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LP
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KEPLARREV 020LP
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The Fun Years, comprised of multi-instrumentalists Ben Recht and Isaac Sparks, have been making music together since the turn of the century, producing intriguing interrogations of ambient, drone, post-rock, and turntablism. Originally released in 2008 on the now-defunct Barge Recordings, baby it's cold inside is perhaps the high watermark of their discography. Equally concerned with microtonal nuance and harmonic intensity, it is both a product of its time and something well past it. The chief protagonist is surely the turntable, deployed to create woolly, evocative loops from unidentifiable source material that recall, at times, the work of Philip Jeck or Jan Jelinek -- churning, roiling, hissing, atrophied textures further articulated with nuanced processing and buoyed by baritone guitar drones and anti-riffing. The title of opener "my lowville" feels like a wink to the famed slowcore duo, with spare post-rock motifs hovering in a dusty ether, slowly consumed by distorted washes of rich, harmonic sound. One of the most satisfying aspects of the album is that despite the recumbent nature of most of their sound design choices and compositional proclivities, Recht and Sparks are loath to sit still. "auto show of the dead" is a serpentine piano/guitar exploration full of subtle detail, preceding the immaculately titled "fucking milwaukee's been hesher forever," in which the tactile delights of clicks and cuts are liberated from the laboratory and allowed to slum it in the world of tape gunk and '90s plate reverb. Later, "re: we're again buried under" presents an inky black ambience that feels truly expansive and almost overwhelming, and closer "The Surge is Working" tears apart an anthemic shoegaze dirge at the seams, leaving only billowing filtered noise and negative space in its wake. Presented here with a brilliant remaster by LUPO, baby it's cold inside should be considered alongside records like Belong's October Language and Polmo Polpo's Like Hearts Swelling -- an arresting early aughts ambient marvel that warrants ongoing investigation.
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LP
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BRG 009LP
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Ben & Isaac began The Fun Years in 2004. In the intervening years, they have made some of the most memorable and distinctive drone-pop albums to have come our way, evolving from layered ambience to a hybrid sound that's impossible to pigeonhole. Their setup of synths, turntables and guitar has lent their music a quality that's halfway between the haunted loops of Philip Jeck and the porous wall of sound so typical of My Bloody Valentine, without really sounding like either. Their drones are forever engaging and never quite follow the trajectory you'd assume or expect, often bursting into violent shards of sound. After 2008's critically-acclaimed Baby, It's Cold Inside, several festival appearances and contributions to Kompakt's Pop Ambient series, The Fun Years now return with a new album, their finest to date. Ben and Isaac haven't lived in the same city for several years, so their recording sessions have necessarily become less frequent and more intense. Splitting time between Ben's makeshift recording studios and Isaac's bedroom tomb, The Fun Years spent marathon recording sessions constructing, blurring and honing their sound. These sessions, coupled with some adventurous road tests performing the pieces in such uncharted venues as an air traffic control tower and the guts of a Richard Serra sculpture, imbues the album with a rich patina seldom heard in new drone experiments. This is most visibly displayed in the first half of the record, where shorter songs fizz with melodic repetition and almost traditional structures. The second half, by contrast, showcases a more harsh and artificial tone, offsetting the serenity of the opening with a more aggressive sound palette punctured with slow and dense skittering decaying into sparse passages and layered synth meditations, acting as a visceral yet cathartic fade-out for this wonderful album. Limited one-time only vinyl pressing of 500 copies for the world. Unique artwork and labels for the LP version.
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CD
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BRG 009CD
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"With God Was Like, No The Fun Years continue to experiment with turntable and guitar while retaining a sound that listeners have grown to recognize as an infectious, memorable style. God Was Like, No is not dissimilar from what you would expect from Cambridge/Madison-based The Fun Years, although upon deeper listening, the subtleties of a well-seasoned group further developing their sound begins to take hold. Ben and Isaac haven't lived in the same city for several years, so their recording sessions have necessarily become less frequent yet more focused. Splitting time between Ben's makeshift recording studios and Isaac's bedroom tomb, The Fun Years spent marathon recording sessions constructing, blurring and honing their sound. These sessions, coupled with some adventurous road tests performing the pieces in such uncharted venues as an air traffic control tower and the guts of a Richard Serra sculpture, gives God Was Like, No a rich patina seldom heard in new experimental recordings. Refining an already exceptional formula is a tough thing to do and The Fun Years -- masters at their craft -- tread these waters with ease."
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CD
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BRG 005CD
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Restocked. Rated the #1 release of 2008 at Boomkat! "In 2007, The Fun Years released their first album with Barge Recordings. Life-Sized Psychoses was well-received by a diverse fan base of drone junkies, post-rock nostalgics and picky ambient collectors. It was clear that across the board, The Fun Years had struck a nerve; they were able to successfully reach different listeners while jeopardizing zero artistic merit. Audiversity.com put it well: "They understand the pros and cons of being at each polar end, inspired by both the classics and the unknown, and aim for a balance between idiosyncrasy, unpredictability and accessibility." True, yet their music is far from being crossover; more so a unique salient musical language which Ben and Isaac continue to utilize and a developed creative style that almost every type of underground music fan can find beauty in. Forged at the peak of The Fun Years' musical abilities and a significant broadening of raw musical sentiment, Baby, It's Cold Inside is not a record to be taken lightly. Once again 'exploring the pleasures of slow evolution, repetition and decay,' as music writer Susanna Bolle perfectly put it, but this time there is a much wider dynamic range, spanning from massive swells of guitar distortion to microscopic pulses, almost inaudible fragments. They harness compositional energy, focus it and release it in powerful blows, while exercising their innate sense for timing and restraint. The sense of artistic control achieved on Baby, It's Cold Inside is extraordinary, so much as to say The Fun Years have transcended the preconceptions of drone music as both a genre and scene."
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CD
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BRG 002CD
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"The Fun Years' new full length CD entitled Life-Sized Psychoses is a 50-minute composition combining drones, textures and stretched-out progressions. Split into five tracks (although we at Barge prefer listening all the way through), Life-Sized Psychoses is a perfect balance of soundscape meets song. A duo of turntable and baritone guitar, The Fun Years have disguised their instruments with atmospheric textures comprised of obscure samples and blissful repetition. The result is a stream of audio magma, filled with dreamy sound washes and subtle phrases that effortlessly tumble over one another. The Fun Years could be called experimental, but Life-Sized Psychoses is very well mapped out. As artists such as Stars of the Lid and William Basinski achieve, The Fun Years use time as a musical tool without pretense. They concoct thick layers of rich drone and underlying harmony that artfully conjure notions of memory, space and the subconscious. While Isaac Sparks' sampling creates a thick haze of pops and crackles from abstracted vinyl recordings, Ben Recht's guitar work of arpeggios and open tunings draws the listener into the world of The Fun Years."
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