The world has a way of tethering us down with its turmoil but there are keys to float free. It sometimes takes an equal and opposite reaction to snuff out the madness. Whether your destination is far out or deep within, you need a spark to set these moves in motion. Thankfully, Gravité are here to help. Their heavy vision sounds light the path and give weight to release.
"'Window Paine' is an honorable entry in the analog continuum due to Riley and Diko's knack for a dreamy melody. Classic synth tones float and interlock, the short track falling somewhere between Musik Von Harmonia and Chris & Cosey's most romantic, blissed-out material."
"As much as we love the ambient direction many synth-driven artists have embraced lately — we’re still a sucker for songs that sound like a turbo-charged trip around the sun.
Matthew Riley and Aaron Diko pursue that path on their first proper Gravité LP, a self-titled space race led by the analog lines of nine different synths."
These eight tracks – performed on a collection of classic and reissued analog equipment: Juno 60, Prodigy, Mono/Poly, Minimoog, SH-01A, MS20, Minilogue, Volcakeys, TR-08 – are an introduction to a new creative collaboration.
"Floating like the fog that sits above the San Francisco sky that they live in, Gravité’s synth melodies are blissful and free. The pair jam on well-weathered machines for a warm and psychedelic sound that effortlessly floats from one song to the next. Gentle percussion helps provide some structure to these ambient and psychedelic synth jams that would feel right at home in a sci-fi TV show or late at night watching the waves gently roll up on the beach somewhere warm."
This is portal music for mortal metamorphosis, shaped and reshaped via endless improvisation and perhaps some psychedelics. So when the whirlwind world gets you blitzed out, it’s time to bliss out. Gravité will set you soaring.
Recorded by Matthew Riley, mixed and mastered by Mikey Young and featuring album art by Billy Werch
No Longer is a suite of six absorbing, patient reveries on conflicted concupiscence and encroaching darkness by Berkeley songwriter Frank Ene, who composed the material in a period of solitude following the demise of his noise-pop group Pure Bliss. Ene abstained from socializing to write the songs, venturing outside mostly to work in the basement of a frame-shop or observe students on the nearby UC Berkeley campus, vintage self-help paperbacks stuffed in his pockets. When it came time to record, he opted to play nearly every instrument himself. “Some songs are affirmations,” he said. “The saddest ones I can’t remember writing, as if someone entered my mind and body in a really brutal way.”
“A minor-keyed blend of pure melancholy, it’s more like a much-needed pain reliever — driving towards the darkness alongside a steady drum beat, lean piano lines, the clanging guitar chords of longtime friend and bandmate Wymond Miles, and Ene’s own morphine drip melodies.”
“Set to the sounds of Ene’s sparse baritone and a dark-country guitar line that could only come from The Fresh & Onlys’ Wymond Miles, the clip sees Frank—at times barely visible—ambling around the remains of an abandoned train station, serving as a visual metaphor of sorts for the theme of mental vagrancy key to No Longer’s aesthetic.”
Suffused with an atmosphere of slow-simmering tension, No Longer traffics in understated grooves reminiscent of latter-era Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, with Ene’s rich voice somehow sounding at once wispy and full-bodied. “Flesh in the Womb,” one of the songs to feature songwriter and Fresh & Onlys guitarist Wymond Miles, channels the lasciviousness of Serge Gainsbourg as well as the beguiling sparseness of Dean Blunt. The lyrics to “Housing Alcove,” a crushing meditation on childhood trauma, reveal competing, interconnected feelings of vulnerability and ambition (a duality captured by the evocative album art). A dynamic, repeat listen, No Longer stands among the most musically arresting and emotionally contoured Bay Area solo debuts in recent memory.
– Sam Lefebvre
Track Listing:
1. No Longer
2. I’ve Studied You
3. Drown
4. Flesh In A Womb
5. Housing Alcove
6. Ides Underneath
Recorded at El Studio by Phil Manley (Life Coach / Trans Am), mixed and mastered by Mikey Young (Total Control) and released by Empty Cellar Records – home to Coopers’ old band The Sandwitches – the album will be accompanied by a 32-page book of Coopers’ illustrations and lyrics.
“A beautiful and timeless piano ballad from her stellar new LP as Grace Sings Sludge — stunningly austere and intimate”
There has always been a dreamy American gothic sensibility to Coopers’ sound, and on Christ Mocked she continues to lean into this mood and presents us with a collection of deeply felt ballads and stories that have as much in common with Shirley Jackson as they do Karen Dalton or anything we’ve heard from her before.
“Though Cooper says she’s in her “comfort zone with buzzy, shitty sounding stuff,” this album brings out the peculiar beauty of her voice in ways previous DIY affairs didn’t quite capture; threaded with sparse guitar, meandering basslines, or dissonant piano, Christ Mocked is a bit reminiscent of early Cat Power, if Chan Marshall had somehow been more awkward (and obsessed with horror movies, religious iconography, and sketches of nude women).”
Taking the album to the studio has added some polish to Grace Sings Sludge but as these songs and stories intertwine, it’s clear that Cooper is evolving her sound forward in strange and unexpected ways – even putting her own spin on audio drama with The Hackers and Borderlands. This is very much the sound of an artist experimenting and pushing expectations. Beneath the surface of these songs is a lovely mystery; a whelm in the gloom; a hope and a resilience that glow and thrive in the bottomless sea.
“Cooper’s hushed avant-Americana. The song sways with delicate instrumentation and her powerful voice, weaving around the track and soaring without warning. Cooper’s voice is spectacular and full of character, breaking and retreating in ways that push the composition and shift expressions. ”
Grace Cooper plays all instruments on Christ Mocked, except drums and piano on “Horror for People That Don’t Like Horror” played by Nic Russo/Dick Stusso.
– Glenn McQuaid (Tales From Beyond the Pale)
Track Listing:
1. Christ fucking mocked
2. He is in our hearts
3. Born again wagon
4. The pledge
5. The Hackers
6. Falling in love with him was the most exciting time in my life
7. Friend to All
8. Walnut Creek Death Trip
9. In your arms forever
10. Horror for people that don’t like horror
11. Borderlands
12. It Can Wait.
Empty Cellar Records and the Earth Girl Helen Brown Center for Planetary Intelligence Band (E.G.H.B.C.P.F.I.B.) are pleased to announce the fifth installment of the E.G.H.B.C.P.F.I.B. seasonal planetary series, URANUS. Featuring Heidi Alexander, Jamin Barton, Eric Bauer, Emilee Booher, Brad Caulkins, Bart Davenport, James Finch Jr., Graeme Gibson, Tahlia Harbour, Doug Hilsinger, Warren Huegel, Josh Puklavetz, Sean Smith, Ryan Weinstein and mastered by Mikey Young.
In these times of many changes, URANUS considers the strain and repose of power which balances all things.
The common English language word, power, refers to four quantitative properties of physics: energy, work, force, and power. In common use it is synonymous with strength, energy, electricity, vigor, and domination. A boundary between time (t) and energy (E) it is also the product of their division (P) and the great scale by which their separation is measured. How shall we manifest these interactions in our social and physical spheres from the atomic scale to the cosmogonic?
F=ma, W=Fs, E=mc2, P=E/t so E=tP and t=E/P.
Available from Empty Cellar Records on 100% post-consumer recycled cassette tape and worldwide on all streaming and digital platforms. All proceeds benefit organizations committed to the preservation of balance in power.
Peace,
Empty Cellar Records/E.G.H.B.C.F.P.I.B.
Track Listing:
1. Wings Of A Dove
2. Superpower
3. Ouranos
4. Take It
5. Conversation Redux
6. Rearrange
All songs written and performed by THE EARTH GIRL HELEN BROWN CENTER FOR PLANETARY INTELLIGENCE BAND (E.G.H.B.C.F.P.I.B.) // EXCEPT “Wings of a Dove” written by Bob Marley & the Wailers AND “Rearrange” written by the Gladiators. Recorded in San Francisco and Los Angeles, Spring 2019
The Leader of Bay Area rockers Cool Ghouls more than likely has a framed photograph of Todd Rundgren on his work desk. …on further inspection the influence of other celebrated popsters becomes apparent. The goofball track “Are You Ok” pulls at the playfulness of Harry Nilson, while the show stopping closing track “Give the Land to the People” would not only be the perfect soundtrack to a 1960s sequence of street skirmishes between police and radicals, but also boasts the elevating properties of Jimmy Webb’s arrangements for The Fifth Dimension.
– The WIRE (Avant Rock by Tony Rettman)
Pat Thomas has been known as a driving singing/writing/bass-playing force behind San Francisco band Cool Ghouls for years and, over those years, in tandem with the band’s group effort, has cultivated an interesting voice as a solo act. “Solo” isn’t really the correct word though because the tracks on I Ain’t Buyin’ It showcase recordings complete with fully fleshed out arrangements, not unlike other ambitious California classics like The Beach Boys or Love. These comparisons seem lazy, given the obvious associations of the west coast with this sort of sonic imagery, which bands from San Francisco or LA – but SF especially – are seldom able to shake off. But at the entry point of this record, you welcome it as you would a lover of this style.
I Ain’t Buyin’ It sounds as if it’s dropped straight in from the late ’60s, not just with the psych/jug sound that recalls classic West Coast rock bands like Jefferson and Country Joe on “Are You Okay”, “New Star Ell” and “The Money Guys”, but also the straightforward anti-capitalist political sentiments of the lyrics. Thomas, also the frontman of Cool Ghouls, slides effortlessly into Southern soul on tracks like the gorgeous “Alternator” and “Egypt”, and it’s his perfect sense of pop melody that really holds it together. This is the sort of album you’ll buy on a whim and then keep coming back to.
– Peter Watts for UNCUT
As this album’s initial feeling moves forward, you get better acquainted with Thomas’s idiosyncratic song-writing and production style, which are playful and groovy and light-hearted. But these songs also convey a deeper inner dialogue which reflects the inherent paradox of life in a city such as San Francisco, or many other American cities. The feeling of general displacement and falling victim to commerce is real. A feeling that includes everything from the seduction of empty suburban idealism, to the city being robbed of its creative force by pointless commerce, to the entire USA being literally robbed from Native Americans. It’s hard to maintain a positive outlook when one reflects on the depth of this situation, but Thomas has succeeded in presenting a way to embrace these circumstances: through this music. From The Beach Boys Friends-era wellness sing-along style on “Are You Okay”, to the almost Curtis Mayfield-style mantra of “Give The Land To The People”, you see that our situation somehow calls for celebration, a spirit that music has forever represented.
Fueled not just by the divisiveness of housing in his native San Francisco, but by the larger implications of space both borrowed and stolen, “Give The Land To The People” is a psyched-out 7 minute opus that reaches emphatic peaks. As a delirious, kraut-y rhythm is propelled by a swirling suite of percussion, horns and guitars, Thomas’ vocal refrains are sturdy and resolute. “The infrastructure of communities should be owned by the residents and workers who utilize it everyday,” said Thomas. “Not by some money guys who really have nothing to do with the daily happenings of these places.”
Music has always been a way to raise one’s spirit to a higher place, despite life’s hardships. Music is material proof that all is not lost! In fact the opposite. And the emotion expressed in music proves that hardship is real, regardless of who you are or where you live. There is always something which cannot be lost and, with music like this, you can conjure a spirit that suggests a world of better possiblities. I Ain’t Buyin’ It is sung mainly by Thomas in his characteristic projectile voice, a thing of confidence and delivery, except the song “Reflection Chamber” which features C. Claire Doyle on lead vocals – a welcome beautiful melodic respite à la Judy Dyble circa Giles, Giles & Fripp. It culminates with a big group vocal by Thomas and other ghouls. For someone who has seen the amazing growth of the Cool Ghouls, you will similarly be impressed by this new piece by Pat Thomas.
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