Little Earl was one of the first tracks I brought to The Sea Drift rehearsal sessions, and as it turns out the one that helped create the sound and feel of the entire record. It’s a soul/Tony Joe White inspired groove, and Cory Gray’s horn and string arrangements set the cinematic tone for two brothers who get into a shoplifting-gone-wrong incident at a mini-mart outside of Port Arthur, Texas. I love songs that just drop you in the middle of a scene and that’s what we tried to do here.

The Sea Drift

Little Earl

The Delines - Little Earl

The Long Winters - In The Light

22 Sparkling Smiles - Sea Of Heartbreak

The Builders and The Butchers - Black Dresses

Remote Tree Children - Wanton Song

Calamity Jane - Miss Hell

Viva Voce - Devotion

Slow Moses comes from Phoenix, Arizona. Charity Binge is a record made in an experimental rehearsal/recording space called the Dressing Room (or Droom) that sits across the street from a municipal mental ward in Downtown Phoenix.

When there’s some sun-stroked, meth-addled guy screaming at the pavement near the patio of a restaurant, who gets called? Insanity isn’t a crime, at least not formally... but still, the police come hush the lunatic, shepherd him into Crown Vic and take him away. They drop him off at the ward. He gets screened. No budget for fixing all the broken people in Arizona. Let him loose. He’s got no clue where he is. No money. No ride. He hears amps pushing sound out an open door around midnight. He walks toward it and sticks his head through the threshold to find five guys drinking, smoking and playing music. They all notice him looming, but they don’t stop playing. When he makes a move to enter, they still don't stop playing. When he finds a seat... even still, they don’t stop. He’s got shelter for a second. He’s allowed to be there. It was a romantic idea, an open-door policy. It went awry.

Slow Moses - Teenage Sun (part 2)

The second album by former Heatmiser co-leader Neil Gust.  Expanded and remastered this edition includes 2 unreleased bonus cuts; "WXYZ" is from the original album sessions and "Who's Behind The Door?" was recorded with Elliott Smith at his studio in LA with John Moen (Decemberists, Eyelids) on drums.

What Does Good Luck Bring? - RSD 2017

No. 2 - Who's Behind The Door?

No. 2 - Is It True?

No. 2 - Stranger's March

No. 2 - A Little Confusion

Since its inception, the music of Portland, Oregon’s 1939 Ensemble has always explored the relationship between rhythm and melody.

On the quartet’s new EP Beats & Saints, that connection — between pulse and phrase — is turned inside out. The record finds vibraphonist José Medeles, percussionist David Coniglio, trumpeter Josh Thomas, and guitarist Knate Carter in a loose, playful mode, interpreting songs by Charles Mingus, Björk, the Breeders, and Stereolab, alongside two new 1939 originals.

Melodic, surprising, and rhythmically dense, Beats & Saints finds the band teaming with experimental music legend Ralph Carney, known for his work with Tom Waits, Bill Laswell, Jonathan Richman, and Martin, Medeski, and Wood, and any more, along with Josh Klinghoffer (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tinariwen). Demonstrating the band’s inside humor, a Korg Rhythm 55 drum machine also receives a “guest” credit. Hunkering down in the 1939’s own B-Sides Studios, the band and guests indulges in the time-honored tradition of musicians simply blowing off steam, seeing what happens when combustible elements are combined.

“We tried to have fun with it — that was the most important thing,” Medeles says. “There was a sense of ‘How far do we take this thing?’”

The answer ends up being “pretty far out.” Opener “Bullseye” strings together noir cinematics, G-funk grooves, and thick ambience. Next, 1939 takes on Björk’s “Pluto” nudging the song forward by with a heavy synth bass under Thomas’ electronically treated trumpet. On Mingus’ “II B.S.” — “You gotta be crazy to play a Mingus’ song without a bass,” Medeles laughs — the combo translates the song’s familiar melody to vibes, Carney’s sax adding a bawdy heft. The original “Illinois Lead Shot” and Stereolab’s “Percolator” prove exhilarating workouts of the band’s cool jazz/lounge sensibilities, and the band’s take on “Off You,” Kim Deal’s classic from 2002’s Title TK — Medeles played drums on the original — feels like an audible swoon, Klinghoffer and Carter locking in together with liquid guitars over shimmering surf motifs. “Our tip of the spear is making music we really enjoy,” Medeles says. “We hope that translates to people out there. I think this record’s a cool snapshot into 1939’s world.

The record is an example of open collaboration. “It was such a great energy,” Medeles says of the band’s collaborations with outside musicians. “It was really about friendship and energy as much as anything.” Since 2013’s Howl & Bite, recorded by Coniglio and Medeles as a duo in 2010, 1939 Ensemble has expanded its parameters with each release, adding members like Thomas and Carter as time’s gone on. Beats & Saints finds that expansion playing out stylistically, tying together and ultimately transmuting disparate threads of groove, noise, and rhythm. It’s a casual assemblage, “a nice collage of songs,” Medeles says, but a picture of a band “recording music in their own space — in their own terms.” The resulting recording is a demonstration of that sonic vocabulary used to stun and wow — the musical equivalent of a friend laying some knowledge on you just because they know you’ll like it.

Beats & Saints

1939 Ensemble - Percolator (Stereolab)

1939 Ensemble - II B.S. (Charles Mingus)

1939 Ensemble - Pluto (Björk)

Electric Guitar is the Boxhead Ensemble boiled down to it’s core. Electric Guitar is the manifestation of simple ideas captured in the early morning hours - first idea, best idea. Electric Guitar is an exploration of timbre. Fender style guitars and an old Gibson amp where used to record Electric Guitar. If I kept and aural sketchbook it would sound like Electric Guitar. Electric Guitar is an homage to the seven pivotal years I spent in Chicago from 1994-2001. Electric Guitar is presented on vinyl in a limited edition of 33 copies. Electric Guitar is Electric Guitar.

Electric Guitar

Boxhead Ensemble - Homage To The Tren Brothers (For Mick And Jim)

Downtown Phoenix can be a strange and dark place. The heat, sucked in and stored by the asphalt, emanates upward from the streets, mostly empty save the few dazed and bruised strangers who wander them. Even in the middle of the night, long after the sun has set to the distant west, the heat remains. Downtown Phoenix is the site of the Dressing Room, the DIY performance space/studio where Slow Moses, an eclectic collective of four or five (give or take) musicians led by Wally Boudway and Ross Andrews, recorded their Jealous Butcher Records debut Charity Binge. Now decommissioned, it was a permeable space, with frequent comers and goers, folks wandering in from the nearby mental ward to listen to the strange sounds bouncing out onto Roosevelt St.

“It was an open door policy,” Boudway explains. Things quickly went south. Gear got busted and stolen, people got confused, and the experiment in maximal egalitarianism was subject to gritty, even deranged, factors. Things broke down — “demolition in motion,” Boudway says — and Charity Binge manages to reflect some of that process, gloriously beat up and curiously joyful at its state.

The hot, woozy quality of the record is rooted in those Sonoran surroundings — “All the billboards keep one eye, on the teenage sun in the Phoenix sky,” the lyrics of the two-part epic “Teenage Sun” goes — but Slow Moses’ sound is borderless by nature, incorporating the sounds of African highlife (see the polyrhythmic and impressionistic “Oh Bembaya,” an ode to the late Demba Camara, leader of Bembeya Jazz National), creeping psychedelia (hear “Fever Dream,” its slide guitars swaying like thin reeds in the monsoon breeze) and dismantled rock & roll swagger (try “Run, Run Away”). There are moments of delirious pop, like “Amen,” with its pulsing, motorik drums and the strutting “Of Another,” but the songs sound elastic, capable of withstanding vigorous tugging at both edges, stretched out like silly putty.

“Songs want to speed up and slow down,” Boudway says. “Songs want to have a temporality to them.”

Like Califone, which counts Boudway and guitarist Ross Andrews among its amorphous roster, Charity Binge is the result of thorough deconstruction and assemblage: guitars and vocals smooshed and pulled, rhythm sections twisted, manipulated, looped, the makeshift recording studio serving as an instrument, the raw recordings subject to transformative demands by Boudway and Andrews, who fixate on and accentuate each stray note or slippery guitar line, always looking to build the foundations of the record’s songs on distinctly organic and human moments.

“Often, we’re playing with song ideas and recording before we know where they’re going,” Boudway says.

Utilizing surprise tactics, like recording performers unaware they’re being recorded, Boudway listens for elements which have an “offness” to them, a shaky humanity to the grooves that will be built into songs. It’s not the easiest approach, but it yields results far removed from the antiseptic sheen of most modern indie rock. And so Charity Binge becomes something of a mirror to those sweaty Dressing Room nights: filled with transient characters, blurry images, and constant, fitful creativity.

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