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viewing 1 To 14 of 14 items
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CD
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EGGS 013CD
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2012 release. Paper Dollhouse is the work of Astrud Steehouder. Her debut album, A Box Painted Black, on Bird Records, the femme-folk off shoot of the Finders Keepers family is a dark minimal gothic folk which comprises haunting vocals, acoustic guitar, effects pedals, found sounds, slide projector, and minimal electronic atmospherics. Inspired by early '60s electronic pioneers Delia Derbyshire and Eliane Radigue, bleak British television soundtracks, minimal dark electronica, Scott Walker, Arthur Russell, Christine Harwood, and France Gall, the music combines simple folk songs with environmental and electronic textural sounds and visuals to create a pared down, beautiful experience. A Box Painted Black was named after the 1988 cult horror film Paperhouse, Atrud explains: "I watched the film when I was about ten and was really drawn in by it. Something about the quality and tone of it, the psychology and aesthetic of that struck a chord and been with me ever since. I'm into actual dollhouses and models of things as well. I used to make these little viewfinder boxes containing little scenes in them as a child for fun, I found them magical." Steehouder has created a new kind of (black) magic on her debut release. A Box Painted Black was recorded entirely in the kitchen and garden of her London home amongst the incidental sounds of trains passing, children playing, door slams, and running water. The songs retain the ambience of the place they were recorded. Often first takes and recorded as soon as they were penned, the songs combine an immediacy and raw quality which fills the album with a naivety and emotive dark tonality. Dense in simplicity and thick with silence the songs are restrained, intense, lingering, and decorated with white noise. Steehouder names "bewildering post nuclear landscapes, bleak fields, forests, thunderstorms and archaic industrial objects in the middle of nowhere" as influences. The songs possess a folk pop sensibility rich in mysterious hooks that creep up on you from around a dark alleyway, following you on the all the way home at night. There is a raw completeness to the work, the body of which is clearly a deep and evolving spectrum. Hypnotic, meditative, and a midnight look through the keyhole of Paper Dollhouse's secret garden.
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EGGS 015CD
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2012 release. A reissue of Suzanne Ciani's Seven Waves, originally released in 1982. Following Finders Keepers' first time compendium of Suzanne Ciani's vintage electronic private music, custom made commercials and sound effects with Lixiviation (FKR 053CD/LP), and providing a brilliant companion piece to the recently deleted limited edition handmade edition of her ultra-rare 1970 art house installation record Voice Of Packaged Souls, released via the Demdike Stare/Finders Keepers Dead Cert company in 2012, the sonic sisterhood at Bird Records now present a specially packaged 30th anniversary edition of the record that "The Delia Derbyshire Of The Atari Generation" regards as her finest hour with this internationally exalted commercial debut Seven Waves from 1982. Ciani on Seven Waves: "Originally released exactly 30 years ago, Seven Waves was my first commercial album. It took two years to complete and was first released in Japan in 1982. Seven Waves is special for me because it expresses my love for and fascination with early electronic instruments. With this album I blended my classical-romantic sense for melodies with the astounding possibilities offered by electronics. Because most of the instruments on Seven Waves no longer exist, this recording is a historic footprint in the evolution of music, unique to its time yet still valid today." With a portfolio that boasts music from the Xenon pinball machine, the sounds for the Meco Star Wars theme, the Atari TV commercials, and the electronic sound effects in the original Stepford Wives film (amongst many others), the mutant electronic-music CV of Suzanne Ciani is proof that in a 1970s commercial world of boys toys, monopolized by male-dominated advertising industry, a woman's touch was the essential secret ingredient to successful sonic seduction. Recently, and rapidly, enjoying a new resurgence amongst fans of all streams of electronic, experimental and neo-tantrik music, Suzanne Ciani collaborates with the Finders Keepers/Bird family to present a new generation with the record, seldom celebrated this side of the Atlantic, that truly turned her career from behind-the-scenes library composer to a leading light in modern American electronica, spearheading the musical new-age movement, and drawing indelible parallels with krautrock, early techno, and electronic soundtracks. Features nine bonus tracks in the form of Voice Of Packaged Souls, the art house project album released on vinyl on Dead Cert in 2012; Available here for the first time ever on CD.
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EGGS 014CD
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2012 release. 1612 Underture is a 12 chapter sound poem based of the mistreatment and memory of the Pendle Witches who were executed in Lancashire, England, on August 20, 1612. Although the nucleus of the project is based on historical events, The Eccentronic Research Council identify an uncanny relevance to the current political and social climate. The album's dialogue bounces between an unspecified contemporary time zone and the events leading up to August 1612, contrasting fictional/factional occurrences around various Pendle Witches whilst being routed by a modern day travelogue to Pendle as seen through the eyes of a Catholic nun and priest. On the journey, there's an encounter with 1960s feminist poetry, mythical news stories, a synthesizer folk duet, and the raising of a dead witch via a ouija board. It's a concept record. Exactly 400 years since the trials and execution of the 12 women now known as The Pendle Witches, a purpose assembled collective of artists, sound designers, experimental pop performers, writers, poets pay homage to the legendary Lancastrian sisterhood. One part political commentary and feminist manifesto and two parts theatrical fake-loric sound poem, the 1612 Underture is a sonic mass of multi-disciplined creative reactions, both rehearsed and improvised, built around a skeleton narrative of semi-fictional and symbolic events involving a modern day pilgrimage to Pendle Hill to explore the misconceptions that led to these miscarriages of justice. The collaborative reactions of Adrian Flannagan (Kings Have Long Arms), actress Maxine Peake, and Dean Hohner (I Monster), under the umbrella moniker The Eccentronic Research Council, take their collective experiences in theater, music technology, television, pop cultural archiving, and radio to reimagine a time and place, baron of authority and religious faith, where the unified working classes and alternative thinkers are mocked and persecuted at the hands of a paranoid government and monarchy. Stylistically, The ERC opt for a vast array of mechanical music machines and synthesized effects to create this conceptual non-populist pop using analog and acoustic equipment alongside tape manipulation, vocalizations, and spoken word, remaining faithful to a pre-digital and unpredictable era taking cues from Mort Garson, Suzanne Ciani, Sorel Hayes, Joe Meek, Daphne Oram, JP Massiera, and Delia Derbyshire, amongst others. Conceived with the same ambitions and goals of an electronic Smithsonian Folkways record, the 1612 Underture is a concept album that aims to reevaluate and positively re-contextualize an important historical and cultural feminine incident.
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EGGS 011CD
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2011 release. Remaining faithful to her influences of Germanic märchen tales, Eastern European children's cinema and mechanical pop music, Jane Weaver expands her critically acclaimed Fallen By Watchbird (BMS 022CD, 2010) concept album with The Watchbird Alluminate, a ten chapter sequel-of-sorts, by employing a cast of new actors and narrators to reinterpret her surreal "cosmic aquatic folklore" twelve months after the first installment. Here, Jane experiments with volks-music in its purest, most innocent form using modern tools to retell and recycle second hand stories. Inspired by post-war cinematic interpretations and hand-me-down mistranslations of global folk tales Jane has collaborated with a close-knit group of musicians, noisemakers and vocalists/narrators to create automatic-music and re-illuminate an eleven-page novella about telepathy, technology, lost-love, wiccan, war and watchbirds. As part of ongoing voice and electronic experiments with the people behind Pre-Cert Records The Watchbird Alluminate includes a wordless vocal introduction and interlude from both Demdike Stare and the elusive Anworth Kirk while the spoken-word narrative of Finders Keepers' lost American pop folk singer Susan Christie is reinterpreted by Ghostbox's Focus Group with results comparable to Ruth White's 1968 electronic/vox interpretations of Baudelaire's Flowers Of Evil (1857). Jane's own Bird Records label roster contributes two new cover versions of Weaver's self-penned tracks re-sung by Italian singer Emma Tricca and Rochdale's time-slipped falsetto soloist Magpahi (in a track evokes cinematic scenes from Night Of The Hunter (1955) or The Innocents (1961)). Elsewhere vintage soft-pop royalty appears in the form of a lead vocal from Wendy & Bonnie's, Wendy Flower, a close friend and confidant of Jane's since their first collaborations in New York and London in 2006 at the request of Jarvis Cocker for his guest curation at the Meltdown festival. Other lead performances from Weaver add a new poetic twist to the story in both solo capacity and alongside Samandtheplants' Sam McLoughlin whose Supernatural Lancashire library project (with Alison Cooper) from 2010 still resonates as one of the finest releases of 2010. With a unique approach to making non-linear mechanical music this pop-up collective adds a further creative perspective to the oft mistreated "concept album" virtually eliminating genre distinction in favor of communal noise - a unique product of genuinely independent music in 2011 which continues to sprout further branches.
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LP
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EGGS 011LP
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LP version. 2011 release. Remaining faithful to her influences of Germanic märchen tales, Eastern European children's cinema and mechanical pop music, Jane Weaver expands her critically acclaimed Fallen By Watchbird (BMS 022CD, 2010) concept album with The Watchbird Alluminate, a ten chapter sequel-of-sorts, by employing a cast of new actors and narrators to reinterpret her surreal "cosmic aquatic folklore" twelve months after the first installment. Here, Jane experiments with volks-music in its purest, most innocent form using modern tools to retell and recycle second hand stories. Inspired by post-war cinematic interpretations and hand-me-down mistranslations of global folk tales Jane has collaborated with a close-knit group of musicians, noisemakers and vocalists/narrators to create automatic-music and re-illuminate an eleven-page novella about telepathy, technology, lost-love, wiccan, war and watchbirds. As part of ongoing voice and electronic experiments with the people behind Pre-Cert Records The Watchbird Alluminate includes a wordless vocal introduction and interlude from both Demdike Stare and the elusive Anworth Kirk while the spoken-word narrative of Finders Keepers' lost American pop folk singer Susan Christie is reinterpreted by Ghostbox's Focus Group with results comparable to Ruth White's 1968 electronic/vox interpretations of Baudelaire's Flowers Of Evil (1857). Jane's own Bird Records label roster contributes two new cover versions of Weaver's self-penned tracks re-sung by Italian singer Emma Tricca and Rochdale's time-slipped falsetto soloist Magpahi (in a track evokes cinematic scenes from Night Of The Hunter (1955) or The Innocents (1961)). Elsewhere vintage soft-pop royalty appears in the form of a lead vocal from Wendy & Bonnie's, Wendy Flower, a close friend and confidant of Jane's since their first collaborations in New York and London in 2006 at the request of Jarvis Cocker for his guest curation at the Meltdown festival. Other lead performances from Weaver add a new poetic twist to the story in both solo capacity and alongside Samandtheplants' Sam McLoughlin whose Supernatural Lancashire library project (with Alison Cooper) from 2010 still resonates as one of the finest releases of 2010. With a unique approach to making non-linear mechanical music this pop-up collective adds a further creative perspective to the oft mistreated "concept album" virtually eliminating genre distinction in favor of communal noise - a unique product of genuinely independent music in 2011 which continues to sprout further branches.
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EGGS 027LP
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After almost two years of busy tour schedules and widespread unanimous critical acclaim, longstanding experimental pop crusader Jane Weaver finally commits one of her most requested projects to vinyl in the shape of dedicated mini-album The Amber Light. Originally issued as a limited CD-only bonus disc for The Silver Globe album global re-release, The Amber Light surprised fans expecting B-sides and outtakes with what for many stood up as its own isolated project. It includes some of Jane's best material to date including the pulsating synth anthem "I Need A Connection" which became a radio favorite, also appearing on film and fashion shows throughout the latter half of 2015. The Amber Light also includes further collaborations with Finders Keepers's Andy Votel as well as long-awaited collaborations with Suzanne Ciani, Tom Furse (keyboardist from The Horrors) and Sean Canty from Demdike Stare. Recorded over the course of two long weekends between tours with her custom-built band operating at an energetic optimum, The Amber Light captures Jane exuding the passion, experimentalism and justified confidence which is instantly reflected with some of her best songwriting to date. On limited amber transparent vinyl.
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2CD
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EGGS 019LTD-CD
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The Silver Globe expands: as one of the most industrious female multi-instrumentalist songwriters in modern pop, Jane Weaver literally doubles the content of her acclaimed 2014 album for the double-CD version of this synth-ridden special release. Unlike so many other big label "campaigns" that vied for PR attention via ego-fuelled video promos and down-your-throat advertising, this unassuming, dedicated, focused piece of experimental vocal pop was in no way spoon-fed to editors or playlisters. Nor did it fall within the lines of what might have been considered fashionable or culturally relevant. The Silver Globe was judged on its own merit as a brilliant, uncompromising pop record. By the end of 2014 The Silver Globe had been announced as Piccadilly Records' best album of the year, earned a spot in Gilles Peterson's top ten Worldwide Tracks of the Year, garnered repeat plays from virtually every specialist DJ on BBC Radio 6 Music (among many more global radio stations), found DJ mix support from Andrew Weatherall, and filled most of the pages in a 12-month diary with gig and festival requests. This expanded double-CD edition of The Silver Globe includes a second full-length disc called The Amber Light, which carves a niche between new age motivational music, radiophonic folk, and snarling krautrock, echoing the kosmische stylings of The Silver Globe with the punk urgency of '80s domestic synthpop. The Amber Light's four original songs are accompanied by three exclusive instrumental themes (including a commissioned theme from an American vampire film), and three collaborative re-workings/duets based on tracks from The Silver Globe, with co-production from Tom Furse (The Horrors), Andy Votel, Suzanne Ciani, members of Demdike Stare, and original Silver Globe inhabitants Pete J. Phillipson and Martin King. Substantiated by other deluxe editions, including a silver vinyl version of the The Silver Globe (EGGS 019LTD-LP), a series of compact cassettes, and a single release of standout robotic-roller-rink track "Don't Take My Soul" (as a split single with Bird label-mate Tender Prey (EGGS 020EP)), the Silver Globe/Amber Light project reciprocates the positive energy shared by Jane Weaver's loyal audience and a wide host of new converts who have allowed her self-sufficient songs and synthetic soundscapes to flourish. The Silver Globe is still turning.
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Cassette
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EGGS 021CS
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An exploration of warped, dream-like atmosphere and taught, noise-ingrained electronics, Paper Dollhouse has evolved from the solo work of Astrud Steehouder into an expansive, cinematic project now involving visual artist Nina Bosnic. Recorded with a stronger focus on electronic processes and with a deeper, light-starved aesthetic, Aeonflower's emboldened use of crushed-noise dynamics takes the London-based group's acclaimed 2012 debut, A Box Painted Black, into darker, murkier, and more thrilling territory. Aeonflower is the slow descent of a newly discorporated spirit into a fogged, neon lagoon, a drowned world still lit. If the first album was a box of raw secrets with hints of obscured folk roots, Aeonflower is the endless rain of expression, experience, and change. On this outing, both artists' vocals are expressive, forgoing complex lyrical concerns for minimal text invested with emotive power. Opener "Oracle" bleeds into "Stand," with the first of Steehouder's haunted vocals, a fragile minimalism augmented by barren guitar. "Helios" sees a drum machine kick and ride cymbal pin down a dark, enveloping vocal duet until "Psyche" obliterates it all with billowing noise, a thrilling shock to the system. The swirling synths and suppressed emotion of "Your Heart" peak in the centerpiece "Diane," a shadowy piece highlighting Steehouder's minimalist approach. Side two acts as a mini-suite, with Diamanda Galás-inspired vocal abstractions and walls of sound coming down with standout ambient track "Black Flowers." Dark and light interplay beautifully on album closer "Siren," a turbulent if ambiguous build-up of harmony and noise. This cassette edition follows a vinyl edition on the Night School label, and coincides with UK press and radio support and a UK tour.
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EGGS 020EP
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Jane Weaver follows her acclaimed 2014 album The Silver Globe (EGGS 019CD/LP) with a split single of free, visionary, exciting independent pop music. Album highlight "Don't Take My Soul" (co-produced by Andy Votel) combines domestic synthpop with falsetto melodics and 10cc-sounding prog pop arrangements, something like Kate Bush karaoke fused with a J-pop Erykah Badu. The track ends with a guitar solo from Badly Drawn Boy that sounds like a cryogenic experiment from his pre-Bewilderbeast days. Label-mate Tender Prey (Laura Bryon) brings her inimitable drummy saccharine-tinged pow-wow punk to the fray with the effortless "Undisputed Heavyweight Champion of My Heart."
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EGGS 016CD
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2014 reissue. Originally scheduled for release on Halloween 1985 (but delayed until Feburary '86), this privately pressed post-punk/broken-folk collective concept LP features personnel pulled from the ashes of The Fall's original lineup and Blue Orchids, the Manchester post-punk band that backed Nico during her live performances in the early '80s. Led by Manchester punk icon Una Baines, The Fates released Furia in 1985 and then disappeared into the annals of UK punk purgatory. With all the DIY traits and snarling attitudes of Manchester's smart-assed punk retaliation, the band delivered a record of haunting, mechanical folk and pastoral drones. This virtually unknown LP, with a backstory that unites sleeve artist Linder Sterling (Ludus), Spider King, Martin Hannett, Tony Baines, Martin Bramah, and John Cooper Clarke with the 16th century Pendle witches, is a vital missing piece in Manchester's self-help anti-pop industry. Lost in the ether, lauded by collectors, and likened by Mark E. Smith to the Third Ear Band, this unclassifiable arty-fact renders tags like "pagan punk" utterly inadequate. File under-ground.
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EGGS 016LP
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2016 repress; LP version. Originally scheduled for release on Halloween 1985 (but delayed until Feburary '86), this privately pressed post-punk/broken-folk collective concept LP features personnel pulled from the ashes of The Fall's original lineup and Blue Orchids, the Manchester post-punk band that backed Nico during her live performances in the early '80s. Led by Manchester punk icon Una Baines, The Fates released Furia in 1985 and then disappeared into the annals of UK punk purgatory. With all the DIY traits and snarling attitudes of Manchester's smart-assed punk retaliation, the band delivered a record of haunting, mechanical folk and pastoral drones. This virtually unknown LP, with a backstory that unites sleeve artist Linder Sterling (Ludus), Spider King, Martin Hannett, Tony Baines, Martin Bramah, and John Cooper Clarke with the 16th century Pendle witches, is a vital missing piece in Manchester's self-help anti-pop industry. Lost in the ether, lauded by collectors, and likened by Mark E. Smith to the Third Ear Band, this unclassifiable arty-fact renders tags like "pagan punk" utterly inadequate. File under-ground.
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CD
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EGGS 019CD
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Like all good parables, Jane Weaver's sixth solo album, a concept album called The Silver Globe, is as multifaceted as it is beguiling. Part coming of age/part cautionary tale and part romantic peon, this 12-track synth-ridden post-apocalyptic prog-pop opus is based on tightly embroidered, non-linear recurring themes and inspired by esoteric stories, cosmic imagery and refiltered past experiences. Written from the optimistic vantage of a long-standing female independent artist, in a desperately-evolving industry, Jane's latest set of self-penned pop abstractions combine mechanical rock/recycled European cinema/empyrean vocalizations and an arsenal of rescued vintage synths to create a futurist narrative backdrop of an allegorical post-apocalyptic landscape. Assembled from disparate studio sessions recorded sporadically since the release of the critically-acclaimed Fallen by Watchbird (BMS 022CD) LP, The Silver Globe explores new collaborative relationships featuring tracks co-produced by David Holmes, guest appearances by Australian vintage space-rockers Cybotron, a recycled chunk of an '80s Hawkwind track, an intricate Damon Gough guitar solo, some Suzanne Ciani waves and post-production/remix flourishes by Andy Votel. Enjoying her most fertile period to date, Jane's reactions to the music of Italian synth stars Daniela Casa and Doris Norton with local DIY artists like Una Baines' The Fates (released on her own Bird imprint) provide yet another launch pad for Jane's latest musical trajectories. Paying homage in title to the troublesome Andrzej Zulawski (Possession) film of the same title, and combining influences from a wide range of lost pop and cinematic obscurities, Jane's new album uses the motif of a distant, mythical, impenetrable silver planet which eventually reveals itself to be a simple reflection of the beholder's own souls. Loosely metaphorical in its content, The Silver Globe witnesses Jane's commitment to self-pressed, conceptual pop music reach its next logical progression without compromising her natural skills as a talented, melodic song-writer preserving pop vaudeville over pre-packed vacuity.
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EGGS 019LP
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2015 repress. LP version. Like all good parables, Jane Weaver's sixth solo album, a concept album called The Silver Globe, is as multifaceted as it is beguiling. Part coming of age/part cautionary tale and part romantic peon, this 12-track synth-ridden post-apocalyptic prog-pop opus is based on tightly embroidered, non-linear recurring themes and inspired by esoteric stories, cosmic imagery and refiltered past experiences. Written from the optimistic vantage of a long-standing female independent artist, in a desperately-evolving industry, Jane's latest set of self-penned pop abstractions combine mechanical rock/recycled European cinema/empyrean vocalizations and an arsenal of rescued vintage synths to create a futurist narrative backdrop of an allegorical post-apocalyptic landscape. Assembled from disparate studio sessions recorded sporadically since the release of the critically-acclaimed Fallen by Watchbird (BMS 022CD) LP, The Silver Globe explores new collaborative relationships featuring tracks co-produced by David Holmes, guest appearances by Australian vintage space-rockers Cybotron, a recycled chunk of an '80s Hawkwind track, an intricate Damon Gough guitar solo, some Suzanne Ciani waves and post-production/remix flourishes by Andy Votel. Enjoying her most fertile period to date, Jane's reactions to the music of Italian synth stars Daniela Casa and Doris Norton with local DIY artists like Una Baines' The Fates (released on her own Bird imprint) provide yet another launch pad for Jane's latest musical trajectories. Paying homage in title to the troublesome Andrzej Zulawski (Possession) film of the same title, and combining influences from a wide range of lost pop and cinematic obscurities, Jane's new album uses the motif of a distant, mythical, impenetrable silver planet which eventually reveals itself to be a simple reflection of the beholder's own souls. Loosely metaphorical in its content, The Silver Globe witnesses Jane's commitment to self-pressed, conceptual pop music reach its next logical progression without compromising her natural skills as a talented, melodic song-writer preserving pop vaudeville over pre-packed vacuity.
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Cassette
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EGGS 019CS
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Cassette version. "Like all good parables Jane Weaver's sixth solo album, a concept album called The Silver Globe, is as multifaceted as it is beguiling. Part coming of age/part cautionary tale and part romantic peon, this synth ridden post-apocalyptic prog pop opus is based on tightly embroidered, non-linear recurring themes and inspired by esoteric stories, cosmic imagery and refiltered past experiences. Written from the optimistic vantage of a long-standing female independent artist, in an desperately evolving industry, Jane's latest set of self penned pop abstractions combine mechanical rock/recycled European cinema/empyrean vocalisations and an arsenal of rescued vintage synths to create a futurist narrative backdrop of a allegorical post apocalyptic landscape.Assembled from disparate studio sessions recorded sporadically since the release of the critically acclaimed Fallen By Watchbird LP The Silver Globe explores new collaborative relationships featuring tracks co-produced by David Holmes, guest appearances by Australian vintage space rockers Cybotron, a recycled chunk of an 80s Hawkwind track, an intricate Damon Gough guitar solo, some Suzanne Ciani waves and post production/remix flourishes by Andy Votel. Enjoying her most fertile period to date Jane's reactions to the music of Italian synth starrs Daniela Casa and Doris Norton with local DIY artists like Una Baines' The Fates (released on her own Bird imprint) provide yet another launch pad for Janes latest musical trajectories."
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