Spain’s Pharaway Sounds is back with some more top shelf Irian jams. This time they are releasing a well-deserved compilation of Shahram Shabpareh best tracks. Shabpareh is the real thing. His music is chocked full of colorful arrangements of blurting horns, evil bass grooves, cheesy organs & thick strata of overlapping percussion instruments going off like microwave popcorn.
As the leader of an Iranian 60s garage band, the Rebels, and later a 70s solo singer, Shabpareh was never happy just tossing a few moves from Abba in front of whatever was on the local charts already. He wrote & recorded hard rock & funky piano riffs that were built bulldozer tough & would’ve stuck out in an American trailer park or a London pub just as easily as they did in Tehran. Not that he wasn’t afraid to put someone else’s idea to good use, as he certainly makes superb use of the Kinks’ chords from ‘You Really Got Me’. It’s more that Shahram’s rock cojones have caused him to make blistering music again & again over the years, with little regard for where it comes from.
Turkish Bar or Bengi folk dancing requires approximately 100 people to do properly, and it helps if a lot of them are eating wedding cake. You put your arms around the shoulders of the people on either side of you, and then stomp around in a circle, facing in and kicking the air, until everybody is exhausted and happy. Far away from any folklore festivals, Derdiyoklar hand-built the soundtrack to this dancing as it was drunkenly executed by luckless German-Turkish immigrants in the fashion-insensitive 80s. And though the band had only two members, they decided electric saz, synthesized drums, cimbalom, and sheep sound effects were all needed to get the job done. Who could argue? Derdiyoklar Iklisi’s Coban Mamosis a tinkly and psychoactive album, full of uniquely odd overdubs and buzzy, flanged-out guitar solos. This first ever reissue from Pharaway Sounds is taken from the original mastertapes and is pressed on 180 gram vinyl. The albums also includes an insert with in-depth liner notes.
The Brooklyn based label Personal Injury Records has just reissued two albums from lo-fi legend R. Stevie Moore. The prolific singer, songwriter, and musician has self-released over 400 albums since 1968, mostly through the R. Stevie Moore Cassette Club, a home-based label. Moore has also worked on numerous collaborations with a wide array of artists including: Ariel Pink, Mike Watt, Dr. Dog, Eric Matthews, MGMT, The Vaccines, Tim Burgess and many more.
Moore’s classic 2nd album Delicate Tension was originally released by his uncle on HP Music in 1978. Delicate Tension is regarded as an absolute highlight of RSM’s massive discography. Reissued for the first time on vinyl in an exact-repro sleeve and mastered from a digital transfer off the original analog reels.
Glad Music, originally released on the French label New Rose in 1986, is regarded as one of the highlights of RSM’s 400+ album discography and was featured as one of his six most “essential” albums by The WIRE.
“Despite plaudits from the likes of Trouser Press and increasingly favourable treatment in the UK inkies, Moore was unable to convert his critical reputation into sales. Laid down in a professional recording studio, Glad Music feels like a last failed stab at connecting with an audience. It’s as though Moore suspects that, all along, that was the problem. Consequently, although it’s almost conventional, it is, thanks to glistening steel-string acoustic guitar, often beautiful.” – Matthew Ingram, The WIRE (2012)
It’s time for another installment of Free Basin’ Friday. This week we’ve got an awesome prize for yah! We will be giving away copy of Strawberry Rain’s forthcoming release of Slaty Dog’s self-titled LP with non-album bonus 7” single!!!
Having formed during the height of the Zamrock period, Salty Dog was a three man band modled after the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Having wanted to base the band around the concept of the force of life, Salty Dog was chosen as a result of being slang for ‘sperm’. The 8th release on the Zambezi imprint, Salty Dog is one of the most obscure Zambian titles from the era having failed to achieve the success of some of their peers like WITCH. The self titled release is a combination of psychedelic rock, blues and folk, with all english songs. Really good from start to end, essential for collectors of African rock and insanely rare as an original. As a bonus for this release we’ve also managed to press up the non-lp single that was released before the album titled ‘Sunday Morning Sunshine’.
For your chance to win this weeks Free Basin’ Friday, please answer the following question: If you had a psychedelic zamrock band, what would name it? Please write your answer in the comment box below. Do not forget to included your email address in the box provided, all addresses will be visible to Light In The Attic employees ONLY. Winners will be announced next Friday via Twitter and Facebook.
Dark – Round The Edges
PICCHU2 (CD | LP ) PRE-ORDER NOW!
The Portland based label, Manchu Picchu Ltd. has done it again! Their newest reissue Dark’s Round the Edgesis one of THEE greatest guitar-heavy psych records in the world. The album was originally released in an edition of around 50 copies, mostly for friends, family, and the odd record company. Its reputation has since blossomed into something resembling a redwood, or perhaps an original Van Gogh. This album is the holy grail for lovers of fuzz-driven hard rock, and has been the most sought-after privately pressed LP on the planet.
The good people at Manchu Picchu Ltd. spared no expense to bring you the deluxe reissue of this classic, an album beloved by heads & cosmic couriers around the world for its great songwriting, terrific instrumental workouts, and mysterious vibe. DONT SLEEP ON THIS, ZERO TIME IS NOW!
• Officially licensed by Dark, who will receive royalties from sales of this album
• Remastered and restored by Warren Defever for maximum brilliance
• Sleeve notes by the group’s songwriter and guitarist Steve Giles, including a complete group history
• LP sleeved in a tip-on gatefold jacket, with an expanded version of the original LP booklet – 20 pages of lyrics and never before seen photos from the group’s personal archives.
• CD sleeved in a digipak, with the same detail and notes as the LP
Pre-orders are now open for Paradise of Bachelors‘ forthcoming release of In Search (PoB-07), the first reissue of the highly collectable 1981 private press countrydelic by Chance Martin, longtime friend of Johnny Cash and radio DJ partner of Cowboy Jack Clement.
After working for and touring with his friend and mentor Johnny Cash as cue card man, stage manager, and lighting designer for eight years, in 1977 Chance began a new life. By the time he was thirty-one, he had already worked stagehands union gigs for all the greats, hung with them and partied with them backstage, and realized that it was now or never—time to turn off all the outside influences, hunker down, and make it new, or else. So he started writing songs on Johnny Cash’s D35 Martin, a gift from the master.
Chance and his gang holed up in the Dead End, the kitted-out “bonus room” above his parents’ garage on a cul-de-sac in a residential South Nashville neighborhood, complete with reel-to-reels, bed, bar, a Head of Security, and a Sergeant at Arms. Under the direction of Chance as guru, they spent five years in secrecy and self-imposed musical isolation, writing songs and recording endless hours of work tapes, periodically emerging under the cover of night, in a convoy of limos and people-movers, to record midnight sessions at the Music Mill and Cowboy Jack Clement’s place.
The result was In Search (1981), a fierce, inimitable, and mythmaking countrydelic masterpiece of insular inspiration and absolutely singular vision and scope. Despite its intensely personal origins, long gestation, substantial financial costs, and deadly serious deliberation, the album betrays very little in the way of outside influences or traceable authorship. Commanding, aggressive, and unabashedly masculine, it literally sounds like nothing else we’ve ever heard—this is as close as we’ve gotten to unique music (if there is such a thing), the real deal, an obsessive, private-press triumph of the imagination. The closest analog we can (tentatively) venture is some unholy pot likker of Waylon Jennings, Funkadelic, the Fields of Nephilim, and the Bob Seger System: a strange Southern Gothic, alternately frightening and funky, and utterly transfixing. One can only wonder as to which interstellar channels Chance is tuned, but whatever he’s hearing is not the same transmission that the rest of us hear. And God bless him for it.
The good people over at Waxwork Records are gearing up for their every FIRST release of the original soundtrack to the horror film, RE-ANIMATOR! The 1985 American science fiction horror film was based on the H.P. Lovecraft story “Herbery West – Re-Animator.” Directed by Stuart Gordon, it was the first film in the Re-Animator series. The film has since become a cult classic, driven by fans of Jeffrey Combs (who stars as Herbert West) and H.P. Lovecraft, extreme gore, and the combination of horror and comedy.
Richard Howard Band is a composer of film music. He has scored more than 70 films, including From Beyond, which won the award for Best Original Soundtrack at the Catalonian International Film Festival in Sitges, Spain. His score for Re-Animator was lauded by the magazine ‘Music From the Movies’, which said, “Band’s music is dark and direct, creating an intense and eerie atmosphere, but always with a humorous touch…. Surely, Richard Band is one of the most underrated composers in the film business.”
Recorded in Italy in 1985, the Re-Animator score is performed by the Rome Philharmonic Orchestra. Layers of synth driven beats and eerie tonal figures layered by Richard Band make this score a classic within the horror genre, immediately recognizable amongst fans, and pays tribute to composer Bernard Herman (Psycho, Taxi Driver, Citizen Kane, Cape Fear).
LP sleeve includes composer notes by Richard Band, director liner notes by Stuart Gordon, and original photos of the actual 1985 recording session in Rome, Italy.
Massive 18″ x 24″ full color poster of cover art included
Head over to LightInTheAttic.net to pre-order your copy of the Re-Animator Original Motion Picture Soundtrack scored by the Richard Howard Band.
Its Friday baby! Time to giveaway some free stuff. This week’s Free Basin’ Friday prize is Steve Gunn‘s latest album Time Off.
Time Off , out June 18th on Paradise of Bachelors,imagines the fugitive moments afforded us during time off, out, and away as occasions for dilatory investigations into our immediate environments and interiors. Time Off showcases the virtuosic guitarist and songwriter’s oblique character sketches and story-songs, some of which, like “Lurker” and “Street Keeper,” portray specific denizens of his Brooklyn neighborhood. “Old Strange” celebrates Jack Rose, a dear and departed friend and muse.
Those contemplative studies frame Gunn’s most affecting, accessible and articulate work of pure songcraft to date. His definitive statement as a songwriter, Time Off represents the culmination of nearly fifteen years of stylistic experimentation as a solo artist, a member of GHQ and the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, and more recently, as a guitarist in fellow Philadelphia-bred troubadour Kurt Vile’s touring band the Violators.
In this latest creation from Gunn, his guitar work masterfully deploys the discursive, deconstructed blues style, at once transcendent and methodical, that has become his signature. Close listening reveals the influence of Delta and Piedmont country blues, ecstatic free jazz, and psych, as well as Gnawa and Carnatic music, on the continually unfolding compositions. The fresh emphasis on narrative, characters in counterpoint, and those heavy-duty vocals likewise recall the finest work of Steve’s friend and sometime touring partner, Michael Chapman.
Building on his established penchant for charting musical travelogues that ramble through city and wilderness alike, these dispatches about home are not merely descriptive but corporeal. Gunn’s evocative writing and ductile instrumental phrasing, buttressed by the band’s intuitive playing, carries the listener along bodily for the “Trailways Ramble.” It’s a real collection of foot-tappers and head-nodders, perfect for summer sessions.This is Gunn at the top of his game, utterly unique but steeped in traditions both vernacular and avant-garde. Jump in.
For your chance to win this weeks Free Basin’ Friday, please answer the following question: What is your favorite summer activity to do in your time off? Please write your answer in the comment box below. Do not forget to included your email address in the box provided, all addresses will be visible to Light In The Attic employees ONLY. Winners will be announced next Friday via Twitter and Facebook.
Scott Key - This Forest and the Sea
LION116 (LP) ORDER NOW!
Out now on Lion Productions, Scott Key’s This Forest and the Sea, an excellent 1976 private press acoustic album, self-recorded at various places in Colorado. From start to finish, this album is filled with beautiful finger style acoustic guitar, plus some atonal bottleneck slide, string scrapes and drones (at times, very Ry Cooder / Paris, Texas about six years before that soundtrack existed). Although almost completely instrumental, what lyrics there are tend towards the dark and the satiric. The obvious points of comparison are John Fahey and Leo Kottke, although Scott Key certainly has his own presence and style, differences in tone and color and attack, which he attributes to his background in rock bands.
Overall, there is a brooding, loner folk/psych feel, most evident on the phenomenal, effects-heavy, almost 11-minute long title track, ‘This Forest and the Sea.’ “I was coming to terms with what it mean to exist… and saw the world in pure black and white—there was no room for grey,” Key said. “I saw an American Culture devoid of any understanding of its place in the universe, how we learn nothing save what we see on television, how our existence is tainted by intellectual laziness, and how our gift of life is defiled by the taking of it.” This deluxe 180-gram vinyl LP edition of This Forest and the Sea comes with an insert which sports engaging, funny, and insightful notes by Key, photos, plus the text to poem that inspired the title track; as a nod to the forest. A very rare album that seems to have flown under almost everyone’s radar—although thankfully not Doug McGowan’s (Yoga Records), who sent this our way. One record collector said to us, and we now say to you: “Have a listen because this rates up there with classics by Bob Desper, Perry Leopold, Robbie Basho, and Phil Yost, with dark moods similar to John Fahey and Nick Drake.”
>> Limited edition pressing of 500!!!
To stream a taste of Scott Key’s This Forest and the Sea, and to order a copy visit LightInTheAttic.net!
Steve Gunn Time Off
POB-08 (CD | LP )
Available: June 18th PRE-ORDER NOW!
Time Off is the newest album from New York-based guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn. The album, out June 18th on Paradise of Bachelors,imagines the fugitive moments afforded us during time off, out, and away as occasions for dilatory investigations into our immediate environments and interiors. Time Off showcases the virtuosic guitarist and songwriter’s oblique character sketches and story-songs, some of which, like “Lurker” and “Street Keeper,” portray specific denizens of his Brooklyn neighborhood. “Old Strange” celebrates Jack Rose, a dear and departed friend and muse.
Those contemplative studies frame Gunn’s most affecting, accessible and articulate work of pure songcraft to date. His definitive statement as a songwriter, Time Off represents the culmination of nearly fifteen years of stylistic experimentation as a solo artist, a member of GHQ and the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, and more recently, as a guitarist in fellow Philadelphia-bred troubadour Kurt Vile’s touring band the Violators.
In this latest creation from Gunn, his guitar work masterfully deploys the discursive, deconstructed blues style, at once transcendent and methodical, that has become his signature. Close listening reveals the influence of Delta and Piedmont country blues, ecstatic free jazz, and psych, as well as Gnawa and Carnatic music, on the continually unfolding compositions. The fresh emphasis on narrative, characters in counterpoint, and those heavy-duty vocals likewise recall the finest work of Steve’s friend and sometime touring partner, Michael Chapman.
Building on his established penchant for charting musical travelogues that ramble through city and wilderness alike, these dispatches about home are not merely descriptive but corporeal. Gunn’s evocative writing and ductile instrumental phrasing, buttressed by the band’s intuitive playing, carries the listener along bodily for the “Trailways Ramble.” It’s a real collection of foot-tappers and head-nodders, perfect for summer sessions.
The album opens with the sublime, meditative “Water Wheel”—a paean to “the water wheel’s constant turn/open views and days to burn”—and indeed Time Off sounds as if Steve has swum full circle to reach the headwaters of his musical practice. This is Gunn at the top of his game, utterly unique but steeped in traditions both vernacular and avant-garde. Jump in.
>> Steve Gunn’s first album with a band, featuring John Truscinski and Justin Tripp
>> His most affecting, accessible, and articulate work of pure songcraft to date, with a new emphasis on vocals
>> Available on virgin vinyl, in a deluxe, limited edition, as well as on CD
>> Vinyl edition features matte, tip-on jacket, full-color inner sleeve, and digital download coupon
>> CD housed in heavy matte gatefold wallet
>> Package features artwork by Anthony Campuzano, Constance Mensh, and Justin Tripp
