Into the Distance Music 123

 

Patrick Shiroishi & Piotr Kurek - Greyhound Days, album review

Collaborative Calm and Curiosity

Certainly a calming experience listening, and the 'curiosity' is an alliterative title trick but prompted by a genuine sense that the two players are exploring with their soundscapes as we do as listeners. The players and their instruments are

Patrick Shiroishi - tenor saxophone
Piotr Kurek - digital piano, keyboards, electric bass guitar

and their music is an ambient rolling wave, repeating. The saxophone is sonorous rather than ever loud and rasping, and this is a calming sound with the keyboard delicately layering in and out of this musical breathing. 

All is mostly deeply soothing, and on Breath, Held there is some playful sound effects to smile amonsgt this restfulness. 

I am at a peaceful ease after this first listen.

 More details and to order, go here.

Into the Distance Music 122

 

Takuya Kuroda - Everyday, album review

Funk & Melody

This is quite a throbbing/percussive set of funky, melodic tunes – various instruments working in clever collaborations: Curiosity a great example of this, and clarinet (not my favourite) holding its own in the mix. There is a general cool groove rather than busy fusion across all the tracks. Talented lead continuously showcases the horn in solo runs across the fellow layers, and here and there, vocals/random voice recordings join in. Most enjoyable.

 

Into the Distance Music 121

 

Weird Herald - Just Yesterday, album review

Actually, 50 Years Ago

Just released from found reel to reel tapes of the band's only album, the backstory is a familiar one of missing the moment through a combination of factors, most significantly the death of guitarist Billy Dean Andrus. That was 1968, and for this California psychedelic/folk group, all the wonderful sounds of that time (and area) are in the collection of songs, including demos. There is the occasional heavy journey, and echoes of Jefferson Airplane, but mostly it is the soft harmonies and winsome lyrics of west coast melody that permeates. A fine mix of psychedelia and the harmonious is in Burgandy and Yellow, its haunting intro breaking like a wave onto the song's Tim Buckley-esque vocal, another wave then breaking climatically into that JA soundscape. Loving it.

EyeMusic 66

 

History of America

Chicken and Egg...

America’s eponymous debut album seemed curious in being launched on the back of their seminal hit single A Horse With No Name and yet this track didn’t appear on it. The reality is this isn’t the exact chronology of that release: it came out initially in 1971 to apparently only moderate success, but after recording some additional material, including the then Desert Song – latter renamed AHWNN after going down well in live performance – it was re-released in 1972 with the song included and going to number 1 in the United States.

That didn’t make any difference to me. I already had the first release as I bought it soon after radio play of A Horse... here in England, where the three main band members lived, but obviously before the re-release. It became an instant favourite and a song filling then and full now of poignant memories encompassing falling in love – I probably should just leave it there as a finite romantic observation – but also all of the other paraphernalia attached to growing up in the early 70s.

The three core members of Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek were living at an American Air Force base in West Ruislip, London – attending London Central High School – and I felt I had an affinity with them, also an American living in England, and the comparisons stretch even further from there: I listened to great music; America made it.

Their musical map was plotted on the geography of west coast harmony a la Crosby, Stills and Nash, but it is a definable enough terrain. Beckley and Bunnell have distinctive vocals, and indeed continued as the band after Dan Peek left in 1977 (he passed away in 2011), and their songwriting and acoustic guitar playing are idiosyncratic within this expansive genre.

A Horse With No Name is the fifth track on the re-release and it is the simplest of acoustic strumming with a melody line that is almost monosyllabic over a driving beat up to the memorable chorus. What carries it there, of course, are the obtuse but mesmerising lyrics, the la la, la la la la harmonising providing a hiatus for reflection on what has been intoned by the ungrammatical storytelling of there ain’t no one for to give you no pain: screw double negatives if it scans. The transformation of the desert to sea, the significance of nine days, the release of the horse, the exhausted naming that ends up observing things, and humans, that are loveless – it is a wondrous landscape of meaningless words creating meaning if we just listen and absorb.

The album ends on the Pigeon Song which I have always liked and sung aloud for the sinister nonsense of its hillbilly nihilism: Well I had me a pigeon / By the name of Fred / But I done shot him / In the head // Had me a railroad / Down on the ridge / But I done blowed up / The bridge // Had me a dog / He was my best friend / But to him / I done put an end // Had me a farm / Sittin’ pretty on the hill / But if you look / It ain’t there still // I don’t know why I done it / Honest it ain’t like me / But I ain’t sad now I done it /‘Cause a baby boy has got to be free.

(chapter from my memoir Holding On to Me in Lockdown)

 

Kaya Street - The Soul Sessions

 

 

Check it out here

Space Music 40