Midweek Beats + Pieces vol.28

Skylab Radio, Clear Path Ensemble, Ghost Riders

Selected Works is a weekly (usually) newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance music journalist, broadcaster, copywriter and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell, aka Yours Truly. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING/WHAT I’VE GOT COMING UP:

On Saturday morning, I wrote a quick recap of a few really cool recent releases from Clear Path Ensemble, Tomas Garcia Station, Twin Cosmos and Charles Stepney for Test Pressing. You can read it here.

Afterwards, I flew down to Ōtautahi with Kush Jones and Surly for the second date on Kush’s debut Aotearoa tour. The vibes have been exceptional. As I type this, I’m at the airport waiting for a delayed plane flight back to Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Kush and Surly left yesterday. Right now, they’re up in Tāmaki Makaurau making tunes. Kush will be playing the final date of his tour here on Friday at Neck of The Woods. If you’re in the area, you might wanna come through.

From 2-3 PM AEST on Thursday afternoon (15/09/2022), Naarm | Melbourne’s Skylab Radio is broadcasting my latest mixshow, Ain’t It True. It’s yet another collection of New Jack Swing, Swingbeat and Street Soul recorded around the world in the ‘90s, but with a dash of South African house. I’ll post the archive link after they broadcast it.

On Sunday the 25th of September, Te Whanganui-a-Tara percussionist, bandleader, producer and DJ Cory Champion is celebrating the recent release of his Clear Path Ensemble band project’s excellent Solar Eclipse album through Soundway Records. I’m on DJ support, and the homie MĀ is doing a live hip-hop soul set to open up. Even better, it’s an early show. Tickets are on sale over here.

The homies at Beehype have just published a special playlist of songs about peace, war and freedom from around the world. I contributed a track from Aotearoa to it. Check it here.

In other news, Tess Nichol’s lovely essay on Hometowns is finally live on the North & South website. I provided Tess with some film photography to accompany it, and I was very happy to see it in print last week. Check it all out here if you want.

WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:

This week, the US blog Women In Vinyl take you Downunder with their first Kiwi feature on Women in Vinyl, Miss Dom, a vinyl and radio DJ on 95bFM in New Zealand. Dom is a bit of a legend up in Tāmaki. Check her story out here.

For the 53rd edition of the always intriguing Herb Sundays newsletter, Sam Valenti IV connects with the Tokyo-based author W. David Marx for some discourse on status, culture and “coolness”, as well as a matching playlist. Get in.

Meet 10 Contemporary Artists Who Are Rethinking Harp Music: You probably never thought you’d hear the harp soundtracking a queer porno, but here we are. April Clare Welsh for Pitchfork.

Discovering 1970s jazz fusion with Kerri Chandler: From Herbie Hancock to Azymuth via Steely Dan and Weather Report. Lazlo Rugoff for The Vinyl Factory.

Assembling a Black Counter Culture: DeForrest Brown, Jr.’s Assembling a Black Counter Culture presents a comprehensive account of techno with a focus on the history of Black experiences in industrialized labor systems—repositioning the genre as a unique form of Black musical and cultural production. It’s a pretty special book.

Jumping Sundays - The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand: In Jumping Sundays, award-winning writer and broadcaster Nick Bollinger tells the story of beards and bombs, freaks and firebrands, self-destruction and self-realisation, during a turbulent period in New Zealand’s history and culture.

Extreme Weather Threatens the Future of Festivals: This year, promoters have grappled with inflation and financial deficits from the pandemic. Now they face another obstacle: scorching heat, raging wildfires and high winds due to climate change. Caroline Whiteley for RA.

King Britt on the Gear of Blacktronika History: For the last three decades and some change, Philadelphia-born DJ, producer, and educator King Britt has been at the forefront of the many revolutions and catalytic movements that have shaped the tenor of electronic music. John Morrison for Reverb.

WHAT I’VE BEEN LISTENING TO:

The year was 1991, and the Houston, Texas-born vocalist and bassist Chris Walker was feeling that New Jack Feeling. Apparently, he was Ornette Coleman’s bassist for two and a half years before recording and releasing First Time. I’m not sure how much of Coleman’s influence you can really hear in this lush Swingbeat/New Jack Swing album, but it is very fitting that I’d managed to dig out the New Jack Swing guy who played with him.

If there’s one thing that is probably pretty obvious to people who follow my DJ mixes, I suspect it would be how much I love UK Street Soul. And within my personal hierarchy of loves within that white label culture/scene (if it even was a scene - debatable, right?), not much tops Jason Halliday and Carol McLeod’s Zushii group. Their tracks have a bit more jazz-fusion in them than the average Street Soul 12”, and if you hurry, you can purchase a collection of their remarkable works via Bandcamp now.

Speaking of Zushii, here’s former Zushii vocalist Sharon Benson’s lost album Sunshine. P-Vine got this one in circulation in 2015, but it also sounds like it could have been released in 1993 or reissued last year. Street Soul meets New Jack Swing with a London bop. Jason Halliday on instrumentation and production, Benson on songwriting and vocals, Gary Bent on BVs. It’s a magical combination.

GHOST RIDERS:

Described as a North American road trip of coming of age garage soul mapped by Ivan Liechti, Melbourne label Efficient Space’s forthcoming narrative compilation Ghost Riders, hoves in a liminal emotional ravine between moonlight melancholy, teenage heartache and unchecked, unrealised ambition. Across 17 open-hearted ballads recorded between 1965 and 1974, the double LP, CD, and digital release collects and connects dots between British Invasion fanatics, child prodigies, the loners and the luckless. In a sense, it’s a trans-continental survey of those swept up in rock’n’roll mania and buoyed by local newspaper ads promising fame and gold records during the era.

I paraphrase the Efficient Space sales notes to ultimately say this, Ghost Riders is one of the most remarkable collections of music I’ve heard all year. It’s due for release on the 14th of October, and I think you’re going to like it. I liked it so much that I got in contact with Ivan Liechti via Zoom from his home in Lausanne, Switzerland, to talk about how it all came together.

Martyn Pepperell: First of all, congratulations on compiling this beautiful collection of North American garage soul records recorded between 1965 to 1974. How did you identify this feeling and time period as something you wanted to explore?

Ivan Liechti: There was some stuff out there already, but not that much, in my opinion. Erik Lindgren did some amazing compilations. He was actually involved in this one. He loaned us a copy of one of the 45s because mine was not that great. There were a few other compilations, but they were very deep inside the garage world. I was obsessed with this kind of music, so I started digging. I thought it had a wider audience than the usual garage folk. I felt that bringing these songs back with good artwork and a label that works differently from the usual ones that do these compilations could have potential. It’s been a work of love.

Martyn Pepperell: Where do you think your interest in this sort of music comes from?

Ivan Liechti: I’ve always loved melancholic music. When I was a teenager, I was a fan of The Cure and new wave music. I started collecting music when I was fourteen or fifteen. Then I got more into soul music, but I always loved the downtempos and the moody ones. From there, I got into a lot of psychedelic folk and rock music. Like lots of diggers, my interest went towards very private press records. That’s what I love with this compilation. It’s all off 45s. Most of them are one-shots from bands who only made one recording. Most of them are privately pressed or own recordings. 

The good thing with the US 45 is you just get the name on the record, no pictures, nothing. To be honest, some of the tracks on the compilation, I didn’t know if it was a boy or girl singing, where they were from, or what date it was recorded. Initially, I wanted to do a sixties compilation, but I knew that ‘Goodnight Jackie’ by Toe Head was released in 1974. It was like going back to the doo-wop in the fifties and sixties, but with the Lee Scratch Perry sound effect. I thought that was interesting. I also discovered some stuff. I was sure that ‘Summer’s Over’ by Dennis Harte was recorded in the late sixties, but it wasn’t made until 1973. These were some of the surprises we had while digging through all of these guys and their records. 

Martyn Pepperell: It seems like a lot of this compilation revolves around musicians with big dreams and limited resources. 

Ivan Liechti: Exactly. That’s the D.I.Y and lo-fi stuff. It’s something that really touches me. I find it very interesting and very creative. It’s hard to imagine what it was like, but maybe some of them were stars in the local ballrooms. 

Martyn Pepperell: I imagine plenty of them would have worked playing covers in local lounges, hotel bars and restaurants.

Ivan Liechti: Something interesting we learned from The Bohemians was that they won the local battle of the bands in Montréal. The guy said, okay, your prize is three hours to record an original song. They had none because they were only doing covers. So the track you hear on the compilation was written and recorded in three hours. 

Martyn Pepperell: Having gone through the process of putting this all together, what are your impressions of North America during the late sixties and early seventies?

Ivan Liechti: I was born in 1975, and I think it’s common to dream about what the world was like not long before we were born. I see a lot of this today with people putting out compilations of eighties music and stuff I hated when I was younger. For me, there is something dreamy about 1965 to 1974. Things were happening, young musicians were creating things in their early teens and extending themselves. They were dreaming of another world, but at the same time, I know it was not so nice. Most of the people on this compilation are white guys, and they were really thinking the world was for them. Maybe it was not the same for everybody. It was also quite tough for Black people and lots of minorities. They fought for their rights, but sometimes they had nothing. 

Martyn Pepperell: From going through this collection, I got the sense that it gathers together a lot of similar types of people from different cities who probably wouldn’t have been aware of each other at the time.

Ivan Liechti: Yeah, it’s quite interesting. I’m sure none of them would have heard of each other at the time. There were a lot of small fires during this period, but not a big one. Today, we have Instagram, we’ve got all this stuff, they had nothing to use to connect with each other. If anything, most of these records would have only been played on local radio. 

Martyn Pepperell: In a sense, it’s a case of multiple discovery or simultaneous invention, right? Often an idea arrives in several places at the same time, but only the most famous person who had it is usually remembered.

Ivan Liechti: For this compilation, the cliche to mention would be The British Invasion in the mid-sixties. You know, like, The Beatles are coming, they’re huge, they do great songs, and everyone loves them. I’m half okay with that. What’s interesting for me about this period, though, is, yes, there is a bit of a British influence, and you can feel it in the tracks. But I find myself asking the question, what could US music have been without the British invasion? You can feel it in these tracks. You get the blues, but you also get lots of different stuff that never appeared in the British bands.

Martyn Pepperell: How do you get to the point of being able to assemble a compilation like this? I guess you spend a lot of time in record stores first.

Ivan Liechti: To be honest, it’s the internet today. Now, the records I look for are so specific and almost impossible to find in Switzerland or in Europe. You can find some, but it's quite difficult. But at the same time, there are still some amazing record stores in my hometown of Lausanne in Switzerland.

Martyn Pepperell: The other part of this equation is having the right record label to release the compilation. How did you get to know Michael from Efficient Space?

Ivan Liechti: I met him through Julien Dechery. Basically, I had a mixtape for sale in a now-closed shop in Paris called Colette. Julien went in, bought the mixtape and loved it. We’ve been in touch ever since. That was just before Efficient Space put out his Skygirl compilation with DJ Sundae. We emailed and chatted a lot, but we only met in person three years ago. He’s a really nice guy, and he introduced me to Michael. 

Michael had been asking Julien for a follow-up to Skygirl, and Julien said, I think Ivan has a project. I also need to say that by this point, Julien and I had already put together a playlist for Efficient Space called LOSSLESS, which was more like eighties and nineties shoegaze music. When Michael asked me, I sent him ten or eleven tracks, I think ten of those tracks ended up on the Ghost Riders compilation.

Martyn Pepperell: Outside of your musical passion projects, you’re also one of the co-founders of the +41 //DIY graphic design agency. I’ve been noticing a trend toward creative directors and graphic designers getting involved in reissue compilations over the last few years.

Ivan Liechti: I guess when you go to art school, you are usually open-minded about some kind of stuff. Back when I was studying, there were a lot of people who were into their own things. Some relate to techno, but whatever it was, they got really deep into it. It’s the same when you do advertising design or graphic design, you try to go really deep into something. With the Ghost Riders compilation, I didn’t have to do the graphic design, which was cool. It’s really nice to have someone else do it. Steele Bonus did that. 

What I did do is work really closely with Elise Gagnebin-de Bons. Elise was in art school with me. One part of her work has always been colour collages. She has quite a dark world, and I thought she would be great for the art. I gave her a pile of sixties magazines I had and said, okay, cut into that. I felt very happy with what she did. 

Martyn Pepperell: Finally, if you could have a filmmaker use music from Ghost Riders, who would you pick?

Ivan Liechti: Well, I just read today that William Klein died. That would have been fantastic. He did some amazing documentaries. You need to see the one on Little Richard. It’s one of the best music documentaries ever, and it works with the era. Otherwise, I don’t know who would be very nice. Someone quite downtempo, maybe Kelly Reichardt, who made that film with Will Oldham, Old Joy. She has a really nice universe.

Ghost Riders is due for release in 2xLP, CD and digital formats through Efficient Space on the 14th of October. Pre-order here. By the way, there’s a tote bag as well.

WATCHING:

Here’s a couple of music video and live studio clip-type things from some friends of mine.

How about a quick lo-fi music vid from my favourite young Tāmaki Makaurau rap duo, Church & AP feat the bro, Deadforest.

Speaking of Tāmaki Makaurau, Eddie Johnston, aka Lontalius, one of the greatest New Zealand singer-songwriters of a generation, has been uploading some acoustic renditions of his songs on Tiktok. Here’s ‘Comfortable’.

FIN.