Last week was stressful. I wrote my last postcard to you in a daze, worried about my pet rabbit, Mouse (name chosen because she had big ears and looked like a mouse. I know, I know), who had stopped eating and entered the early stages of GI stasis. For those of you unaware, rabbits have a somewhat insane digestive system that essentially acts as a one-way food conveyor belt (fun fact: this means that rabbits cannot vomit!). If this system stalls for any reason - such as your rabbit manages to eat half a fucking cushion when you’re away for the weekend and so is blocked up by cushion fluff - you have about 24 hours to get it restarted or it’s highly likely the animal will die. Don’t worry; after several trips to the vets and several hundreds of pounds evaporating out of my bank account, I can gladly say that Mouse is back to her old sassy self. However, this lead to my partner Megan and I using our Friday evening to rearrange the living room to create a more permanent spot for the buns to live when we’re out of the house, which in turn lead to a reorganisation of my record collection.
I’ve been accumulating records now for about 15 years now (gulp) and I’ve amassed a collection of about 590 records during that time - great for rainy Sundays, terrible for the next time we have to move house. And as I’m sure you can probably guess, I bloody love organising them. So much so that one of the first things I did when the first lockdown was called in early 2020 was to spread my records around the lounge of our flat in Seven Sisters and catalogue my collection on discogs. I think for me the record organising is less of an act of curation, and more an act of remembering and rediscovery. Each record acts as a time capsule of the place and time when you first found it, and so stumbling upon a record you’d forgotten about becomes just as invigorating as discovering it for the first time. In reorganising this time I unearthed a treasure I’d entirely forgotten about, the fascinating Dylan’s Gospel - a record of gospel-style Bob Dylan covers recorded in 1969 by The Brothers and Sisters, a group of L.A session musicians. It’s an odd little record where the main conceit doesn’t always come together, but when it hits oh boy it hits.
In this spirit of discovery, I took some time going through my collection and picked out an assortment of ten tracks from slightly odd or unusual releases that I thought you might enjoy for your postcard this week. I’m kicking off the playlist with an absolute all timer - ‘I Pity The Country’, by Willie Dunn off the superb compliation boxset Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock and Country 1966-1985. Put out by Light in the Attic records, this box set collects rare and out of print records by a selection of Inuit, Métis and First Nations musicians, and also showcases their stories in an extensive set of liner notes. There are gems throughout the tracklist, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so immediately moved by the lyrics in a song as I have upon listening to ‘I Pity The Country’; every line is devasting in its simplicity and directness. There is no fumbling about with meaning here. It’s one of those tracks where I can vividly remember hearing it for the first time - in my friends basement living room, off an old crackly record player - and just immediately falling in love. I hope you do too. Another old favourite for certain readers (I’m looking at you, Tom) will be ‘When I’m Gone’ by the now sadly defunct Brighton-based duo GAPS. I was a little obsessed by this folk/electronica outlet back in about 2015, and adored their debut album In, Around the Moments - I remember feeling like it was exactly the music I’d like to make if I could get my arse in gear. The track I’ve chosen here is a good showcase for their talents - Rachel Butt’s soaring vocals, the subtle electronics that seem to perfectly fit the gaps (look at me making puns this week!) in the music, the trance-like rhythms that catch you in their wash. It’s an album that I’m happy to report holds up in retrospect, and if you’re a Brighton local it’s worth a listen if you happen to be traipsing along the beach during a grey winters’ day (the record even features sampled seagulls in the first track to really sell the atmosphere). Finally, I’ve been trying to figure out where I first heard about the ambient country band Old Saw and for the life of me I cannot remember. I do know however that when I first heard Country Tropics I immediately rushed to bandcamp to snag one of the remaining few records available. A collective of banjo, pedal steel and pipe organ players from Western Mass., Old Saw are sculptors of sound, using drone as the material from which their creations are hacked and hewn. What their songs lack in traditional structure is made up in their lavish texture; it is amazing to me that there can be so much going on in a song that seems on the surface to be relatively static. This makes the record sound challenging or brash, but that could not be further from the truth. It is a stunningly beautiful album, and one that I keep coming back to. I’ve chosen the track ‘Dirtbikes of Heaven, Grains of the Field’ for inclusion here, but any one of the four songs on the record could have easily taken its place.
You can find the Tidal version of the playlist here for your listening pleasure. I’ll be back with some more post for you next week, but until then I hope you dig up some new favourites in this weeks postcard.
Postcard 06: 26/02/2024.
Willie Dunn - I Pity The Country
Karl Blau - Fallin’ Rain
The Brothers and Sisters Choir & Edna Wright - Lay Lady Lay
Shye Ben-Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express - Hu
GAPS - When I’m Gone
Laure Briard - Wonder / Wander
A. Savage - Black Holes, The Stars and You
Peel Dream Magazine - Reiki
Old Saw - Dirtbikes of Heaven, Grains of the Field
Ryley Walker & Kikagaku Moyo - Pour Dampness Down in the Stream