| May 31st, 2006 by Jonathan Fletcher (Permalink) Add Comments |
Tower of Label – Finders Keepers
OK, sincere apologies for what must be one of the worst feature names of all time but I just kept thinking Label Lore and then had to keep reminding myself that that’s a feature in The Wire. So, we’re stuck with it- suggestions can be left in the box at the bottom. Any decent ones and I’ll change it.
This then, is the first in a regular series where I will be looking at labels that offer something a little different and out of the ordinary or are seeking to educate and keep alive marginal, obscure or historically important music. Over the next few months I will be casting an eye over imprints as diverse as Ghost Box, Soul Jazz, Treader, El, Trunk and Trojan to name but a few. I hope to use the feature both to explore and promote genres of music as well as also offering mini recommendations within the body of the text.
Anyway, to launch the series in a twisted (nerve) kind of way, I will cast an eye over the unusual scope of releases on the Finders Keepers label.
This month, Finders Keepers release ‘Gluckskugel’ by ex-Can collaborator Bruno Spoerri, which includes amongst its myriad delights, motivational music for factories and engineering companies. This er, unusual collection is typical both of the quality and oddity drive at work in this most choosy of UK labels.
Finders Keepers define themselves as “psychedelic librarians and cosmic-pop-quiz-elitists” which in short results in a discography from the ridiculously sublime to the sublimely ridiculous. Andy Votel is a producer, remixer and recording artiste as well as acting as head honcho of Manchester’s now legendary Twisted Nerve Records. Dominic Thomas is a designer and DJ for ‘B-Music’, one of Manchester’s best club nights catering as it does to all kinds of bloody weirdness and kitschness that you can shake a stick at as well as your funky rump. Completing this obsessive trio is rare disc detective and London (‘White Noise’) DJ Doug Shipton.
The label then specialises in reissuing and compiling forgotten, lost or simply never-released gems from the past. This is undertaken with a healthy irreverence so the serious skips hand in hand with the more quirky. What is serious though is a healthy disregard for standard notions of what makes a classic album, or what is deserving of reissue. Setting out to equally serve the likes of DJ’s as well as the public could wind up with a typically masculine preoccupation with promoting items that are noteworthy simply for their scarcity or at the other extreme providing a platform for music that is just so ridiculously kitsch that it was no surprise that obscurity beckoned in the first place with no justification for sonic resurrection. As it is, each release is unpredictable, lovingly repackaged and often available as a quality and/ or limited vinyl reissue.
So here is a short selection of essential emanations from this most worn fingered of labels, starting with their debut release which is nothing short of a bone fide piece of epic grandeur…
Jean Claude Vannier - ‘L’enfant Assassin des Mouches’
Vannier was Serge Gainsbourg’s greatest arranger (and that is hardly a light compliment in itself) and this work is truly the stuff of legend, picking up the strands from the maestro’s ludicrously brilliant L’histoire de Melodie Nelson. Eliciting orgasmic praise from such luminaries as Jim O Rourke, Stereolab’s Tim Gane and Jarvis Cocker this is a monumentally monstrous work seating musique concrete next to rich warm funky orchestral easy listening next to genuinely kick-ass blistering Psychedelia benefiting from some brilliantly fried guitar underpinning a 140 strong choir. Vannier’s art as an arranger just leaps off the vinyl- there is true depth and clarity here and about the only conceivable reference points I can find is to compare it Aphrodite’s Child jamming with Stockhausen and Henry Mancini. I’m being serious and believe me, you need to own this record. And the cover art is a naked Vannier parading around a French beach in January.
Daniel Vangarde and Jean Kluger - ’Les Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki’
The Yamasuki at the dawn of the 1970’s was a dance craze on the verge of world domination which tragically, never truly made it. However, all was not lost as there is still this sonic testament. A Fench/ Japanese collaboration, its two authors working to a limited budget gathered together what sounds like a mildly restrained fuzz rock act with a penchant for proto hip-hop beats and funky fat bass lines and married them to the Nico Gomez family choir. Oh yes, and on top of this, what sounds like an aging Kung Fu master screams excitations over the top. A more ridiculous concoction you could not imagine and its as fresh as a daisy.
Stanley Myers – ‘Sitting Target’
Stanley Myers achieved worldwide fame with his soundtrack to the ten-laughs-a-minute Vietnam horror story that was The Deer Hunter but prior to this he scored a number of Brit flicks including Peter Walker’s wonderfully dark female prison horror offering ‘House of Whipcord’ and this rarely seen raw thriller from 1971 starring Ollie Reed, Jill St. John and Lovejoy (or Ian McShane if you like). Comprised of four suites (‘Prison’, ‘Outlaws’, ‘The Mews’ and ‘Betrayal’) it moves at a stalkers pace and mixes strings, brass, electronics (sounding incredibly ahead of their time, sounding right now), synths, a hauntingly poignant harmonica and stark acid-infused guitar solos that wouldn’t be out of place on early Pink Floyd albums). Its 17 short tracks are complex and fragmented, richly and imaginatively arranged and the whole work carries an austere air about it. In short, it’s marvellous.
