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BIRCHVILLE CAT MOTEL with LEE RANALDO - 30th December 2004

Format: CD Label & Cat.Number: Celebrate Psi Phenomenon #1011 Release Year: 2005 Note: silk-screened cardboard cover / A live set from New York’s Tonic on New Year’s Eve 2004 Price (incl. 19% VAT): €14.50 Warning: Currently we do not have this album in stock! More Info “New York is pretty different from Lower Hutt. In a lot of ways. But that doesn't mean New York is BAD... its just 'different', y'know? I was down the Lower East Side recently with the guy from Sonic Youth. He was as cool as he looked in Rip It Up magazine! We tuned our guitars and bagpipes, the lights sunk in anticipation, and we buried the audience in a cloud of fairy-dust so thick you could eat it with chopsticks and people with shovels tried to dig their way out of it but it just got deeper and deeper and when the sound couldn't get any louder my soul gnawed a hole in the roof with its teeth and the cast of Friends descended on angel-wings, urinating in ecstacy on the assembled masses in what looked like a tornado of golden glitter. WOW! Afterwards we cleaned up the mess and I got Phill Niblocks mobile phone-number on a napkin. Yeah... New York is just 'different'.” [label info] “Now this is a bit of an odd combination, AQ faves Birchville Cat Motel, aka Campbell Kneale going one on one with none other than Mr. Lee Ranaldo, he of indie noiseniks Sonic Youth. How did it come about? Why did it come about? Who knows, and who really cares as the results speak for themselves. These two fellas, with some kind of 'noise' as their common thread, managed to conjure up some gorgeous dronescapes, that eventually ramp up to some serious NOISE, before drifting back into dreamy shimmery bliss. A single hour long track recorded live in New York at the Tonic in December of 2004 on BCM's last trip to the US, this is a slow building drone, equal parts chord organ, guitars, maybe even bagpipes (at least that's what it sounds like) all sort of swirling and reverberating, with distant tinkling chimes and simple stretched out melodies. About halfway through, Ranaldo kicks it up a notch and lets the distortion rip, a huge wall of white hot guitar, kept in line by a simple and very spare single snare-hit beat, a sort of free noise doom, with little bits of backwards electronic rhythm, and keening lawnmower like guitar melodies. The last fifteen minutes is a sweetly languid wind down, distortion disengaging, rhythms drifting into the ether, melodies dissipating like clouds after a storm, all as the chatter of the crowd slowly encroaches on the barely there sounds that moments later are not there at all.” [AQ]