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2LP+CD
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GRLP 659LP
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Now available on double vinyl. Two years after the Walkabouts' successful return with the chart album Acetylene, a new Chris & Carla album, Fly High Brave Dreamers, finally was released in 2007. It had been way too long (1998) since the two had last appeared as a duo. Musically, a lot had changed since then. Of course, the trademarks remained audible: the warm, excellently unobtrusively produced basic mood, Eckman's guitar playing, the vocal harmonies. But the result is an upbeat version of a Chris & Carla record. One half was produced with analogue instruments as a digital production, a sort of folktronica draft, the other five songs as live and direct as possible with the support of Al Deloner (ex-Midnight Choir) and Jason Victor (Steve Wynn, Willard Grant Conspiracy), among others. The eleventh song, 'Salad Days' by the Young Marble Giants, provides the credo for this album: Stay direct and keep everything as simple as possible.
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2LP+CD
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GRLP 360LP
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Now available on double vinyl. Chris & Carlas' Life Full of Holes presents a wide range of friends and performers to create an evocative album easily the equal of The Walkabouts' best efforts. Guests range from R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and Tindersticks. Musically, everything from baroque European folk tunes to avant-garde noisemaking surfaces, creating an overall feeling of hushed power throughout. There are almost too many highlights to pick out. Life Full of Holes is an underrated gem by consistently underrated performers.
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2LP+CD
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GRLP 432LP
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Second studio album by the guiding lights in The Walkabouts. This time around Chris & Carla are credited for playing a variety of instruments: guitars, upright piano, Swinger 500 organ, Wurlitzer electric piano, percussion, synthesizer, loops, programming and assorted noises. Just like the main band, the Chris & Carla duo is steadily developing and refining their sound. Rolling Stone Magazine wrote about this Chris & Carla album: "An expedition to the dark heart of America," and that pretty much sums it up.
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6LP/3CD
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GRBOX 1026LP
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The Velvet Fog: The Studio Recordings box set contains three double-LPs plus three CDs, carefully remastered for vinyl versions of the three studio albums. Life Full of Holes (1995) and Fly High Brave Dreamers (2007) for the first time ever on vinyl, and Swinger 500 (1998) now as a double-vinyl set. All three LPs come in a gatefold sleeve and the whole set is rounded by a LP-size, 16-page brochure including tons of unreleased pictures and extensive liner-notes plus rare bonus tracks.
Chris Eckman, Ljubljana 2020: "Carla and I had played a handful of duo acoustic shows in Europe during the winter of 1993 as a way to promote the New West Motel album. On that short run of shows, we recorded the concert in Hamburg and that became the Shelter for an Evening record. I guess the idea of Chris & Carla as a studio recording entity came of out of that low-key start. Our debut studio endeavor Life Full of Holes, was never supposed to have been an album. We had originally planned to make an EP with the esteemed Seattle producer Steve Fisk known for his work with many of the bands we had come up through the clubs with . . . At the end of our Moroccan journey we stopped back in London for a one-day session with the Tindersticks. They had become friends and pretty much our favorite band ever since they had asked Carla to duet on their classic song 'Travelling Light' the year before . . . Carla had brought an unstable stomach back from North Africa and she had to stop the session a few times to wrestle with that. The condition gave her voice a dark, dusty texture. She liked the effect and, in the end, didn't want to re-sing 'Velvet Fog' and 'Take Me,' the George Jones song that she did as a duet with the band's singer Stuart Staples . . . The two subsequent Chris & Carla albums were both made in a similar sprit. They relied heavily on serendipity. Raw trust. An Eno-like faith that if you invest on the front-end in atmosphere and context and choosing the right people to work with, you will end with something intriguing. We never did rehearsals with any of the musicians that played on those records. First reactions and intuition were the governing ideas. On Swinger 500 we used drum machines and programmed beats for the first time and brought in modular synths, horns, strings and banjos to add hues and textures on top. It still one of my favorite recording projects ever . . . A decade forward and a continent away we assembled in Ljubljana to record Fly High Brave Dreamers. We cut the album in two halves. At first, we worked in a small room on a laptop -- sculpting songs more than playing them. And then we decamped to a basement studio on the edge of town, for a live-tracking sessions that included a supple Slovenian rhythm section..."
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