When I'm asked to emergency sub I like to play long songs cause I don't have much time to prep. Not that I don't play long songs on Middle School Friends, but artists like Beru make me not feel at all guilty for throwing their music on for 15 or so minutes. This tape, according to its track listing, has only two songs, one per side, but that is decptive. The A-side, "What would I do without you" is actually and exploration of tons of instrumentations, structured and unstructured songs, hooks and pure noise, some intentional others seem to be improvised. Jessica Collins, Beru, mixes her acoustic guitar songs, simple and haunting, with layered male female choruses, with pounds of reverb and delay, plus spontaneus noise spurts and changes into new themes. Overall its a dark, bittersweet, and at times frightening. Jessica voice is fragile and demure, and with the lo-fi recording style you can imagine her recording in the middle of a forest, maybe being taunted by a black metal band also sharing the same grassy knoll. If none of this has helped, think Grouper, Blessed Oblivion, Inca Ore, and Vashti styles all used perfectly, spread out amongst an epic 20 minute marathon.
Ros Bobos's third self-released cd "Mandatory Astral Projections" is my favorite cd in the new music section at KDVS. Field recordings, indigenious drumming and throat singing, samples from satanic sermons and absurdity. Not as touching as Beru, but undeniably evil at times, frightening and surpirsingly groovable. Go to this web site http://www.rosbobos.com/home.html and find out for yourself, I don't think I can do it much justice. Some say its like Negativland, and it is, but samples from a completely different pool of recordings so the sound is totally different even though the process is the same.
mike
