Blackest Ever Black announces unreleased Officer! LP (This Heat / Flaming Tunes related)
Blackest Ever Black presents to you Dead Unique, an album by Officer! recorded in 1995 but - outrageously, inexplicably - never before released into the public domain. This then is not a reissue or a revival; it’s a new record that just happens to have been maturing in the cask for, oh, a little shy of 20 years. It also happens to be a lost classic of English art-rock, and the crowning achievement in the career of its mercurial creator, Mick Hobbs.
Londoner Hobbs’ roots are in the fecund RIO scene of the late ‘70s and early 1980s, initially as guitarist in The Work (alongside Bill Gilonis, Rick Wilson and Henry Cow’s Tim Hodgkinson), and subsequent related groupings The Lowest Note, The Lo Yo Yo, and The Momes. Over the course of the decade he became closely associated with This Heat and their Cold Storage studio in Brixton, working with the likes of Flaming Tunes, Family Fodder, Catherine Jauniaux and Zeena Parkins, to name but a few.
Officer! – the project that this incorrigible collaborator and connector calls his own - surfaced in 1982 with a cassette tape entitled Eight New Songs By Mick Hobbs. It marked the blossoming of a singular writer and improvisor, with a gift for plangent melody, ingenious arrangement and lyrics at once caustic and courtly, playful and profound (two songs from this tape, ‘Life At The Water’s Edge’ and ‘Dogface’, have been remastered for a limited edition 7” release on Blackest Ever Black later this year). The Cold Storage-recorded Ossification LP arrived a year later, followed by Cough (1985) and Yes Yes No No Yes No Yes (1988). Megaphone Records, responsible forOssification’s recent 30th anniversary reissue, rightly describe it as “one of the most unusual, pleasurable and character-filled ‘pop’ records anyone has heard…a timeless anomaly in the history of recorded music.”
By the start of the 1990s Hobbs had joined Jad Fair’s Half Japanese (he continues to play in that group as well as Strobe Talbot, a trio with Fair and Benb Gallaher). In the early months of ’95, Half Japanese were in Baltimore to record their Hot LP; Hobbs stayed on to cut the bulk of the songs that comprise Officer!’s Dead Unique – songs drawn from a rich store of material written and refined in the seven years since the band’s last outing - with a talented assemblage of local and visiting musicians. Returning to the UK, Hobbs brought the tracks to producer Julia Brightly to mix at her 16-track home studio in Bethnal Green; by the end of the summer, Dead Unique had taken shape.
And then? Nothing. For reasons that no one, least of all Hobbs, can remember, Dead Unique was shelved, all but forgotten about until 2012, when Blackest Ever Black chanced upon it while trawling the Officer! archive maintained for Hobbs by Andrew Jacques. Finally, rightfully, on May 26th, 2014, the album will be made available to all for the very first time - on double-vinyl, CD and digital formats.
A complex but thrillingly immediate avant-pop song cycle that charms and confounds at every turn, Dead Unique will give immense pleasure not only to Officer!’s existing cult following, but to anyone with an appreciation of piquant, idiosyncratic songcraft – fans of Kevin Ayers, Flaming Tunes, Art Bears, Woo, Dislocation Dance, R. Stevie Moore, Robert Wyatt, Cleaners From Venus, Lol Coxhill or The Monochrome Set should especially pay attention. It touches upon ragged-raw rock ‘n roll, sumptuous chamber music, pastoral folk, blowsy prog-jazz and paranoid dub-space, effortlessly shifting from skronking abstraction to rousing harmonic refrain and back again.
Dead Unique is also the culmination of Hobbs’ lifelong collaborative impulse: his visionary ability to bring musicians together, galvanise them and wrestle coherence out of the collective free play of ideas, arriving at something far more than the sum of its parts. The tension between composition and improvisation is key to the LP’s power, with Hobbs abetted by an extraordinary supporting cast that includes Tim Hodgkinson (bass clarinet), Pleasant Livers’ Fred Collins (vocals), Legendary Pink Dots’ Patrick Q (violin), filmmaker/animator Martha Colburn (vocal), Gilles Rieder (drums), Jad Fair (vocals) and Jason Willett (bass, keyboards, trumpet). Special mention must go to John Dierker, whose superbly expressive clarinet and saxophone parts are a fixture throughout, and to Joey Stack, who takes lead vocals on ‘Good’ and the show-stopping ‘Elephant Flowers’.
Nonetheless it is the voice of Hobbs – as principal writer, performer and protagonist of these songs – that resonates most powerfully. Blurring the roles of storyteller, poet and prankster, he turns memorable line after memorable line, booby-trapping them with mischievous puns, fleet-footed literary allusions, sudden digressions and shifts of register, nonsense rhymes and other wordplay. But his acute wit and flair for the absurd is moored by a deep romantic sensibility, and though it delights in the minutiae of the human comedy, Dead Unique ultimately addresses its biggest themes: love, loss, commitment, independence, the mutability and inconstancy of all things. “You lose, you learn, you advance…but you always go back.”
100 years ago World War I started, the all destroying war that was a shadow over Europe. Between 1914 and 1918 all big wrld powers got involved in the conflict in where 70 million soldiers fought a battle, 9 million of them died. The war ended in trenches and had battles at sea and in the air. These fights were characterized by modernized and deadlier weapons.
History now presents the first chapter from an unique collection that will feature World War I in all is aspects. It’s available now.
Length: 275 minutes.
Folk for the People: a benefit compilation for the victims of repression in Ukraine
This fundraising project has been initiated by the European alternative folk scene after a call from Mich Rozek (drummer of the Belgian Tribal Folk band Rastaban, whose ancestors came from Ukraine) in solidarity with the people in Kiev who were killed and injured while demonstrating for the respect of their basic rights, for a better life, for freedom, for a society without corruption and abuses.
Hundreds were injured, more than a hundred were found dead, shot or tortured. Some were kidnapped. There are still more than 100 people missing. We've all seen and followed what happened in Kiev, and it touched us all very deeply. There's no hate, political motivation or radicality behind our intentions with this project, only compassion and a call for tolerance and diversity as basic values against injustice and the injustifiable suffering of all these people.
In order to help the victims at our level as musicians, every band accepted to donate one of his song for a downloadable compilation available on Bandcamp. 35 bands from all over Europe and even Canada have contributed.
All the benefits of this compilation will go to EuromaidanSOS, a structure who's financially helping the victims and their families. You can read more about this organisation and their work on this page:
euromaidansos.org/en/help-victims
Contains songs from Daemonia Nymphe, Faun, Orfeo, Rastaban, Cesair, Shantalla and many more!
Projekt celebrates its 300th release with a loving homage to Black tape for a blue girl from Italy’s All my faith lost… Redefine my pure faith is extremely limited, with only 134 copies available from Projekt. Don’t miss out on your copy.
Coinciding with the vinyl release of Blacktape’s Remnants of a Deeper purity, the ethereal neo-classical All my faith lost… takes a loving look back as they re-interpret six songs in their particular style: fragile, ethereal, otherwordly, melancholic, innocent, and beautiful. The classical instrumentation of acoustic guitar, violin and cello is graced by heavenly female and earthy male vocals. Slow, emotional progressions that captivate the listener, drawing them into a subtle and hypnotic embrace.
Vocalist/instrumentalist Viola and vocalist/guitarist Federico explain, “Without Blacktape, All my faith lost… music would not have been the same; a sort of tribute to such an influential band was due. All my faith lost… take Blacktape songs and dismantle them, pulling out the heart and the core of each track and redefining them following our own vision.”
Released in a limited edition of 200, Redefine my pure faith is a unique collection of songs that will enthrall fans of both bands. It’s a perfect recording for those late night moments when you are most honest with yourself.
Are you ready to redefine your pure faith?
Release Date: April 15, 2014
It really seems a busy month for Lumière as some days after we announced their newest releases, they already have two new ones coming up.
This time they add two French movies on their catalogue.
AVANT L’HIVER
The excellent new movie by Philippe CLAUDEL ('Il y a longtemps que je t'aime', 'Tous les soleils') with Kristin SCOTT THOMAS ('Il y a longtemps que je t'aime'), Daniel AUTEUIL ('Le huitième jour', 'Caché'), Richard BERRY ('Le petit prince a dit', 'L'Emmerdeur') and Leïla BEKHTI ('La source des femmes', 'Paris je t'aime').
The movie was one of the highlights of last year’s edition of the Filmfestival from Ghent.
Synopsis:
Lucie presumes that her husband Paul - an older neurosurgeon - has an affair. Indeed, Paul behaves strange lately, but the truth behind it is dark and complicated.
BONUS: Interview met regisseur Philippe CLAUDEL (40 min.)
Technical specifications:
France, Luxembourg, 2013 | Length: 103 minutes + 40 minutes (extra)
Language: French | Subtitles: Dutch and French
Format: 16:9 | Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1
JE FAIS LE MORT
A movie by Jean-Paul SALOMÉ ('Les femmes de l'ombre') with François DAMIENS ('Rien à déclarer'), Géraldine NAKACHE ('Nous York') en Lucien JEAN-BAPTISTE ('Possessions').
Synopsis:
A has-been actor takes a job playing the victims in a homicide reenactment, where he sparks with the civil officer investigating the real-life crime.
BONUS: Audio commentary, interview with Jean-Paul Salomé, improvisations by François Damiens (20 min.)
Technical specifications:
France,2013 | Length: 104 minutes + 20 minutes (extra)
Language: French | Subtitles: Dutch Format: 16:9 | Audio: Dolby Digital 5.1
