Showing posts with label Seattle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seattle. Show all posts

August 21, 2012

Universe People Signs to Little Black Cloud Records



In case you missed reading this on my record label site - I signed a new band!

Once upon a time there was band from Seattle, WA called Welcome on Fatcat Records that I liked a lot. I mean A LOT. 


In fact I worshiped their album  Sirs   so much  that I named it my favorite record in 2007. I loved them for their strangely wonderful combination of raw '60s mod garage Rock with the cool Kim Deal side of the Pixies blended in. They delivered an unbelievably interesting combination of something old and new but they sadly  faded away. leaving fans like me hoping that someday an offshoot band would sprout up. 


Enter Universe People in 2012 and one very happy me.


Welcome's female bass/volcalist player Jo Claxton has a new band and I enjoyed their songs so much I pretty much begged to put them out. I worship their angular female fronted energy that has the power of UK Riot Grrrl bands like Huggy Bear with a post punk dose of The Fall added in. 
(Also for fans of  Delta 5 Country Teasers, Wire, Dolly Mixture, The Stranglers,  and  The Breeders  off the top of my head )

So there it is. We have a new member of the Little Black Cloud Record's family : Universe People!


Their debut album will be released February 12th
,   2013   but in the meantime enjoy their  band page  and follow them on  Facebook . A video is in the works right now for their first single so stay tuned for that in weeks to come! 

Read on for their official bio:


Once upon a time, Jo Claxton accidentally wandered from her hometown of Sydney, Australia and ended up in Seattle, WA. In 2010, several years and several bands later, she approached Kellie Payne to play bass and sing with her. The idea was to make simple, angular songs based around sweet but stark girl-vocal harmonies. Jo had recorded six demos in her basement in the winter of 2010 to get things rolling. Next, Jo needed some drums, so she contacted the ever-popular drummer about town named Dave Ramm. This was in a vanishingly small window of time when he was not actually in a band, in March 2011. Universe People were born and began playing out in Seattle. Early in 2012, they recorded 10 songs for a full length LP at the all analog Pool Recording Studio, in Portland OR.

Dave also plays drums in Wimps, and Kellie plays drums in Eyes and Teeth.

Don’t mistake Universe People for a Czech-Slovak UFO space cult. But they could melt your brain and take you to outer space if you let them. Let them!






July 23, 2012

Universe People

Do you like The Fall, Country Teasers, Kim Deal and Mary Timony? Maybe you will like this Seattle trio as much as I do then!  I give you Universe People.

This band features vocalist / bass player Jo whose previous band was another favorite of mine. They were called Welcome and their album Sirs came out on Fat Cat Records. I named it my favorite album of 2007 and wrote a little post about them here.

March 30, 2012

Christopher Thompson : Sunny Day Real Estate Artist

I met Chris Thompson while living in Seattle in the early '90s and if memory serves me right, we went on a date or two. During this brief time period I ended up with a few of his pieces of art and yeah, they rule in a Star Wars tribute sorta way.

Chris is perhaps best known for his artwork for Sunny Day Real Estate but his paintings and tattoo work deserve recognition way beyond that a few album covers and liner notes.




March 1, 2012

March 1st, 2012 : Cause & Effect : Mark Lanegan


It is difficult to fathom what it would be like to own a voice that when it sings, sounds as if the weight of the world is being channeled through it. When I imagine what sorrow, lament, and regret sounds like (with the addition of whiskey and cigarettes) there are a few voices that come to mind. Johnny Cash and Leadbelly would be at the top of that list but Mark Lanegan would be right up there too.

What is strange about an artist owning a voice so distinctly mournful is that hearing him doesn't make me sad. It comforts me in the way that it reminds me that in life there are highs and lows, and the valleys are just a part of living. Mark's voice naturally helps carry the burden of tough times and there is something marvelously reassuring and uplifting about having someone prove that you aren't alone in that temporary pain. I believe people misinterpret the kind of voice Mark Lanegan has for being strictly melancholy but tonight I am out to prove that there is an unmistakable joy and beauty buried in the throats of those who sing the Blues.

From 7PM to 9PM tonight I will spend two hours exploring the multitude of projects associated with Mark starting with the Screaming Trees, his solo catalog, and then the seemingly endless numbers of collaborations that  perhaps he has become best known for. (Twilight Singers, Gutter Twins, Breeders, Mad Season, QOTSA, Maggie Bjorklund, UNKLE, Isobel Campbell, Soulsavers, and so on)

WWW.WRIR.ORG to stream live or 97.3lp FM for locals.











February 7, 2012

Sub Pop Records Artifacts

Found these cleaning out some drawers in my apartment. These are a handful of press photos by Charles Peterson that I have never posted before plus the covers of a few of the Sub Pop press kits I have saves from the early '90s.













January 9, 2012

More 1994 Goodness

Talk all you want about how exciting news of the return of At the Drive In or Refused is but Lync will always be more important to me than any of those other bands. And holy crap I can't believe their amazing final (and firey) show from 1994 at the Velvet Elvis is now on You Tube. 2012 is looking up!

This is yet another time and place I feel very fortunate to have experienced in person and I don't think bass players come any better than James B (plus I got to see bands like Modest Mouse and Sunny Day really take off)

Now all I need to do is convince Sam to let me re-release his early Love as Laughter cassettes. You mean there was music after Lync but before LAL's Greks Bring Gifts ? Yes! And here is a little note about these two brilliant tapes from Sam's web site. One day I will transfer my favorite songs and post them somewhere. People need to hear these lo-fi pop gems.

"This was two years after the dissolution of my band ‘Lync’. I had been living in Olympia, Wa months before and was just running wild and for a while living in the Martin Apartments where my girlfriend at the time, Becca Albee (still a really great friend), lived down the hall. Tae from Kicking Giant, Chris from Karp, and a bunch of other scene luminaries lived in the same building. In the two years I lived in Olympia I moved liked 5 times, couches, haunted houses, the lucky 7 house, wherever. I started recording on a friend’s 4-track (I think it was Corin Tucker’s or Tracy Sawyer’s) and eventually my cousin Layne Staley gave me a Tascam 8 track that I proceeded to go nuts on. I remember right before Beck’s One Foot in the Grave was recorded Beck came over to my apartment and my room was just packed with electronic stuff and recording stuff and video games and whatever and I think he was kinda impressed at my strange existence. Or totally weirded out. We got along off the bat, I liked him because he was so weird, I was such a wild spazz back then who knows what people thought. I just had too much energy.


Music gave me somewhere to put all my restlessness and I recorded tons of songs, which I first put on cassette compilations. The first one was called ‘Love as Laughter’ and the second one was called ‘Clear Sky = Blue Dye’. I gave these out to friends, sometimes they would pay for them because I never had money."




PS: If you can actually find me in this video (I am in there!), I will send you a prize.

October 13, 2011

October 13th, 2011 : Cause & Effect : NIRVANA

Tonight from 7PM to 9PM on WRIR I will explore the musical family tree that is NIRVANA. I am quite certain there will at least something for the experts on the group to those of you who still insist that Mudhoney were better.

I moved to Seattle in early 1994  at the age of 23 (right before Kurt's suicide) to work at record label called C/Z Records but I obsessively followed all things Seattle starting in the late '80s.  Because of this early passion for grunge, my private collection of early Sub Pop material (both printed matter and music) is rather extensive and in turn my knowledge of this scene comes from first hand experiences.

Rather accidentally I lucked into a part time job cleaning an artist's studio at the top of a lovely lakeside house that was a few doors down from where Kurt and Courtney lived. The side window overlooked a part of the Cobain property that offered a birds eye view of part of the building we all later learned in the press was where Kurt died. If there was terrible time to move to a city you spent half a decade worshipping, this was it. I grieved with the world as kid from NJ who grew up loving the music of NIRVANA and I certainly never expected life to lead me literally to death's door.

I think my story in many ways isn't exceptional. There were a lot of us who were around the same age as the members of NIRVANA and felt a deep connection with their songs, music that was rebellious, at times angry, and had lyrics that were ambiguous enough to make them your own. We all sort of grew up together and whether you knew the group or not, the death of Kurt represented not only the end of a band we loved, but our wild, troubled youth as well.

Tonight will not only be a nice excuse to visit some music that I know changed my life but maybe a few of yours too.

I can't legally read on air some of what the opening page of NIRVANA's press kit for Bleach says but I have posted it here for all to enjoy. I think this gives you a pretty good hint of what to expect from my show tonight.

UPDATE: The final tracklisting can be found here.
UPDATE 2: Download the whole show here.

October 6, 2011

October 6th, 2011: Cause & Effect : Death Cab For Cutie

JJ is at the helm of Cause &Effect tonight and his band of the evening is Death Cab For Cutie. Tune in from 7PM to 9PM tonight to hear about the band's influences, peers, side projects, and followers. Stream the show live at www.wrir.org.

June 20, 2011

Before Built to Spill,

frontman Dug Martch was in the Treeople.



This is an ancient press photo of the band taken in early '90s I guess?

I have a lot of warm feelings towards this band, not only because they were my favorite band from the Pacific Northwest (take that Nirvana) but because they were the first band to ever stay with me (1990 or 1991), inspired me to want to learn how to play guitar, and in an effort to help the band as much as I could, eventually move to Seattle to work for C/Z Records, the label they were on. The only irony here is Dug left the band just as I moved out there but lucky for me, Built to Spill was right around the corner.

On a sad note, member Pat Brown committed suicide in 1999. He was the first person I knew who took their own life and the first of too many good people from that area to leave us too early.

June 19, 2011

Sub Pop Records Press Kits Circa the Early '90s

I have been digging around my closets and unearthing many treasures to further prove my obsession with Seattle in the late '80s / early '90s. Here are some press kits that a friend who worked at Sub Pop at the time sent me. We were pen pals and often his letters were written on the back of these things- posters, pictures, and handbills.

Here are some press kits I have that are anywhere from 6 to 20 pages each.