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Irene Rible on 11/19/2009 at 05:40PM
The Legacy of the Tower Recordings
After listening to the live P.G. Six recording posted a few weeks back, I have been discovering the variety of post-Tower Recordings projects available on the FMA.
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Tower Recordings were a group of friends in upstate New York who began releasing their mysterious, ramshackle bedroom folk in 1995 on a few different small labels, but my first exposure to their music was after the release of their album Furniture Music for Evening Shuttles. I had never heard of them before, my reasons for picking up the album had more to do with my curiosity on what their take on Eric Satie’s self-proclaimed “furniture music” would sound like. “Furniture music” was proto-ambient music, an idea proposed by Satie, who wanted to create repetitive music that was only meant to be heard in the background. Banal today, but a radical proposition for music in Satie’s time (see WFMU’s LCD article “Flabby Preludes for a Dog: An Erik Satie Primer" for a detailed account). But what I heard was far from background music. Furniture music perhaps, but only if you’re in the living room of some highly evolved, avant-garde race of ESP record collectors living on Mars. Years ahead of the "freak-folk" fad and Finnish underground music that emerged a decade later, the album contains dissonant experiments with noise, lots of tape manipulation, hints of pagan folk, meandering jams, and an eerie cover of an Os Mutantes song that devolves into a nonsense language before being invaded by a Brother Ah rallying cry. |
Having grown up on the West Coast in a Sixties throwback town of new-agers and drop outs, I felt like I’d heard this album before I ever heard this album and it really hit home. Tower Recordings was able to sonically reproduce the ineffable vibe of fractured yet gentle souls waiting to lift off to that next floor in the cosmic elevator. They could feel as heavy and dark as a thick fog rolling into the Redwood forest, as celestial as the monarchs fluttering in the sunshine like so many shards of stained glass, as lost as the stoned guitar strums of an acid-fried street musician, or as found as an Alan Watts seminar.
The last record released by the Tower Recordings was 2004’s The Galaxies’ Incredibly Sensual Transmission Field of the Tower Recordings but several musical projects from former members have continued since then including Matt Valentine and Erika Elder, Hall of Fame, Samara Lubelski, and P.G. Six which you can listen to here. Stay tuned to the FMA for the Tower Recordings live sessions recorded on WFMU currently being mastered by Matt Valentine.
