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LP
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STRLP 030LP
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Maroma was there long before the Moors. The Moors were there long before man landed on the moon half a century ago. Drum machines meant you didn't have to take Ginger Baker out for a drink. Life takes on sublime logic. In retrospect, everything takes on a new meaning from a different perspective. The past is the future. From Glasgow to Edinburgh to Andalucia. This music is about a small journey, an aural triptych of sounds.
"The Glasgow period was most definitively 1982-1987 and the Edinburgh period didn't really start again until around 2010. Two decades without creating music is a long time and it had been gnawing at me all along the yellow brick road I'd been travelling. With a new vigor and echoes of teenage angst I began again. I decided to call myself 'Reluctant Participant'. It was very apt. It was a love/hate relationship that reached deep into the soul. Delving down into dormant memories of places visited and the atmospheres created by them. Like the ice white shroud that lay over winter in Krakow's Jewish Quarter, Kazimierz. Photographs didn't do it justice. It needed a piano. The Edinburgh period on this LP is represented by the four piano pieces 'Embers', 'Kazimierz', 'Star Chamber' and 'Ritual', all recorded there between 2014-2016. They're part of a sequence of around fifty compositions from the same period some of which featured on the previous Vazz LP on STROOM and on the accompanying twenty track CD on Forced Nostalgia. It was a three-year purge recording this piano music. Emotionally intense and technically challenging. I'm glad it's over. It was the culmination of another chapter of music that remains frozen in time and place. It was time to move on again to pastures new. Constricted by the boundaries of a small island and the madness of Brexit I felt an urge to leave it all behind in 2017 in search of the exotic. The same urge that took fellow Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson to look for his treasure island. He died in Samoa in 1894. I didn't feel the urge to go that far and Stevenson is quoted as saying 'wine is bottled poetry'. Yes, I agree, and the wine is cheap and very fine in Spain. Cheap poetry was what I needed. Bukowski told me to do it." Hugh Small, May 2019
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LP+CD
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STRLP 008LP
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Post-punk pop meets ethereal wave. Vazz are one of Scotland's best kept secrets. Includes a bonus CD of piano works. Features a mix by Macula Lutea.
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