SOUNDTRACK: GARCIA PEOPLES-Hear Here Presents (2020).
Sometimes it takes a band you like to introduce you to something you didn’t know about.
Like Hear Here Presents, a non-profit studio in Wisconsin that records bands in a small setting with great audio quality. And there are some fantastic bands (and yes, many many more that I haven’t heard of) on their page.
The band just released their session from this live show on bandcamp.
Back in January, Garcia Peoples went into the studio at Hear Here Presents for a session.
I’m not sure how long the sessions usually are, but this one runs about 35 minutes and consists of two songs.
Up first is what they are calling “Hear Here Jam.” It’s 12 plus minutes of a jamming instrumental. It’s impression how tight these guys are that they can improv for 12 minutes and not only not step on each others toes, but actually make a composition that sounds interesting.
There’s a raging guitar section at around three minutes and an impressive build to a peak around 8 minutes before finishing up a few minutes later. Having the three guitar of Tom Malach, Danny Arakaki, and Derek Spaldo allows for terrific interplay and a depth of sound.
That depth of sound is really evident on the second song, which opens with the introduction to “One Step Beyond.” Of course, before they start that, there’s some tuning to be done, with some snippets of recognizable riffs: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, “Hey Joe,” “Sweet Child of Mine.”
But once everyone is ready, it’s down to business. It’s fun picking out which guitars are playing what in the complex intro to “One Step.” It’s impressive the way the three guitars can keep the looping melody original and changing while bassist Andy Cush more or less take a lead role.
It’s also important to keep an eye (or an ear) on drummer Cesar Arakaki because he can keep a beat and keep it from being dull as well.
Then after nine and a half minutes of intro, the band shifts gears into the rocking “Feel So Great,” a terrific song with a fantastic musical bridge. Ringing guitars and a super cool bass line propel the song before the chill chorus.
Not content to let a short, catchy song end their set, they proceed to stretch of “Feel So Good” starting around 15 minutes. Multi-instrumentalist Pat Gubler trades his keyboard for flute as the psychedelia commences. After some raging guitar work up until about twenty minutes, the band slows things down to ring to a close.
The only thing disappointing about this set is that when the song is over, you can hear them talking and someone says, “we can do another one,: just as the audio cuts out. What else did they play????
[READ: September 24, 2020] We All Die Naked [an excerpt]
During the COVID Quarantine, venerable publisher Hingston & Olsen created, under the editorship of Rebecca Romney, a gorgeous box of 12 stories. It has a die-cut opening to allow the top book’s central image to show through (each book’s center is different). You can get a copy here. This is a collection of science fiction stories written from 1836 to 1998. Each story imagines the future–some further into the future than others. As it says on the back of the box
Their future. Our present. From social reforms to climate change, video chat to the new face of fascism, Projections is a collection of 12 sci-fi stories that anticipated life in the present day.
About this story, Romney writes
[In 1896] Svante Arrhenius first calculated the increase in Earth’s surface temperature caused by increases in industrial carbon production — what we now know as the greenhouse effect. … As far as I know, James Blish is the first science-fiction writer to imagine an apocalypse caused by climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. It’s a biting satire, simultaneously bleak and gregarious, that catches the characters on the brink of catastrophe through climate change.
To me, this story felt a little preachy. But then, I’m reading it after fifty years of this kind of story already existing. I imagine it was pretty impactful back in the era of Silent Spring (if sci-fi ever had an impact on anything). And, indeed, it’s still pretty impactful given how many things he gets right.
The protagonist, Alexei-Aub Kehoe Salvia Sun-Moon-Lake Stewart, Sa. D., is forty and set in his ways. He is the General President of Local 802 of the International Brotherhood of Sanitation Engineers.
Blish was eerily prescient to 2020 in one aspect of the story
Adjusting his mask–no matter how new a mask was, it seemed to let in more free radicals from the ambient air every day–he put the thought aside and prepared to enjoy his stroll and his lunch.
But some things are more grim. The roads around Times Square, Wall Street and Rockefeller Center are all canals. (more…)
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I have seen Garcia Peoples five times, but I hadn’t heard much from them lately–which is only surprising because they used to play all the time. So much so that I have NOT SEEN them five times since the last time I saw them.
I Just Read About That... 