How is it that I'm just hearing about Index for Working Musik (London, England). Not only does this band have a member of former greats Proper Ornaments, but apparently Nathalia is from the band Drift.
Pedigree like that and a label like Tough Love Records would normally have made me pay attention earlier. "Which Direction Goes The Beam" features a write up from Tom Lax (Siltbreeze Records). That was it. I paid attention, listened and fell head over heels.
This has elements of Syd Barrett, and Hamish Kilgour. Tom Lax mentions This Kind of Punishment and Trespassers W.
This album contains "Purple Born" - an 8 minute masterpiece previously only available of a limited lathe cut.
Listen to their full length release from 2023, "Dragging the Needlework for The Kids at Uphole", also released on Tough Love.
Jim Shepard was a lo-fi renaissance man—poet, musician, early home-taper, sound collagist—who inhabited the fringes of a Columbus, Ohio art rock scene, fronting bands including Vertical Slit, Phantom Limb, V-3 and Ego Summit. He lived hard and died early in October 1998, at the age of 44, leaving behind an imprint in zine articles and home recordings and memories of unhinged performances, as well as a small but influential fan base, whose members included Thurston Moore, David Bowie and Tom Lax (who wrote the liner notes for this reissue).
This three-disc box set collects songs, snippets of recordings, spoken word, answering machine messages, taped interviews and material from a couple of his bands (V-3 and a pre-official version of Ego Summit), as well as a collection of pieces about and inspired by Shepard from sometime collaborators Robert Pollard, Charles Cicirella, Nudge Squidfish, Dennis Callaci and Don Howland.
It is rather a lot of Jim Shephard at 22 tracks and also not nearly enough to make sense of the artist, who comes across as complicated, possibly misogynist (he spits the word “whore” with too much glee for my taste and remembers the girl who coaxed a band member north from Florida only as “a blonde”), enraged and powerfully creative, whether in spare, vulnerable little melodies or in full-on blasts of dissonant noise.
In his poem, “The Death of Jim Shepard,” Charles Cicirella observed, “Jim’s venom-soaked guitar requiems are as charred as his vocals are singed…His live shows were more like indoctrinations into something damp, dark and musty while also electrified throughout from this man’s integrity and sweat. Hell yes, his performances were more like an introduction to an underbelly of light and magic than a music show dealing in the politics of sex.” It is hard to improve upon this as a description of the live cuts.
You also get a sense of Jim Shepard, the artist, who is enough of a hustler to leave a couple of answering machine messages (For a label? A critic? A friend? It’s not clear) when his songs get covered by another band. But he is also enough of an anti-commercial outsider to write songs like “Tabernacle Moneygun,” which starts with the line, “Don’t call me a corporate whore and don’t point that poison pen at me.” You see him in a variety of guises – live and exposed and reading his poetry; accompanying himself with acoustic guitar; covering favorites like Van Morrison, Dylan and Gun Club, and in bands including V-3 and Ego Summit.
Shephard had two art forms, the spoken word and the music, but they were never mutually exclusive. In cuts like “Fuck the Clock,” he riffs verbally against a Nuggets-esque r’n r backing (Mike Rep and Don Howland in an early version of Ego Summit), narrating a noire-ish drugs and drinking scenario. “He feels the burning in his belly feeds the soul parking meter that marks the passing of the time he spends in any one space, he has a lot of unpaid tickets framed on his wall,” Shepard reads, and it’s a rock song, a short story and a poem all at once. When he tells an interviewer how he got to Ohio in “The Blonde and the Body,” a noise of guitar cuts in and out of the tape recording, as if it was always there, playing in the back of his head, whatever he might be doing.
The set includes “Prom Is Coming” a song Shepard wrote with Bob Pollard, the one out of his band of collaborators who had anything like mainstream success. You hear the Pollard in it at once, the minor-key tunefulness, the absurdist poetry, the gentleness of its offhanded lyricism, but it’s a twist or two darker than most Guided by Voices tunes. Shepard could get close, but he couldn’t cross over into the kind of ingratiating rock pop that gets consumed in bulk; there was an invisible fence between him and commercial viability. You can hear it rattling around in his head in “Star Power,” where he mutters, “Star power, cancels itself out, sanded blank, it exists no more, star power is a battery that drains itself out.”
The box set comes with in introduction by Ever/Never label head Josh Gordon, a poem by Jason Baldinger and Charles Cicirella and a long rambling essay by Tom Lax; a third disc collects works by friends and collaborators and one more disturbing cut from Shepard himself in “Loaded Gun.” Amid blistering feedback, the artist unspools a violent poetry. “You don’t hold a loaded fucking gun to your mother’s head/take it all back now, take it all back bitch,” he mouths with lacerating disdain and it is strong, bitter stuff that burns all the way down.
Tom Lax at Siltbreeze Records has been posting a lot of things to Bandcamp - magazines, LPs and back catalogue from Siltbreeze. I guess I missed that he released a compilation of the Victor Dimisich Band (Christchurch, New Zealand) - but Lax recently put up a few copies of that 2013 release on Bandcamp. "It's Cold Outside" was their contribution to the "Time To Go" compilation of South Island psychedelic inspired music on Flying Nun. This song is the only Victor Dimisich Band presence I can find on Bandcamp.
Believe it or not, I've only really known Stephen Cogle's music with Dark Matter, but I know Micah loves The Terminals. I didn't know that prior to VDB he was with Bill Direen in a band called Vacuum Blue Ladder.
The Victor Dimisich Band definitely sounds like a Flying Nun band, but they aren't traditional pop. And you can get most of their output by buying the Siltbreeze compilation LP (which can be found on Discogs). VDB first appeared in the early 1980s, then again briefly in the 1990s.
"You can have 10 copies, just send me your 10,000 BTU air conditioner." - Mac Sutherland
YAK’UZ’Å, #6 1994 (pages 41-42 ) DAVE MCGURGAN, Editor/Publisher
TOM LAX/MAC SUTHERLAND INTERVIEW by CHRIS RICE (PART 4 of 4)
PART 1 with tasty linx
PART 2 right there in the socket
PART 3: fruit salad lives
Tom Lax’s visited Brian Turner’s WFMU radio show on Tuesday 8/26/14. From the WFMU Brian Turner Express: Guest DJ Tom Lax from Siltbreeze Records download here
Drawing of "Siltbreeze Records dude arm wrestling a dinosaur" by Terminal Boredom user 'degenerated' from DRAWINGS OUTTA BOREDOM (4/14/11). Used without permission.
8/29/14 5:47 PM update: paperhose (aka tumblr site for one of the great bands of our time, MORDECAI) said: "Professor Dinosaur Mahaffey was NGL contributor, the mag where the comic originally appeared." Thanx paperhose!
"It had this latent ignorant mentality, like fanzines used to be, like Touch & Go and other fanzines, purposely dumb, stupid and idiotic, but funny. So that's where it came out of..."
YAK’UZ’Å, #6 1994 (cover) DAVE MCGURGAN, Editor/Publisher
TOM LAX/MAC SUTHERLAND INTERVIEW by CHRIS RICE (PART 1 of 3 PART 1 of 4)
In recognition of Tom Lax's sixth or seventh visit to Brian Turner's WFMU radio show on Tuesday 8/26/14, we launch a celebration of Siltbreeze with what may be the earliest interview on record: Tom and Mac Sutherland, 1994 style.
From the WFMU BT Express: Tuesday, 8/26/14, 3pm - 6pm: Guest DJ Tom Lax from Siltbreeze Records "Another great annual visit from Siltbreeze Records honcho Tom Lax, bringing yet more esoteric, uncategorizable and otherworldly slabs of wax to confound even the most obscuro-hound WFMU listeners. Even after several years of guest DJ sessions, we've barely scratched the surface of the fabulous motherlode of DIY recordings Tom has in the vaults; expect high grade entertainment, and of course, uploaded photos on the playlist page of the great cover art from the wax he brings."
Of Mac Sutherland, it is written: "Rest in peace malcolm "mac" sutherland, tom's 2nd in command, and the heart and soul of 90's siltbreeze action. i saw him almost every day in the 90's and he always made me smile. he was funny and cranky and one of a kind. i worked right below siltbreeze HQ for years and i always liked getting a visit from mac or his roommate ellen. troo philly peeps!" ― scott seward, Saturday, 26 January 2013 17:33
2014 photo 'Tom Lax and Friend Who Loves Those Who Love Wawa' courtesy of tiffanyyoon.
Tiffany Yoon? She drums for amandaxband, who just issued a record on...Siltbreeze! BUY IT HERE
There's no shortage of info about Siltbreeze's history on the internet. If you want the long view, try this detailed 2006 Tom Lax interview/overview by Scott Soriano at Terminal Boredom.
3/15/06 interview/overview by Brian Howard at Philadelphia City Paper: "It had never been Lax's plan to start a label; photocopying 150 issues of a fanzine and pressing 1,500 vinyl records are quite different propositions. Lax's grandmother had taken out an $800 life insurance policy on him, a policy he had the option keeping or cashing in. 'That,' says Lax, 'is how I started Siltbreeze'."
VICE? VICE. 7/23/08 Any bands you wished you'd never even emailed back and were shitheads to deal with? TJ: "Probably. To be honest, I can't remember...No one's really a problem and everybody is pretty easy to deal with this go-round. Local bands always have a tendency to be problematic, but I solved that issue by not having any. Again! Yet!"
[2014-uh-oh-local-bands-coming-for-you-update: see amandaxband above and wooderylove and faroutfangtooth]
Believe it: Siltbreeze/Image Scavengers at The Institute of Contemporary Art - University of Pennsylvania ran from 4/30/14 to 5/11/14!
updated siltbreezerecords.com with handsomely redone shop!
older, derelict siltbreeze site (March 2006 - Sept 2010)
cobwebbed siltblog - hundreds of golden posts, however, and cave parlor of Roland Woodbe. Educate thyself!
Tom Lax and Siltbreeze at Fuckin' Record Reviews? Google sez we have much to choose from.
We have a full interview in the latest issue of Maximum Rock and Roll - MRR #376 • Sept 2014 - Interviewed by Tom Lax of Siltbreeze Records. Get yours today: http://maximumrocknroll.com/mrr-376/
