The Upper Cuts Singles

You'll Stay In My Heart (Instrumental) (Remastered 2023)

Intro (Remastered 2023)

It's You

It's You (Alan Braxe Remix)

CS YEH
Transitions
IND 102 CD/LP/MP3

Having rattled the hinges with last year’s “In the Blink of an Eye” 7-inch, C S Yeh (C. Spencer Yeh) flings open the door and steps inside with Transitions, his first full-length album of songs after years of establishing himself as one of Earth’s top humans in experimental music and unbound improvisation, both alone and in collaboration, on record and onstage.

The effect Transitions has on you may or may not depend on your familiarity with Yeh’s past work; regardless, his path in music has always been about and rather than or. And the addition to his catalog of work that Transitions represents is nothing short of startling: songs that flit between sculpted guitar riffs and measured, just-shy-of-lush synth-pop; wry lyrics delivered in guileless tones; the remarkable fact that Yeh made every sound on the record. All the same, his most ardent fans will have little trouble understanding the move and recognizing this distinct voice. Its plainspoken confidence and intrepid spirit are as present as when he’s carving drones or emitting speckled and serrated noise; Transitions is simply a different form of Yeh’s unmediated expression. As you’d guess, for a career outside guy really coming inside for the first time, Transitions involved quite a bit more behind the scenes strategizing than it would for some indie band on its third album. Think of how English can sound so jarringly beautiful on the tongue of non-native speakers: Everything fits even when, maybe especially because things might seem ever so slightly off. Thus we have a new language of melodies, ones of a spirit with say, Slapp Happy, but which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Magnetic Fields record. Ultimately, the pop heart on display is characterized by the artful mind behind it — and besides, when we say pop are we talking popular, or populist? Perhaps the space we’re trying to sketch here could be found between the artists covered on Transitions: Father Yod and the Spirit of ’76, and Stevie Nicks. Perhaps citing the varied examples of Jim O’Rourke, Dave Gahan and the aforementioned Peter Blegvad in artful songcraft could be useful (whether or not they were inspirations). Perhaps we’re not talking about a space at all, but instead a particular sort of freedom in a music landscape defined by cages and enclosures. Questions, questions — what do we know, we’re only observers. All that’s really clear is that C. Spencer Yeh is transitioning into, not away from. 

photo : Peter Gannushkin / downtownmusic.net

CS Yeh : Whose Life

Messages : Humid Prolusion

PETER JEFFERIES
"The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World"
IND 123 CD/LP/MP3

Peter Jefferies’s extraordinary debut solo album, "The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World", first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs – for both the album and a striking 7-inch, “The Fate of the Human Carbine”, released around the same time – it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a handful of years it slipped out of print and out of sight. Roughly 20 years later that situation is being amended by De Stijl with a vinyl reissue that includes the songs from the attendant single and no amount of remastering whatsoever.

Though no one’s gotten around to writing a book on it yet, "The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World" nonetheless stands as one of the singular singer-songwriter albums of all time, existing on a sparsely populated plane with "Pink Moon", "I Often Dream of Trains", "Blues Run the Game", "Our Mother the Mountain" and not many others. In a sandy voice that soothes and slashes, Jefferies offers a compassionate, piercingly lucid view of the endeavor of life, all our pain and small glories rendered in tones both harrowing and tender. On piano, drums and percussion, he pounds out melodies that roar, sweep and lilt, accompanied on many songs by the serrated guitars of a variety of players. Featuring a small team of South Island heavy-hitters – all three members of the Dead C as well as David Mitchell (3Ds), Alastair Galbraith, Kathy Bull (Look Blue Go Purple, Cyclops), Nigel Taylor and Robbie Muir (who’s cobilled on the single) – Last Great Challenge provides a pivot point in Jefferies’s formidable recording career, which included two bands he shared with his brother Graeme in the ’80s, Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, and four further solo albums, as well as stints in bands here (Mecca Normal, Two Foot Flame) and there (Plagal Grind, Cyclops, and collaborations with Shayne Carter, Jono Lonie and Chris Smith).

This immediate and affecting album has been a comfort and a guide for me since it came out. Sit a spell and see if it doesn’t speak to you as well.

~ Mike Wolf, NYC, 2013

Peter Jefferies : The Fate Of The Human Carbine

THE NO-NECK BLUES BAND
"Online Catalog"
S@1/IND124162

This track, "To You Too" was recorded live at the 79th st boat basin in NYC and ultimately released on "The Birth Of Both Worlds" (S@1#4647SER 3/IND139) as a double CD on Sound@One in 1999.

The No-Neck Blues Band : To You Too

 WOLF EYES
No Answer : Lower Floors
IND 164 CD/LP/MP3

Some say Rock N Roll will never reach the same primitive raw vein hit of Bo Diddley at his more subhuman lurch, or that no unit could ever scramble the marbles left of what brain-boiling suburban electronic punk outsiders did in the mid-’70s: Whatever you think, there is no denying the homemade nuclear war Wolf Eyes has declared on music. Wolf Eyes was birthed in the shadows of late-’90s Michigan by a few like-minded individuals: Nate Young, Aaron Dilloway and John Olson. However, Wolf Eyes has grown beyond a band into a collective mutant ensemble, an art abstraction unit: musicians, print makers, photographers and more, all sharing a primal vision of decoding the wilderness of the humanoid soul using their deep audio arsenals.

Today, Wolf Eyes are pleased to announce their return with a European tour (U.S. dates to follow) and a new record, No Answer : Lower Floors. Wolf Eyes are also returning to longtime friend-base and Interzone of outsider art, De Stijl Records, with whom the band worked on No Face Lives, their collaboration with Smegma, and the loner blues cerebration unit Stare Case’s Lose Today.

The No Answer : Lower Floors material covers all bases: tough to toughest to tangled, all done in the Wolves’ least convoluted smooth-style simple-yet-tangled rhythms. The vocals, delays, primitive electronics, woodwinds and raw guitar of newest member James Baljo create a new destroyed space to crawl through. No Answer was recorded and mixed at the Michigan Underground Group’s gambling/clubhouse/art space, with the usually 2D-flat quality of the drums and electronics given creeping new brightness-life within the hollow echo acoustics of the sacred space’s cinder prisons. No Answer : Lower Floors shares a natural feel with previous Wolf Eyes efforts but goes much further in detailing their underworld of odd melodies and mangled harmonics. Within their system-based economic compositions, there remains zero room for wasted space. The whole record is less internal misery and more colorful, if of a “could be life on Mars” zone more than rainbows and daisies.

No Answer : Lower Floors features former members Aaron Dilloway and Mike Connelly, and thus is a family homecoming of sorts. More important, it’s the dawn of a new Wolf Eyes era. As the desconstructed skull mangled on the cover states: It’s RNR from a waste world of 2001244 A.D. 

Wolf Eyes : Choking Flies

PETER JEFFERIES
"The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World"
IND 123 CD/LP/MP3

Peter Jefferies’s extraordinary debut solo album, "The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World", first saw life as a cassette via the Xpressway label of Port Chalmers, New Zealand, in 1990. As a result of some international underground acclaim in fanzines and mailorder catalogs – for both the album and a striking 7-inch, “The Fate of the Human Carbine”, released around the same time – it soon appeared on LP and CD as well, through the Ajax label of Chicago. Within a handful of years it slipped out of print and out of sight. Roughly 20 years later that situation is being amended by De Stijl with a vinyl reissue that includes the songs from the attendant single and no amount of remastering whatsoever.

Though no one’s gotten around to writing a book on it yet, "The Last Great Challenge in a Dull World" nonetheless stands as one of the singular singer-songwriter albums of all time, existing on a sparsely populated plane with "Pink Moon", "I Often Dream of Trains", "Blues Run the Game", "Our Mother the Mountain" and not many others. In a sandy voice that soothes and slashes, Jefferies offers a compassionate, piercingly lucid view of the endeavor of life, all our pain and small glories rendered in tones both harrowing and tender. On piano, drums and percussion, he pounds out melodies that roar, sweep and lilt, accompanied on many songs by the serrated guitars of a variety of players. Featuring a small team of South Island heavy-hitters – all three members of the Dead C as well as David Mitchell (3Ds), Alastair Galbraith, Kathy Bull (Look Blue Go Purple, Cyclops), Nigel Taylor and Robbie Muir (who’s cobilled on the single) – Last Great Challenge provides a pivot point in Jefferies’s formidable recording career, which included two bands he shared with his brother Graeme in the ’80s, Nocturnal Projections and This Kind of Punishment, and four further solo albums, as well as stints in bands here (Mecca Normal, Two Foot Flame) and there (Plagal Grind, Cyclops, and collaborations with Shayne Carter, Jono Lonie and Chris Smith).

This immediate and affecting album has been a comfort and a guide for me since it came out. Sit a spell and see if it doesn’t speak to you as well.

~ Mike Wolf, NYC, 2013


CS Yeh : Whose Life

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