lyric- and songwriting, and marshaled a distinctive palette of sounds that favors nylon-string guitar, harp, synthesizer, sitar, and overlays of drum kit and drum machine. Their European label Sonig (home of Mouse on Mars and Lithops) refers to is as 'krautfolk.'"

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Cycle Des Souvenirs (1995-2000)
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 008CD

First ever release of a large scale electroacoustic piece five years in the making that revisits numerous periods from Ferrari's five decades of work. From the composer's liner notes: "I have been composing a new series of works under the general title Exploitation des Concepts. The point is to take concepts I have been experimenting with throughout my entire life as a composer, and to put them to use in every possible direction: in instrumental as well as electroacoustic music, in video, in multimedia installation, in new technologies as well as old ones.... These Exploitations go in all directions: the Tautology, superimposed cycles, the minimalism of the Presque Rien series, architectures of chance, anecdote, narrative, everyday sounds, arte povera . . . souvenirs . . . etc. -- all these concepts that have always preoccupied me but which until now I hadn't really exploited. So we find images of my childhood, my street, my subway; places I passed through and which struck me enough to record them, certain villages in Italy or the sea in Portugal; of my present, too: workplaces, my souvenirs, my house. The Cycle des Souvenirs also means that all the elements are structured in cycles which, when superimposed, produce chance encounters." -- Luc Ferrari.

Artist:	GRUBBS, DAVID
Title:	Act Five, Scene One
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 009CD

"Act Five, Scene One" is an hour-long instrumental piece that features the trio of David Grubbs, Tony Conrad, and Dan Brown. You'll find it divided into four psychedelically digestible fifteen-minute slices. Ah, the places you'll go -- it's an hour of sawing and banging and riffing and cutting and (let's not mince words) shapeshifting. What the hell. . . here are a few possible reference points: Brian Eno's Music for Films and Discreet Music; Rodney Graham's Verwandlungsmusik; Workshop's longer pieces; Sun Ra (New Stream mode); The Fall (but languorous and wordless); Bruce Witsiepe's guitar sound on the first Circle X record. Also highway driving (solitary); a pinball game; a dream about breathing underwater."

Artist:	VAN OEHLEN
Title:	Rock & Roll Is Here To Die
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 010CD

"The brothers Oehlen are stellar, oft-decorated visual artists with a long history of thorny, helpful interventions into the world of music. Albert has been a Red Krayola mainstay and provocateur since the mid-1980s, and is also responsible for the fabulous Lelterwagen label. Markus drummed in the legendary German punk band Mittagspause, and records for Leiterwagen under the name Don Hobby. They were there as punk shaded into post-punk and scraped together the Deutschmarks for an analog synth. They're still here as various reissues of DAF, Der Plan, and Palals Schaumburg hang out in 'new releases' sections and find themselves spun by electroclash DJs. And they're still making music as odd, is-that-funny?, and darkly otherworldly as the early Suicide rehearsal tapes that recently saw the light of day."

Artist:	GRUBBS/MATS GUSTAFSSON, DAVID
Title:	Off-Road
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 011CD

"Off-Road finds the two of them forsaking their earlier, glacially meditative m.o. for a shower of digitally re-composed slivers, the metal-on-metal timbre of a saxophone equipped with contact mics, Grubbs's chiming electric guitar, and Gustafsson's Pro Rhythm analog synthesizer clipped to the bell of his horn. Turntablist Henry Moore Selder makes a couple of guest appearances marked by sharp rhythmic counterpoint and low-frequency warbles and moans."

Artist:	AKCHOTÉ/ROLAND AUZET/LUC FERRARI, NOËL
Title:	Impro-Micro-Acoustique
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 012CD

"Impro-Micro-Acoustique is a meeting across generations and genre. Composer Luc Ferrari, one of the progenitors of musique concrete and a pioneer of electroacoustic music, has previously written scores for improvising musicians. (One of these, 'Tautologos 3' -- in an explosive 1970 performance by Konstantin Simonovitch's ensemble -- appears on an earlier Blue Chopsticks release.) But prior to Impro-Micro-Acoustique, Ferrari himself had never played the role of an improviser. Several years ago, Ferrari chanced to see the Parisian guitarist Noel Akchoté mistreating his instrument in his characteristic, inimitable manner. Ferrari was surprised to be reminded of musique concrete techniques -- especially by an instrumentalist, and outside of the studio. He referred to what he'd heard as 'new, real-time concrete.' Then he thought to take up improvisation. As regards sympathetic players, Akchoté was an obvious choice. Equally so was Roland Auzet, who had previously performed the demanding percussion part in Ferrari's Cellule 75. Impro-Micro-Acoustique presents Ferrari at the piano and utterly at home, utterly in-the-moment for this trio's first encounter. Improvisers generally opt for a documentary approach to recording. Stereo mics in a fixed position is par for the course. By contrast, Impro-Micro-Acoustique is a meticulously crafted assemblage of shifting sonic perspectives. It's a play of depths, in which individual attacks come abruptly and unpredictably to the fore. It's taut, edge-of-seat, aggressive interplay deployed within the wondrous frame -- and frames within frames -- of Ferrari's montage."

Artist:	AKCHOTE, NOEL
Title:	Adult Guitar
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 013CD

"Adult Guitar is a startling anthology of twenty unreleased tracks from Noël Akchoté's first twenty-one years of recording. Adult Guitar (it is twenty-one years, after all) is the first record to attempt to represent the breadth of Noël's music. The project began when Noël dumped ten hours of wonderfully heterogeneous archival recordings in the hands of David Grubbs, who served as project editor and created a number of pieces from the raw material of live recordings. The resulting collection includes a demo made at age thirteen or fourteen; an awesome four-track cassette recording of Noël slashing his way through Ornette Coleman's 'Macho Woman'; a pair of spikily discordant acoustic and electric guitar improvisations; several stellar live performances from his period of static electric guitar pieces (be sure to enjoy the punishing 'Numéro 122,' recorded full-blast at the tiny Parisian bar L'Atmosphère); and a large helping of slippery, funny, ultimately gorgeous renditions of standards by Sidney Bechet, Cole Porter, and Dizzy Gillespie. There's also an excerpt of a conversation with legendary drummer Jacques Thollot. Pourquoi pas?"

Artist:	BASTRO
Title:	Antlers: Live 1991
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 014CD

This CD was once rare and illegal, now it's common and freely available. "During the final year of their existence, Bastro was the power trio of Bundy K. Brown, John McEntire, and David Grubbs. Antlers is an attempt to represent what Bastro was doing in 1991. It represents a period in which Bastro seemed to be changing from show to show, playing intricately constructed instrumentals with utter abandon. Many of these instrumental pieces later morphed into Gastr del Sol songs. Compositions were in flux, with the band soon to follow. These are among its final recordings, but they sound less like death throes than chin scratchings and chargings onward. Antlers consists of cassette recordings made by audience members. It has a rough, blasting-at-you quality that perfectly suits these headlong performances. This enhanced CD also includes live footage of the group in Germany and Holland during their final tour."

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Far-West News (Episodes 2 and 3)
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 016CD

"Far-West News is the late Luc Ferrari's three-part aural travelogue of time that he and his wife Brunhild Meyer spent in the American Southwest in 1998. Far-West News strains familiar categories of genre; as Ferrari himself writes, 'It's not a report or a soundscape, not a Hörspiel or an electronic work, not a portrait or a recorded reality exhibit, not a transgression of reality or an Impressionist account, not a so on or so forth. It's a composition....[C]omposition in some cases, especially in mine, and increasingly in my life, is a perverted game with the truth.' There you go. File under 'perverted game.' Far-West News is constructed from field recordings, narration, and overlaid electronic music fragments. The electronic interruptions read as representations of musical accompaniment that likely existed in Luc Ferrari's brain to keep things interesting -- herky-jerky musical phrases are slathered ex post facto atop the sounds of a foundry, a Garth Brooks-ish singer-songwriter, a walk in Death Valley. These David Lynchian sonic interruptions of the everyday have a found object quality that's central to Far-West News. There's a steady macro-rhythm of cars passing along the highway, recalling the basso continuo of the train in Glenn Gould's The Idea of North. In his dual role as composer and tape editor, Luc Ferrari had a supreme knack for musicalizing the comedy of linguistic confusion. Luc and Brunhild, Far-West News's main characters, treat locals and yokels alike -- with exquisite visitor-hospitality. Lewis and Clark, meet Bouvard and Pécuchet. This could be a case study in cross-cultural sociality. Far-West News takes place during the lead-up to the Clinton impeachment -- innocent time -- and Lewinsky looms over the landscape. It's all punctuated by Luc's laugh. Far-West News, like Ferrari's classic Presque Rien No. 1, is a work of landscape. Where Presque Rien No. 1 presented a landscape wiped of speech, Far-West News revels in the locals' voices and their choice of words."

Artist:	GRUBBS/SUSAN HOWE, DAVID
Title:	Souls of the Labadie Tract
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 017CD

"Souls of the Labadie Tract is the second collaboration between musician David Grubbs and poet Susan Howe. Susan Howe's and David Grubbs' collaboration is largely without precedent. (Cage and Tudor? Robert Creeley and Steve Lacy?) Souls of the Labadie Tract takes as its starting point a substantial new poem by Howe that will appear in a collection bearing the same title, to be published in 2007 by New Directions. The Labadists were a Utopian Quietest sect that moved from the Netherlands to Cecil County, Maryland in 1684. The community dissolved in 1722. All that was to remain of it was the 'labadie poplar.' Thiefth, beginning with its title, is a glittering assemblage of shards. By contrast, Souls of the Labadie Tract sustains a sound world of buzzing reeds and electronics. After a prose introduction, individual poems occur as regularly as grave markers. Howe's reading is a marvel of hushed intensity. Grubbs' chosen instruments for this piece include two species of khaen, Laotian free-reed mouth organs that at signal moments fluoresce into a full ensemble. A distant VCS3 synthesizer slowly moves to the foreground with what becomes a full-circuited roar."

Artist:	CIRCLE X
Title:	Prehistory
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 018CD

"Some of you may remember Circle X's corrosive, caterwauling, and unutterably fabulous self-titled EP, which was originally released in 1979 and reissued a little over a decade ago by Jim O'Rourke's and David Grubbs' Dexter's Cigar label. Now the story picks up again with the long-overdue first CD release of Prehistory, Circle X's first full-length album. Prehistory was recorded in 1981 and released in 1983 by Index Records, making them, strangely enough, labelmates with Wall of Voodoo. Circle X were formed in 1978 from the remnants of No Fun and the I-Holes, Louisville, Kentucky's first two punk bands. (No Fun, also featuring Tara Key of the Babylon Dance Band and Antietam, finally appeared on the excellent Bold Beginnings: An Incomplete History of Louisville Punk compilation.) Circle X got the hell out of Dodge quickly enough, settling upon New York, then Dijon, France, and then back to New York again. The self-titled EP is a lurching, squalling monster. Prehistory is a tire-burning left turn. The pendulum arc of Tony Pinotti's vocals still contain throat-shredding howls, but expands to contain croons, moans, speech. Bruce Witsiepe's lacerating guitar is dumped into a dubbish aquarium of reverb, and Rik and Dave Letendre worry obsessive polyrhythms nearly to death. After the trash-compaction of their first EP, this is the sound of unhurried, committed exploration. So where did Circle X fit in among their peers? It's fair to describe them as a genre unto themselves. They came from punk rock and art school and sounded like none of their potential allies. They arrived in New York at the tail end of No Wave, at the same time that equally ornery bands like Swans and Sonic Youth were getting revved up. Circle X are every bit as distinctive and attitudinal as Throbbing Gristle, PiL, Theoretical Girls, DNA, or Mars, and yet they don't particularly sound like any of these groups. After Prehistory, they resurfaced with four white-vinyl 7"s, (later collected as the box set The Ivory Tower) and the 1994 Celestial, an album for the then-fledgling Matador label. Bruce Witsiepe passed away in 1995, marking the end of the group. Critic Jordan Mamone hit the nail on the head when he wrote: 'Every rare utterance from these unsentimental adventurers possesses a passion and a manifesto-writing fervor usually reserved for turn-of-the-century culture movements.'"

Artist:	FERRARI, LUC
Title:	Les Arythmiques
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 019CD

"Les Arythmiques is one of the final works created by electroacoustic composer Luc Ferrari. A starting point for the piece was the challenge to represent in sound the jolt of electricity that had been sent across his heart to treat his arrythmia. The sound that he finally crafted to his satisfaction is the crackling, vaguely terrifying one that jolts Les Arythmiques into life and reappears throughout to interrupt the proceedings at the most unlikely moments. The sound environment that the electrical shocks interrupt is that of the EKG's regular beeps, the distant tolling of a church bell, and even more distant sounds resembling birds. In other words, it's the sound of enforced rest, of a patient immobilized. This relatively small repertoire of concrete sounds is examined with a disorienting repetitiveness that brings to mind the mobile-like quality of many of Ferrari's electroacoustic works. Here that quality is combined with the lightning-quick stabs associated with Erik M and Otomo Yoshihide, two artists with whom Ferrari collaborated in his final years. Les Arythmiques ultimately moves beyond the hospital room by delving into an archive of remembered sounds. Murmurings in Italian give way to the English-language interjection 'Are y'all familiar with the parts of a saddle?' -- the composer's reflection on material gathered in the American Southwest for his Far-West News series. Ferrari's characteristic humor is here, particularly in the superimposition of diverse sound environments. But Les Arythmiques also possesses a nagging unease, a persistent gravity that both listener and composer cannot shake. Les Arythmiques was included as part of the ten-CD box set Luc Ferrari: L'Oeuvre Électronique (Ina GRM). This is the first time that it has appeared as a separate release."

Artist:	GRUBBS, DAVID
Title:	Hybrid Song Box.4
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	BLUE 020CD

"David Grubbs's 26-minute soundtrack to Angela Bulloch's Hybrid Song Box.4 picks up sonically where An Optimist Notes the Dusk left off. Grubbs brings his thick, solid-body electric guitar tone to the most relaxed of tempos, the most spacious of handlings. This instrumental soundtrack is based on a short piece for electric guitar, followed by an interstitial section created with feedback from the last note of the guitar piece. This A/B structure is repeated three times. With each iteration, the guitar composition becomes progressively more scuffed, more degraded. The interstitial section begins at its gentlest and most transparent, and the material gradually becomes stronger and more harmonically distinct over the course of its three iterations. The first composition wanes, the second waxes. Hybrid Song Box.4 is Angela Bulloch's most recent work in a series of 'Pixel Box' sculptural installations. Hybrid Song Box.4 was first shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of the exhibition Theanyspacewhatever."

Artist:	BELFI/GRUBBS/PILIA
Title:	Onrushing Cloud
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	LP
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	BLUE 021LP

"Onrushing Cloud is the first recording by the trio of Andrea Belfi (drums, percussion, electronics), David Grubbs (electric guitar, piano, voice), and Stefano Pilia (electric guitar). Prior to meeting, all three had released recordings on the excellent Swedish label Häpna, and were already fans of one another's work. In the spring of 2009, Belfi and Pilia were invited by the Harlem Studio Fellowship for a residence in New York, and the three took this opportunity to get down to the brass tacks of forming a power trio. Onrushing Cloud is characterized by the eccentric, fleeting symmetries of Grubbs's and Pilia's guitar playing simultaneously mediated, punctuated, and over- and underscored by Belfi's hybrid assemblage and deeply personal vocabulary of electronics and percussion. Although ultimately divided into five songs, this is clearly a single start-to-finish skein. 'Hermitage' records the preliminary gestures of these musicians' first encounter, and the album steadily builds towards the appearance of Grubbs's vocals on 'Onrushing Cloud,' a tale of being stranded atop a mountain and facing a rapidly approaching storm:

       City rats on a mountain pass

       In onrushing cloud

       Lightning marked a moment's suspension

       Events commanded our utmost attention"

Artist:	HOWE & DAVID GRUBBS, SUSAN
Title:	Frolic Architecture
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	BLUE 022CD

"Frolic Architecture is the third collaboration from poet Susan Howe and musician David Grubbs. It follows Souls of the Labadie Tract (2007) and Thiefth (2005), both of which appeared in the Records of the Year lists in The Wire. Writing in Artforum, Bennett Simpson described Souls of the Labadie Tract as 'a confrontation with history, community, language, and sound that is truly harrowing.' Where the previous works began with prose introductions that contextualized the poems' embeddedness in history, Frolic Architecture drops the listener into a soundworld that germinates wildly from this most multiple and heterogeneous of Howe's celebrated collage poems. Looking at one of Frolic Architecture's poems on the album's cover, it's apparent why Howe initially thought the poem to be unperformable. For long stretches, it is impossible to separate Howe's real-time performance of her fragment-strewn text from Grubbs's further deformations, scatterings, and layerings. These aberrant vocalizations are placed in a landscape in which individual pitches pulse autonomously within thick chords; gravel and cicadas duet. There is no foreground, no background. Frolic Architecture is the most radical and abstract of Grubbs's and Howe's work together."

Artist:	WINGDALE COMMUNITY SINGERS, THE
Title:	Night, Sleep, Death
Label:	BLUE CHOPSTICKS
Format:	LP
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	BLUE 023LP

"The third full-length album by songwriting juggernaut The Wingdale Community Singers. It finds the core trio of Hannah Marcus, Rick Moody, and David Grubbs augmented by a cast of effortlessly sympatico guests including Jolie Holland, Tanya Donelly, and Oneida's Kid Millions. The Wingdale Community Singers have always drawn from folk, gospel, country, and pop, with reference points ranging from the Carter Family to the Fairport Convention. Night, Sleep, Death is their most assured album, and also the one with the most viscerally pulsing through-line."

Previous Page Index of Labels Next Page