Eloquent Tirades
Archival oracle Jed Bindeman - the high priest of diggers’ fantasies - one half of the Freedom To Spend label, co-owner of Portland’s Little Axe record store, and Grouper’s bandmate in Helen, returns for a second brain-curdling session for Berceuse Heroique, unfolding through 90 minutes of disintegrated, wavey, outsider pop, congealed acid, new age, somnolent folk, EBM and avant-drone enigmas from the far margins. In other words, call it higher education.
Honestly, we're still getting our heads around the last one, but Bindeman's second psychedelic sprawl goes even deeper - the guy has spent the last however many years rifling through dingy basements, thrift stores and private collections for DIY oddities that tell a parallel history of this thing of ours. You only need spend a few seconds looking through the Concentric Circles catalog, or the output of Freedom To Spend, the label he co-runs with Pete Swanson, for a sense of scale, and his mixes continue the same thread, mining, dusting off and showcasing music that’s slipped almost entirely from view. What stands out - with all his endeavours - is Bindeman’s interest in obscure music that might have had popular appeal if it wasn’t for bad timing or circumstance - it’s all just a little bit off, but rarely outrageously weird or unlistenable.
‘Eloquent Tirades’ opens out into a kind of alternate vapourware timeline, all dissolved, screwed loops, canned strings and dub synths, then into waves of pastoral field recordings, skeletal FM synths and breathy, sensual recitations. Bindeman admits that his purpose was to top his last mix, spending more time on the transitions and edits and making listeners feel as if their brains "had been scrambled and rearranged…”, and in that mode he follows a through-line that helps navigate his spread of seemingly endless influences and inspirations. There's faded, windswept post-rock and Americana baked into pinging tablas, dramatic, ghost mode operatics, pebbly Japanese sound collage, sonorous, flute-led court music and homespun, crackly solo piano - and that's just the first side.
Somewhere on the flip, Dieter Moebius, Conny Plank and Mayo Thompson's cartoonish 'Das Apartment' makes an appearance, quickly folding into ritualistic drum machine incantations, alien-voiced electro and proto acid sounding something like This Heat retooled by Adrian Sherwood, as a dusty echo-mutated drum solo rattles around the stereo field for a while before hitting a microtonal symphony. But - thing is - we're never too far from poppier waters, spreading half-songs that twist acoustic arpeggios with synth outbursts and boxy reverb, echoing voices, sometimes songs - you just want to know what it all is - every single track - all of it - all gold.
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Edition of 115 copies, no digital
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Archival oracle Jed Bindeman - the high priest of diggers’ fantasies - one half of the Freedom To Spend label, co-owner of Portland’s Little Axe record store, and Grouper’s bandmate in Helen, returns for a second brain-curdling session for Berceuse Heroique, unfolding through 90 minutes of disintegrated, wavey, outsider pop, congealed acid, new age, somnolent folk, EBM and avant-drone enigmas from the far margins. In other words, call it higher education.
Honestly, we're still getting our heads around the last one, but Bindeman's second psychedelic sprawl goes even deeper - the guy has spent the last however many years rifling through dingy basements, thrift stores and private collections for DIY oddities that tell a parallel history of this thing of ours. You only need spend a few seconds looking through the Concentric Circles catalog, or the output of Freedom To Spend, the label he co-runs with Pete Swanson, for a sense of scale, and his mixes continue the same thread, mining, dusting off and showcasing music that’s slipped almost entirely from view. What stands out - with all his endeavours - is Bindeman’s interest in obscure music that might have had popular appeal if it wasn’t for bad timing or circumstance - it’s all just a little bit off, but rarely outrageously weird or unlistenable.
‘Eloquent Tirades’ opens out into a kind of alternate vapourware timeline, all dissolved, screwed loops, canned strings and dub synths, then into waves of pastoral field recordings, skeletal FM synths and breathy, sensual recitations. Bindeman admits that his purpose was to top his last mix, spending more time on the transitions and edits and making listeners feel as if their brains "had been scrambled and rearranged…”, and in that mode he follows a through-line that helps navigate his spread of seemingly endless influences and inspirations. There's faded, windswept post-rock and Americana baked into pinging tablas, dramatic, ghost mode operatics, pebbly Japanese sound collage, sonorous, flute-led court music and homespun, crackly solo piano - and that's just the first side.
Somewhere on the flip, Dieter Moebius, Conny Plank and Mayo Thompson's cartoonish 'Das Apartment' makes an appearance, quickly folding into ritualistic drum machine incantations, alien-voiced electro and proto acid sounding something like This Heat retooled by Adrian Sherwood, as a dusty echo-mutated drum solo rattles around the stereo field for a while before hitting a microtonal symphony. But - thing is - we're never too far from poppier waters, spreading half-songs that twist acoustic arpeggios with synth outbursts and boxy reverb, echoing voices, sometimes songs - you just want to know what it all is - every single track - all of it - all gold.