LULU'S NOVEMBER 19 NEWSLETTER
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Here is the November 2019 Newsletter, emailed at the start of the month to our mailing list and sent hard copy with all instore orders.
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Featured in this newsletter:
INOYAMA LAND - COMMISSIONS: 1977-2000 2LP [UPDATE: SOLD OUT]
LEE MOSES - HOW MUCH LONGER MUST I WAIT? SINGLES AND RARITIES 1965-1972 LP [UPDATE: SOLD OUT]
ROKY ERICKSON - GREMLINS HAVE PICTURES LP [UPDATE: SOLD OUT]
Brendon Annesley died soon after completing this 2012 issue of Negative Guest List. Available in print for the first time from Coward Punch.
NGL dug deep, and championed outsider music, both in the sense of that anti-social hostility to mass culture, or in the sense of those incoherent, unapproachable, drugfucked and alienating freaks that would not have found a champion elsewhere. NGL made connections to bands and writers attempting the same in foreign lands, and with a prolific, amphetamine pace, managed to spit out NGL on a regular enough basis that it could compete with the coverage of the online world and establish itself as a resource for what was happening in the Australian underground and our relevant international counterparts. His writing reflected his risk taking behaviour: he was impulsive and provocative and offensive and succeeded as often as he failed, and this issue contains numerous examples of both his success and failure.
The manic drive to cultivate and nourish underground or outsider music in publishing and writing that defines the legacy of Negative Guest List has waned considerably in the past 8 years. The loss of this drive and ambition in underground publishing is evident in the 20 pages here that were intended to summarise the events of 2011, including a Kitchens Floor tour report and a report on the progress of the Low Life Dogging LP. The more palpable loss here is the life of the writer, editor and publisher, our friend, a son and loved one. In many of these pages the references to self destruction may be disturbing and upsetting for people who cared for him, and suffered from losing him. This is an opportunity to celebrate his life and his talent and mourn a tragic loss of life. RIP.
INOYAMA LAND - COMMISSIONS: 1977-2000 2LP
Ambient music as environment has always been a lofty ideal of the genre and those working within it. At it's purest, ambient music can act as a space for the listener to inhabit as actively as they desire, as well as allowing the music to interact with the physical environment in which it is performed. While in the West these spaces were primarily limited to the loungerooms of the hippies and weirdos who engaged in the scene, the surprising popularity of ambient music in Japan, as well as it's booming 1980s bubble economy, meant that Japanese architects, designers, and corporations were more and more often looking towards sound artists to create soundscapes to go along with whatever project they were working on at the time.
The vast majority of Inoyama Land's new double LP Commissions is culled from this kind of work. Following the 1983 release of their Hosono-produced masterwork Danzindan-Pojidon, the duo of Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita began working with the acoustic consulting company SPD (Sound Project Design) on creating music for museums, stadiums, theater performances, and galleries. They would come, donned in their company hardhats, to these spaces while they were still being built, trying to imagine the eventual environment and it's sound over the pummeling of jackhammers and shouts of workers.
For anyone familiar with Inoyama Land's work previous to this release, this collection is a revelation. The playful, almost childlike melodies that dominated Danzindan-Pojidon are still there (and just as strong), but alongside them sit tracks of Hiroshi Yoshimura style minimalism, rolling melodies reminiscent of the very best of Roedelius, and shimmering percussion evoking a Midori Takada level of precision and restraint.
Ambient music is sometimes seen as purely functional; cold, soulless music made for inner city yoga studios and housing development PR videos. Inoyama Land's Commissions is proof that even within explicitly functional music there can be found a wealth of humanity and warmth. It is an album that lives and breathes, music that creates an environment of it's own even when divorced from the space it was explicitly created for.