Wanna come along, click HERE

June 19, 2013: Steve Gunn & Interview / Black Springs in Session / Lucie Thorne in Session / Playlist

Sideways Through Sound Spotlight: Time Off.

In the city we’re all angling for Quittin’ Time, laboring along and among the hours, searching and scheming for the sweet sound of those two easy words: Time Off. It’s something you take—or sometimes steal, like a thief or a baserunner—but seems you can never get enough of it. It’s regulated, rationed, and billed by volume, like water or electricity or ice cream. Sometimes you have to beg the boss for more, or even for a trifling taste. So let’s make time! Let’s roll the dice and get these old bones out on the road again.

Steve Gunn’s new album 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 (PoB-08) 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.

Gunn’s first eponymous album with a full band, Time Off harnesses a core trio format to launch his compositions into new, luminous strata; the songs have evolved through disciplined trio interplay with longtime collaborator John Truscinski on drums and Justin Tripp (formerly of Aspera and Favourite Sons) on bass and guitar. Helena Espvall (Espers) also guests on cello. Steve’s keen baritone voice features more prominently than ever before on these tunes, each of which feels both more rigorous and expansive than previous efforts.

Here, Gunn the guitarist 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

Paradise Of Bachelors

Black Springs: Live in Session on Sideways Through Sound

Black Springs (a.k.a The Country Music Space Band) emit shiny, spiraling, multi coloured and wildly undulating sonic vibrations of gooey lo-fi psychedelic sun drenched country tinged barnyard indie/surf/60s caveman garage rock with delicate lashings of lofty droning pretty dream alt-post neo.... something...

With a debut EP about to be unleashed, don't miss this chance to catch the band in a more intimate sonic scene...

Black Springs

Lucie Thorne: Live in Session on Sideways Through Sound

It's been far too long since show favourite Lucie Thorne was in session (HERE) but she is back in town on tour and has kindly taken time out of a very busy scheule to join Thee Sonic Assassin in the studio.  Check out the link below for tour dates and here's a few words from Chris Johnston:

“Not long ago, I was driving through the Wimmera at night, back roads beyond Horsham. No towns and no lights except the moon and stars. Lucie Thorne was singing in the car; I loved 2009’s AMP-nominated Black Across the Field but this year’s album is sensational. The songs are small and finely formed in the same way that Gillian Welch’s are, the attention to microscopic folk/rock/country detail immense. That night way out west the songs shone out of the dark; it was religious. Great music will do that for you and I give thanks.” (Chris Johnston, The Melbourne Magazine)

Lucie Thorne

Wanna come along, click HERE

June 12, 2013: David A Jaycock / Psychlops Eyepatch in Session / Playlist

Sideways Through Sound spotlight: Ten Songs

David uses surreal moments, real memories and ghost stories to create a dreamlike quality to his music. At the centre of most of David’s work is the guitar and he is influenced by the great right hand technique players like Fahey and Jansch but also the harmony techniques of more experimental offerings.

His recordings to date incorporate and use different forms and ideas but mainly focus around the acoustic guitar. For David’s LP Presets (Blackest Rainbow Records) he combined acoustic sounds with found sounds and samples of old toys, hammered pianos and analogue synths. "I am very interested in dissonance and its resolution and I have tried to incorporate these devices into a song format."

David has just written a new album to be released on Static Caravan entitled Ten Songs, his most accessible to date. It is as it says a singing record. For this, his fifth full-length recording the guitars, vocals and synth sketches were recorded on to tape with no edits.

This is a coming together of the usual multi-instrumental, synth-laden arranged miniatures with guitar picked song. There is playfulness with regards to time signatures and the use of dissonance. There is also a nod towards more progressive song structures and arrangements. Having said that, some of the more traditional folk meanderings have also been observed. What seems to have evolved are a number of warm, melancholic, sometimes cryptic, post rock/folk ramblings that could have been recorded in the early seventies in a sleepy village off the A38.

“David A Jaycock is a musician whose music I’ve admired and loved for many a year. He is a valued collaborator and a quiet genius.” James Yorkston.

“Jaycock colours his take on acoustic guitar’s traditional warmth with an edge of thoroughly chilling British oddness” Frances May Morgan

David A Jaycock

Static Caravan

Psychlops Eyepatch: Live in Session on Sideways Through Sound

This group of psychedelic mischief makers first came to Thee Sonic Assassin's attention as part of the WhatIsPsych compilation released last year... Take a look HERE

Psychlops Eyepatch make an inspired 60's garage flavoured psych-rock racket and Sideways Through Sound digs it... a lot !!

The lads came into the studio to record a session in advance of their EP launch (details below) which promises to be a live highlight of the 2013 calendar... miss it and miss out brothers and sisters...!!

Psychlops Eyepatch

Radio Playlist – June 12, 2013 (HERE)

Joonatan Elokuu – The Tower [The Tower & The Hanged Man]
Corn Capri – Another Tribute [Eight Tracks]
David A Jaycock – Dozen Mizzen [Ten Songs]
**
Steve Gunn – Lurker [Live at Atlantic Sound Studios 05-06-2013]
Tales Of Murder & Dust – Like Young Gentle Beasts [Skeleton Flowers]
Black Springs – A [Sunrise]
**
David A Jaycock – Wolverine Returns [Ten Songs]
David A Jaycock – Ghosts & Gold [Ten Songs]
David A Jaycock – Brighton In Sunshine [Ten Songs]
**
Devotional – Paradise [Live on Sideways Through Sound 15-05-2013]
Sam & The Bird – Ocean [Live on Sideways Through Sound 05-09-2012]
Daniel Darling & The Poultergeist – Daddy Longlegs [Live on Sideways Through Sound 24-04-2013]
**
Psychlops Eyepatch – Nuclear Bombora [Paranoise]
Psychlops Eyepatch – As Haunted As A Thousand Theremins [Live on Sideways Through Sound] Psychlops Eyepatch – Waves Of Doubt [Live on Sideways Through Sound]
**
David A Jaycock – Decanting Sand [Ten Songs]
Joonatan Elokuu – The Hanged Man [The Tower & The Hanged Man]
Lucie Thorne – Whatever Floats [v/a Take Something Beautiful: The Songs Of Jesse Younan]

Wanna come along, click HERE

June 5, 2013: Jessica Pratt & Interview / Milk Carton Kids in Session / Playlist

Sideways Through Sound spotlight: Jessica Pratt

Jessica Pratt is a young songwriter with a decidedly old soul and a voice that balances spry sweetness with husky grit. The songs themselves feel lodged in some subliminal realm between past and present, devoid of references that might place them in a historical moment. But their sepia tone never feels like a cheap gimmick; words like "brethren," "twain," and "bushel" roll off Jessica's tongue so naturally that you quickly become enveloped in the record's self-contained grammar. The effect is cumulative, lulling the listener into a tranquil, meditative space somewhere outside the interruptions of the modern world.

Jessica and her acoustic guitar are mostly unaccompanied, and there are occasional imperfections, the buzzing strings, the faint crack of her voice, that add to its atmosphere of unvarnished intimacy. Her chord progressions are neither neat resolutions nor mournful elegies, which is to say that her songs traverse that vast, somewhat under-explored territory between happy and sad (except for "Titles Under Pressure", which revolves around a hook that goes "The next time, I'm stayin' away from this place/ I cannot make more mistakes"; that one's a heartbreaker.) Even when Pratt sings a line like "All the lights in my life are fading" on "Streets of Mine", there's a bright, resilient note or two that belie how dismal it looks on paper.

“I never wanted to ever start a record label. Ever. But there is something about her voice I couldn't let go of. It's an actual voice. An actual beautiful voice. This ones a classic sounding voice. Not to mention her song writing, recording and guitar playing. Jessica Pratt’s music feels like I have found a lost LP of an old forgotten mystical folk singer, that feeling of discovering a record all by myself: Without the help of friends or the Internet. Like Stevie Nicks singing over David Crosby demos, with the intimacy of a Sibylle Baier. I am in love with it. So much, that I saved up and threw all my money to get it into this world. I actually care about it, no matter which way the winds blow.” (Tim Presley, White Fence)

Jessica Pratt

Birth Records

The Milk Carton Kids: Live in Session on Sideways Through Sound

It is here in room 922 of The Mitsui Garden Hotel that I have my first encounter with 'The Ash & Clay' by The Milk Carton Kids. And whereas for as long as I have known them I have always perceived the twin voices of Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale as disappearing into one, I now hear that single and distinct character rising to speak for many...

For within these songs is a man himself in motion – a traveler who dances in silent, halting circles. And what he does is quietly bear witness like a weather vane, to the carnival of souls by the wayside, his eyes cornered but his face always pointing forward, his voice in our heads. He moves through love but is alone; laughs at the wreckage, weeps with lust; throws and sweeps confetti, stands at cold gravesides; raises a hand in promise, then picks your pocket and slips quietly back across the border.

He slides outside the law, bound by honor and duty, the pure product of a mad country working with all its heart at fevered cross-purposes. In the end it is mercy he is after, the character in this play—the kind of mercy that attends grace when truly living in spite of the inevitable, when singing the unspeakable to the unlistening. And from Hiroshima to Graceland, this character knows that the whole of human foolishness must be witnessed, loved, and forgiven for that mercy to be ratified.

Like Jesus and Harpo Marx, he does this for us. (Joe Henry, Hiroshima, Japan.10-10-2012)

The Milk Carton Kids

Radio Playlist – June 5, 2013 (HERE)

Hawkwind – Warrior / Opa Loka / The Demented Man [Warrior On The Edge Of Time]
Michael Wohl – Song Of Impermanence [Moonfeeder 7”]
Jessica Pratt – Half Twain The Jessie [S/T]
**

David A Jaycock – Decanting Sand [Ten Songs]
Palladium – Hurricane Break [Palladium III: Horses On Mars]
Psychlops Eyepatch – Seven Seas [Paranoise EP]
**
Sister Jane – Wonderful Feeling [Mercy]
Sister Jane – Indigo Shire [Live on Sideways Through Sound 08-06-2011]
Sister Jane – And That Is All [Live on Sideways Through Sound 08-06-2011]
**
Jessica Pratt – Hollywood Half Twain The Jessie [S/T]
Yair Yona - It's Not The Heat (It's The Humidity) [Live on IDC Radio, Tel Aviv 14-07-2010]
1099 – There Is No Such Constellation [1099]
**
Bad Braids – Through The Door [Supreme Parallel]
Narwhal – Lysergic Voyage [v/a The Psychedelic Underground Generation Vol.5]
Fabel – Clotheslines [Zimmer]
**
Hawkwind - Assault and Battery/The Golden Void [Warrior On The Edge Of Time]
Jessica Pratt – Night Faces [S/T]

May 29, 2013: John Smith & Interview / Andrew Tuttle (Anonymeye) in Session / Playlist

Sideways Through Sound spotlight: Great Lakes

John Smith’s musical destiny was cast in his early life, informed in no small part by the records his father chose to play during family gatherings at their West Country fishing village home. Amongst other albums, it was the inclusion of Ry Cooder’s late 70s masterpiece Bop Till You Drop which had a mesmeric effect on his young son’s imagination. ‘That really hit me hard’ says John. ‘Just hearing that really intricate guitar and soulful singing. I just remember not knowing what this thing was, or what it meant, but I knew I wanted more’.

It was not long after this that his father entrusted the young Smith with his own guitar, equipping also him with the skills to navigate his way through Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’. ‘I was only 11’ Smith smiles, ‘I remember saying to him ‘How have they made another world with music?’ Then he played me Tom Wait’s Invitation To The Blues and the Bert Jansch & John Renbourn album and I was gone. I basically stayed in my room practicing for 8 hours a day until I left home. You can see colours when records are that good.’

Quite aside from the fact that it is an album of astonishing beauty, the arrival of 'Great Lakes' is something of a miraculous happening in itself, given that it followed a 2 year period of writer’s block so crippling that Smith had considered abandoning songwriting altogether. But when the cloud lifted, the results were plentiful- at the back end of 2011 Smith began working with 2 songwriters, Dennis Ellsworth and the legendary American producer Joe Henry (Lisa Hannigan, Loudon Wainwright, Solomon Burke), and by spring 2012, had over 15 fully formed new songs.

Recently, John Smith had a revelation. He realized that all he really wants to do is write the songs that other people will want to sing along to. As a teenager, he used to spend nights sat alone in his room, listening to waves crashing against the rocks. Inevitably he’d be playing his guitar. His favourite sound in the world is still a steel string guitar being played late at night, but these days, happily, there’s more and more and more of us listening in to what he’s trying to say.

 

  John Smith

Andrew Tuttle (Anonymeye): Live in Session on Sideways Through Sound

It's been a really long time since Anonymeye was last in session on Sideways Through Sound but the constant stream of releases over the years always get a lot of love when they arrive....

Whilst winding down his previous musical project Anonymeye in late 2012 and early 2013, Tuttle continued to work on new recordings during the Australian summer. A relocation of house and home studio, new creative opportunities, and regular seasonal downpours subconsciously motivated Tuttle to create music reflecting on exciting new beginnings and seasonal and domestic bliss.

'4064' (pronounced Four Zero Six Four), named after the suburb of Paddington in which the EP was written, features five new works, ranging from the title track, featuring a contemplative banjo motif that collapses into itself before eventual redemption; to the floating arpeggiated synthesiser workout Fallen Powerlines; to Porch Life, a blissful meeting of Farfisa organ and computer; and other points in between.

The five tracks on 4064 see Tuttle eschew his acoustic guitar, an integral instrument in previous projects; in favour of banjo, synthesiser, and organ. Whilst this isn't predicting future directions by any means, the instrumentation used reflects Tuttle's desire to explore differing musical outcomes now and into the future.

Andrew Tuttle

Radio Playlist – May 29, 2013 (HERE)

Danny Paul Grody – Route 1 [Fountain]
The Milk Carton Kids – On The Mend [The Ash & Clay]
John Smith – Lungs [Great Lakes]
**
Jessica Pratt – Mother Big River [S/T]
Lux Harmonium – Peggy Come Home [Static Caravan 7”]
King’s Daughters & Sons – Sleeping Colony [If Then Not When]
**
John Smith – There Is A Stone [Great Lakes]
John Smith – No One Knows [Live At The Roundhouse]
John Smith – Freezing Winds Of Change [Great Lakes]
**
Lisa Hannigan – Paper House [Daytrotter Session 20-01-2012]
Owls Of The Swamp – The Hypnotist [single]
James Blackshaw – Cross [Live on The Long Rally, WFMU 91.1 New Jersey 02-02-2010]
**
Andrew Tuttle – Rain Transplant [4064]
Andrew Tuttle – Brisbane [Live on Sideways Through Sound]
Andrew Tuttle – Studio Jam Improvisation [Live on Sideways Through Sound]
**
Akron/Family – Until The Morning [Sub Verses]
Joshua James – So Did I [Futureappletree 15-05-2013]
The R.G. Morrison – Slumber [Static Caravan 7”]