Gastr del Sol - 'Mirror Repair' (Drag City)

Mirror Repair is a really solid EP that was probably recorded around the same time as Crookt, Crackt or Fly but has a very different feel. There's a little of the acoustic guitar interplay, but a lot more piano, and a somewhat throwaway 'rock' piece ('Dictionary of Handwriting') which, despite it's thin construction, feels like a defiinitive example of the post-rock sound. 'Eight Corners' is the centrepiece, build around a slowly looping piano figure, which gains a bit of air each time round, lifting up and then almost drifting back to the ground before finding another gust of life. Grubbs intones some Chicago geography, which the usual take-it-or-leave-it impact, and the piece ambles along until some crazy, cracked (or crackt?) electronics chime in. It's like Smegma or the Nihilist Spasm Band dropped by to do some overdubs, and this is where O'Rourke uses whatever digital technology he was surely innovating (in 1994!) to its full potential. It's avant-garde as all fuck, and probably one of the band's highlights, sounding especially great at 45pm because there's so much space and clarity to the recording. I actually listened to the second half of this song twice just now, once through speakers and once through headphones. It's magic. The rest of the EP ain't shabby; the title track has the most vocalising and might even seem to be about something if you slow down to figure out the intention behind the lyrics (I never bother, though). 'Why Sleep' is built around that slowly unfolding spatial drone that mid-period Gastr does so well. Maybe this is nothing more than taking Varese/Xenakis techniques and introducing it to the post-rock set, but it's fucking stunning to listen to, and still sounds like new (or at least underexplored) horizons to me, two decades later.

Bardo Pond - 'Lapsed' (Matador)

It was my freshman year of college and this merging of my two big interests -- Matador-label indie rock and minimalist drone -- seemed irresistable. I remember going to the record store after class and buying this for $8 or maybe $9, which is how much new LPs cost back in 1997. When I got home I discovered a strange, weird smear on side 2- and the shrinkwrap meant it was a factory defect, not the sign of a curious record store owner -- so I emailed Matador. At the time their website was a weird web address like www.matador.recs.com -- actually, that address still works which is pretty weird -- and their customer service rep apologised and offered me a new copy if I would send the old one back. I thought that was pretty nice of them but I never got around to mailing it back. The thing about Lapsed is that I never really got past the first track, so some aberrations on side two were forgivable. Sure, there's some other great jams on here - 'Pick My Brain' has a nice sunny strum-bake;;; 'Anandomiche' is Bardo's great take on 'Til the Morning Comes'. Not to mention the super long closing jam 'Aldrin' which is in some ways the perfect Bardo Pond song, as equally momentous as their big long 'Amen' track on Bufo Alvarius. But it's the opening track here, 'Tommy Gun Angel', that I've worn out on this LP. Not that you can really tell since everything is so murky and fuzzy anyway. Even though I gave this LP the usual once-over with the anti-static brush before playing (and it looked clean), after each side the stylus had scraped a big ball of dust out of the grooves. What a perfect metaphor. Is that a metaphor? But yeah, 'Tommy Gun Angel'. To say this is my favorite Bardo Pond song is an understatement. It actually is the only Bardo Pond song that matters. I used to have Amanita and Bufo Alvarious and some later stuff I think, but I ended up selling them all during some money-hungry purge, because when it came down to it I just wanted to listen to 'Tommy Gun Angel' over and over. This song is huge and thundering, yet concise. It's actually catchy, meaning you are caught in a net you can't escape from; the indistinct, moaning vocals are the perfect counterpart to the snaking guitar riff. It meanders along as probably the world's laziest hook. This is both a pop song and a testament to everything that can be illegible in the world. Maybe they have bettered or bested it, but I have little desire to hear anything else (and that is not a slight upon this band in any way). I saw them live a year or two after this came out and I fidgeted through the whole set waiting to hear 'Tommy Gun Angel'. The sound was terrible (being in some college auditorium) and everything was out of balance, almost like a dub reggae mix. They played it, but it was disappointing. Maybe that was when I sold the other stuff. I saw them a few years later and it was better but by that point I figured I should get over this song. So it's lingered for some years, unplayed until now, and I find that despite my technical appreciation of 'Aldrin's brilliance I'm still hung up on the side-1-track-1. It's nice to know that I can approach art-rock (or artistic rock music at least) with the same attitude of a spoiled Top-40 radio fan, just wanting to hear the hit song. But stop reading this and go hear it yourself.

Areski & Brigitte Fontaine - 'Comme la Radio' (Editions Saravah)

Sometimes a few minds come together and make a record that exists in its own magical vacuum. I'll probably say that about a lot of albums throughout the duration of this lengthy project but you'll just have to get used to my repetition, repetition, repetition. Due to my idiosyncratic filing system, I keep this under 'A' for Areski even though it's really Brigitte Fontaine's show. This is because I owned L'Incendie first, where Areski gets top billing; when I finally scored a vinyl copy of Comme la Radio (a dream fulfilled, really), I didn't bother to refile. Plus I quite like it in the A's because it's rather close to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the 'backing' band on (some of) this record, who we will be visiting again very soon. So yeah, this record is awesome, by which I mean it's totally mindblowingly great if you like folk or jazz or foreign people or psychedelic music cause it's all of those things plus more. It's like an ice cream sundae with a rainbow streaming out of it. Fontaine's songs are kinda long and jammy, almost in an Astral Weeks way, though the instrumentation is really sparse and the production -- my god, the production! This record sounds a bit like it was recorded in a mailbox, though that suggests that it's thin which isn't really right. Maybe it's better to say it's "distant". And kudos for that - it's probably hard to make a record with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and keep the reeds mixed low. But Areski and Fontaine realised that the beat is the real current they want to ride, so the percussion is up front, the vocals are flush up against it, and the other instruments are there, but not in the forefront. This was made after the Art Ensemble had been in Paris for a few years, and they were about to go home and hook up with Don Moye and enter a whole new period. By it's very nature the songs are gonna hold to a more rhythmic structure than what these dudes were laying down on Tutunkhamen, Reese and the Smooth Ones, etc. - but it feels like the dark side to the Les Stances a Sophie material. Areski's presence is really prevalent too, at least one assumes the dark guitar stuff is him, and he sings lead on 'Le Brouillard' but it's cool. And the credits indicate that most of the percussion is him, though it's clearly funked up by Malachi Favors. But it's clear Fontaine is the driving force behind this. I've always had a real starry-eyed view of the French idea of "pop", probably influenced by a teenage appreciation of Stereolab and Godard films. Side one feels almost like a new form of pop being invented. Side two is the more exploratory side and it burns with a pulse that synthesizes a bunch of disparate strains of humanity. Lyrics, well, I don't know really even though they are printed in a nice purple ink;; I'm happy to just smile and let it all wash over me.

13th Floor Elevators - 'Easter Everywhere' (Radar)

Source: Can't really remember but my gut tells me I got it from Ross for a couple of bucks around January 26, 2003.

Roky Erickson talks to zombies now but back in '68 he and Tom Hall combined for that rare perfect moment and they recorded this cornerstone. It's one part scraggly thumping psych-rock and one part underwater gurgling, held together by a glue that hasn't dried yet. Roky sings as if trying to move his mouth as little as possible, just keeping it opening and letting it rip. The back cover has a drawing of Chef Boyardee reaching englightenment, flanked with band photos and a big logo of International Artists, the original label that Radar licensed this reissue from. Stacy Sutherland takes lead for his shimmery "Nobody to Love" (the darker mirror to Jefferson Airplane?) and they end side one with (a marvelous, sprawling) "It's All Over Now Baby Blue". Dylan covers were mandated by law in '68 I guess, but I'd stake on this one outdoing the original, as it's well-roasted in Texas sun. The epics are what I always go back to - 'Baby Blue', 'Slip Inside This House' and especially 'Dust'. There's a desperation baked into every note and every lyric - a desperation that won't be realised for years to come - but its promising in '68, enough that I don't trust him when he sings 'I'm feeling fine' on the hippie-dippie 'I Had To Tell You' (which sounds like a Yahowa 13 outtake). When it's over, if you look at the picture of Tommy Hall, he seems to be saying "Sssh - don't tell anyone about how much acid I made Roky take."