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Thursday, March 5, 2009

Choke: eponymous e.p., gauze/total reverence, and lo-fi noise


I think I am most comfortable thinking of myself as an experimental musician. For me this means I experiment with the process by which the music is created. In this sense, Choke was the most experimental band I have been involved with. This is true despite the fact that the product of Choke's experimentation ended up being closer to pop music than anything else I have played. This experimentation in large part involved doing things to break the band's members out of comfortable roles and habits. So, for instance, 4 of 5 the songs on our eponymous e.p. were based around guitar parts and bass lines written by the drummer (me) who can't play guitar or bass. Add to that a guitarist on bass and a bassist on guitar, turn it all up past eleven even on the pretty songs, and...well, just listen.

Style: Post-punk dream pop with a quick detour into prog-noise.
The players:
David Liso- guitar, bass, vocals (check out Dynamo Stairs)
Grant Garner - bass
Matt Sneddon - guitar
me - drum kit, steel pan, hand drums, metal objects, loops, samples

Choke (eponymous e.p.) (FLAC, Ogg Vorbis,MP3)
Produced by Matt Thorne (a Skin & Barrel Production)
Track list:
1) Alexander Orchid
2) Barcelona
3) Browse
4) H20
5) Sheltering

Note: the player plays the whole e.p.

Choke
released two DIY cassettes, Gauze and Total Reverence. My copies were, ironically, all but destroyed in a crushed box during one of my many moves. I was able to salvage all but three tracks off of the cassettes thanks to scotch tape & razor skills learned in my experimental music classes back in the day. The track Green Hand, in fact, was put back together from almost a dozen splices using several cassettes. The three missing tracks are a great version of Barcelona, a version of Alexander Orchid that includes a hammond organ part missing from the version above, and a slower noisier version of Browse. I will work on finding clean copies of those tracks. I'll upload them if they become available [update - Now available here].

Choke: Gauze/Total Reverence
Style: shoegazer, rave, post-punk, dream pop.
DIY cassette releases from the early 90's.
Recorded in our rehearsal studio using 4-track cassette machine

Tracklist:
1) Mortar
2) Sex Trial
3) Shine
4) Crushed box/grill
5) Bliss
6) Poundcake
7) Circles
8) Tanta Figa
9) Green Hand
10) H20 (clank mix)

Note: player plays all ten tracks

For archival purposes, I am also including two unfinished bonus tracks. These were recorded live to ghetto blaster in our rehearsal space. Both songs were eventually part of our live set list, but they were never properly recorded. There is something about these takes that I like: Lo-fi noise.

Rehearsal Tapes
1) Untitled
2 ) Sturwelpeter


Enjoy.





7 comments:

  1. Hey icastico,

    Thanks for the heads up. I do indeed like the stuff at your place. Damn, I'm impressed. You've done a hell of a lot, and if the great music weren't enough, which is very diverse and something i need to digest more of, there's all of that very cool imagery!

    Bob

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  2. Bob,

    Thanks for the kind words.

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  3. beautiful music, you may like some of our stuuf on modnotrasho, download it form mysoace blog

    www.myspace.com/mondotrashorecords

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ghost,
    Thanks.
    I'll take a listen when I get a chance.

    ReplyDelete
  5. very good! great sounds! thank you for your comment. and greetings from spain!

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wow, I've never heard of this band.
    P&M
    If your in to underground shoegaze check out this LP:


    Anything After - There's Something Warm

    http://www.mediafire.com/?wgtyuz0diml

    ReplyDelete