LULU'S NOVEMBER 2022 NEWSLETTER

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Featured in this newsletter

ALEX MACFARLANE - "THE THOUSAND NOTE CHORD" CS
LOU REED "WORDS & MUSIC, MAY 1965" LP
POLUTE – “POLUTE” 7”
DEMOLITION - “UNDER BLACKENED MOUNTAINS” CS
V/A - “GHOST RIDERS” 2xLP
MORGANA – “CONTEMPORANEITA” LP
SHADOWPLAY - "ANOTHER AUTUMN DAY" CS
& A RUNDOWN OF THE RAMBLE RECORDS CATALOGUE

Hey babes,

Here we are again. I know I said this two months ago but spring is feeling like it has finally  come this week, after really fucking it up for a while there.

And with that (finally) comes flung open windows, crop tops, a beer in the sun, and records played louddddd for the whole neighbourhood to hear.

We look forward to facilitating at least two of those spring joys in the coming month. And it’s a stacked month!! Be sure to suss the calendar for the whole lot of dumb and fun ways to spend your time and money. (I’m sure some of them are smart too)

Until next month (December??? wtf?), stay cool, stay safe, and look after each other.

With love always,
Lulu’s

NEW ARRIVALS

ALEX MACFARLANE - "THE THOUSAND NOTE CHORD" CS
Hobbies Galore

Progressive to the point of surreal. One of my earliest thoughts about this tape is that it feels like the day-to-day musings of a Medieval scribe-knight having returned from strange and distant lands to tend secretly and sacrilegiously to a private garden of rare plants. It’s beautiful and thoughtful and a little bit dangerous in its own humble way. The Thousand Note Chord is sweeping and ambitious; there’s something large in scope about it with the layers upon layers of sound that branch out in many directions, but beneath those chord canopies down at it’s root lies something simple. Not dissimilar to the way that a fractal is a tiny and modest thing expanded out exponentially into something vast and sophisticated. In fact, that is almost certainly what’s going on here in Macfarlane’s Medieval garden; a seed soothed and nurtured into sprawling life by the thousand note chord.

LOU REED "WORDS & MUSIC, MAY 1965" LP
Light In The Attic

With an artist like Lou, one that encourages a cult like obsession from fans, it can feel like that throughout the years and years of excavated demos, clandestinely traded bootlegs, and rock'n'roll campfire stories there's not any surprises left to be found.

"Words & Music", the inaugural entry in Light In The Attic's Lou Reed Archive series, quickly and efficiently does away with those assumptions. These recordings, made alongside then-new friend and future Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale in May of 1965, are completely unlike any Lou we've heard before now.

Often sounding like a ratty Woody Guthrie (accompanied by Cale on guitar, harmonica and vocal harmonies), the takes are almost completely lacking the slouch and swagger would later come to define Reed's sound. Instead we have a bedroom folk record; complete with themes of longing, betrayal, God, and heartbreak. The then 23-year old runs through 10 songs (three of which would later become Velvets tracks, the rest unheard until now), originally recorded and mailed to himself as a form of cheap copyright claim.

The results offer not only a fascinating piece of the puzzle for Velvets obsessives, but an incredibly charming collection of scrappy folk songs in and of themself. For those looking though, the clues are there to be excavated. Lou and Cale's version of I'm Waiting For The Man, in this form a loose country crooner completely unlike the album take, is actually quite reminiscent of a version of the song The Velvet Underground would eventually come to play live (though my guy straight up yodels in this one, which did not make its way to the eventual live throwback version).

The previously unreleased 8 minute "Wrap You Troubles In Dreams" offers what is maybe the clearest through-line between this work and what Reed and Cale would later do in The Velvet Underground. A sparsely arranged dirge, and the only track featuring John Cale on vocals, it is a haunting creep of a song that slowly burrows its way into your brain and sticks with you long after it ends.

An absolutely fascinating document. If “Words & Music” is any indication of the revelatory calibre of future Lou Reed Archive entries, we all have a lot to be excited about.

POLUTE – “POLUTE” 7”
Legless Records

Well this one does the trick. Total Motorpunk with blood curdled ravings blasting their way all over the top of the rockophany. Reminiscent of POWER and DARKTHRONE during their punk phase. Whether intentionally or not this sounds mighty Satanic (and loose  – written/recorded in a few hours) and that’s the way we like it, baby!! In fact it’s so loose they didn’t even spell their band name right. Total respect.

DEMOLITION - “UNDER BLACKENED MOUNTAINS” CS
Disinfect Records

The ability of UBM bands to tap into something fearful, criminal, chaotic is basically unmatched in these lands. Members of Taipan, Oily Boys, Rapid Dye playing tune-down-and-turn hardcore should give you a pretty good idea of how this one rages – then throw into that mix more COLD SWEAT-ing mania MIND ERASER-ing sludge. Somebody throwing a full pint of beer at two louts in ripped MORTICIAN and BLASPHEMY shirts at their rehearsals gigs is a near certainty. And if none of that means anything to you; the immutable song title NIKESHOX TERROR should be enough for you to throw your body, money and respect to this outfit of outlaws. Hail DISINFECT/UBM/DEMOLITION. Sydney filth rises again.

V/A - “GHOST RIDERS” 2xLP
Efficient Space

The 2016 compilation double LP "Sky Girl", whilst not technically being the first Efficient Space release, feels in retrospect like the genesis and mission statement of the now beloved Melbourne label.

With Sky Girl, incredibly deep French diggers Julian Dechery and DJ Sundae built an entire world out of long forgotten private press and self-released detritus. Stylistically the album cruised between flitty new wave, busted crooners, minimal bedroom synthpop, haunting folk, and everywhere between. Through all of this, the album's greatest strength was it's narrative - it felt like a road trip through a whole parallel universe of forgotten music. Each piece linked to the last through a shared drive to create and build and express, despite often being made decades and continents apart.

Post the release of Sky Girl, Efficient Space has built upon that drive to excavate overlooked music, both contemporary and from decades prior. Their compilations since (Midnite Spares, Oz Waves, 3AM Spares, and Oz Echoes; all essential in their own ways) have focused specifically on movements within Australian underground music from the '80s to the early '00s.

Ghost Riders, compiled and arranged by Ivan Liechti, is their first comp without an antipodean focus since Sky Girl, and in many ways it feels like a spiritual follow-up to that first record.

Less of a straight sequel, Ghost Riders feels instead like a timeline in which we take the "American outsider garage" off-ramp on the Sky Girl road trip and see where it leads. And what a beautiful, worthwhile detour it is.

Don't be fooled by the "garage" - Nuggets this is not. Instead of pent-up teenage energy and angst, Ghost Riders gives us pent-up teenage ~emotion~. These guys and gals are absolutely pining; for what/where/when/whom, you'll have to ask them. Teenagers gazing longingly at the Haight-Ashbury from their flyover, backwater garages and desperately trying to channel that back home.

The result is an incredible capsule of not only time and place, but even more so, if you'll forgive me, vibe. Much like Sky Girl, the artists and songs in Ghost Riders are linked in the ways they hold themselves. The ways they take everything from their contemporary pop culture zeitgeist and refract it through their unique, ineffable points of view.

Much like Sky Girl, Ghost Riders feels like a missive from another slightly different dimension. Coop and Diane in Odessa.

Essential.

MORGANA – “CONTEMPORANEITA” LP
Low Ambition Records

Contemporary Italian group MORGANA are swimming strong in a sea of coldwave/postpunk/peacepunk and their album ‘CONTEMPORANEITA’ lands flush if that’s a mood you find yourself drawn towards. They do a jam up job at conveying the melancholic feelings that come with trying to live well in a world that pushes real hard against that - turning exasperation into an exclamation of the finer threads that join us together. The highly melodic guitar sings all the melodies while Bri’s vocals (sung in Italian, French and Spanish) are matter of fact declarations. As proof of their gift in this realm I will tell to you truly that I surmised this message while listening to the album without having read their lyrics. Upon reading the English translation it seems that I was dead on and this is exactly what the band is all about. If music is a language, sounds that communicate feelings and ideas, then MORGANA are fluent and worth lending your ear. Especially in a time where most of us could use solidarity beneath the weight of the world.

SHADOWPLAY - "ANOTHER AUTUMN DAY" CS
Low Ambition Records

Obscure post-punk gem. Sole composer Michael Scholz (Taste Of Decay) went down the tried and true "never-intened-for-airplay" route with only 100 cassettes originally made in 1988; but such is our luck that Low Ambition Records have made this handsome treasure available again for modern ears to indluge. Shadowplay is an excellent distillation of the genre – bleary and to the bloody point - like somebody found a reel of Bauhaus offcuts and lovingly sculpted them into fully fleshed out compositions. Some of the tracks here are as good as it gets, slipping their hooks in with ease and commanding your attention, letting you know that it needs to be played over and over and absorbed into your body and mind to precipitate itself for the rest of your rainy days. Strongly recommended for those who have an interest in the classics of moody post-punk.

RAMBLE RECORDS LPs

Ramble Records appears to be an obsessive fascination for label owner Mike Sill. Every release feels like it’s been dug out from a time capsule labelled “BEWARE: MUSICAL OBSCURITIES”. Ramble Records scratches the hard to reach places of your musical back. We’ll run through some word association / micromusicjournalism:

The Man From Atlantis – lonely folk / grass smokin’ cowboy with a face longer than his horse’s

Adam Geoffrey Cole – gothy trad Irish / hypnosis

Naujawanan Baidar – Farsi for Enlightened Youth / doomed out desert / Middle East psych raga very very good

Ross Hammond – raw fingers 12 string pluckin’ / Chattanooga at sunset (but I’ve never been)

Mohammad Mostafa Heydarian – reflective tanbur pieces for the homeland mountainsides / improvised love

James Rigby – gorgeous acoustic fingerpicked daydreaming / nestled in the worldmother’s warm bosom

Henry Kaiser and Michael Rothenberg – beat poetry and a beat guitar / inner monologue when trying to sleep

Staraya Derevnya – utterly insane sasquatch music/no seriously

00_ - shoegazing art-moreso-than-rock / red wine at midnight mass

Santa Sprees – outsider devolution somehowpunk / would have a cult following if it was from the 80’s

C. Ross – Neil Young with a beard/whisky for Christmas

Trigona – Neu!Division/let the guitar gently speak

Dark Leaves – Minor moods/dark leaves fall under shadowed forest trees and you’re laying, laying, laying, immersed