Evangeline Recording Co

Limited Pressing Bruce Licher Cover of upcoming Hi Electric realease…

“Bruce Licher’s career exemplifies the entrepreneurial, do-it-yourself ethos that few designers and artists embrace today… Exploiting the potential rawness and imperfection of letterpress printing, Licher uses inks that don’t completely cover his surfaces, and he allows relief characters to bite into the page…  The graphic identity for Independent Project Press revels in the material qualities of letterpress printing.  Licher has made a fetish out of the routine ephemera of paper correspondence, creating not only business cards, letterheads, and envelopes, but also his own simulated postal stamps and bank checks.  To create these pieces, Licher assembles minute typographic elements and prints them in multiple layers of ink.  He designs a new piece when supplies run out, insuring that his brand image remains in flux– appropriately “independent” — rather than freezing into a rigid identity.”

– Ellen Lupton, excerpt from Design Culture Now exhibition catalog for the First 
National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, 2000

Hi Electric’s self-titled debut is scheduled for a very limited release and will be available online from Evangeline Recording Co. and in stores May ( ). It will also (unless completely sold out) be available at the merch table this Summer during their tour with MGMT. It is not simply “limited” but, quite literally, each copy is a work of art unto itself.

Letterpress guru and designer Bruce Licher of Independent Project Press created packaging for the album that surpasses the gimmickry of today’s “odd-and-ironic” packaging (you know: discs in plastic molds, gratuitous fold-outs, etc.). What Bruce did, however, isn’t simple letterpress work. He created the packaging, all the dies and cuts and presses are his – as are the colors, and in it you can clearly see why Bruce is the absolute king of letterpress design and production in rock and roll today: his own pedigree as a musician is lengthy and phenomenal. He took his obsession with great cover art and letterpress work and early on began creating artwork for his own bands. Immediately others wanted Bruce to do the same for them, and by “others” I mean other seminal bands and great indie labels such as Merge at the height of their powers. Still the greatest bands he has created artwork for, however, are his own. I’m certain that, given his modesty, Bruce would disagree, but I imagine no one reading this will.

Bruce was a member of Savage Republic, Scenic, and innumerable other bands and projects. He has shared the stage with PiL, The Gun Club, X, The Clash, and far, far too many others to list. His is a marriage of art and product and is one that denies neither art nor functionality and aspires to amplify only the music itself. He has done work for R.E.M., Stereolab, Harold Budd, Malvo, Bardo Pond, and on and on.

When I last worked with Bruce on a project I loved what was created. This packaging, however, is something that Bruce himself is proud enough of to have wanted to put his name on (he did, of course). Knowing Bruce means knowing he is not a particularly proud person and rarely takes credit for anything. But this packaging is simply brilliant and intense. We all knew it the moment it came to us and are more than pleased that Bruce feels as attached to it as we do.

Each copy is numbered and each varies slightly due to the nature of letterpress work and the intensity and number of colors used in the creation of this packaging. They are all, by default, one-of-a-kind pieces. They’ve been created and will never be reproduced. Evangeline Recording Co. is proud to present Hi Electric’s debut to listeners in this manner. To read more about Bruce Licher and his work, check out his site here:    www.independentprojectpress.com

Brand spanking new Hi Electric Video…

Grateful to Burn (coming in February)

Andy Grooms’ record Grateful To Burn begins with the words “unsung songs” and ends with “that’s where I’ll find the unspoken truth“. This wasn’t a conscious decision on his part; no “hidden message” to decipher. But it does, in a sense, sum up what Grateful To Burn gives the listener or rather what it indelibly marks on them. There are innumerable brilliant lyrics to quote but the collective meaning (if such a thing even exists) is, by brilliant mistake, captured between and within those first and last words within a broad palette of sounds.

It is impossible to listen to Grateful To Burn without feeling as if, in some “unsung” place, you’ve both been shown some of that “unspoken truth” and left searching for it at the same time. Andy speaks that truth when he sings to us, “decadent eyes you don’t have to worry because now in time your world will turn blue”, and continues on in the same song to shred to pieces the false happiness we seek in materialism but not without destroying those who would deny it, too. He pronounces in that same song, Decadent Eyes, “And we become what we’re expected and when we should scream we don’t make a sound. We don’t make a sound.”. He calls us all out. He reminds us that we are all acting out parts pre-arranged for us; shoved down our throats and thrust into our hearts since birth. But he includes himself in this judgment, and the song’s righteous indignancy cannot be ignored or argued against. He nails us to the wall he’s already nailed himself to. (more…)

Andy Grooms and his Living Room

Andy Grooms has no biography. He isn’t definable. Nor is he separate from those who know him or his work. He isn’t definable because Andy Grooms writes much as the great Werner Herzog directs and narrates: he takes the outward landscapes of life and proves that they are, in truth, our own personal monologues and interior landscapes. Like Herzog, any subject Andy touches becomes a part of Andy. Andy is the warzone journalist incapable of not crying or of joining up when the fighting becomes intense: he doesn’t attempt to be “objective” and in not doing so shows us the true horrors and, in equal parts, the beauties of our world through his music. He is too human to stand back and watch but too idiosyncratically thoughtful to blindly leap into the flames, even as he is doing just that. What we are left with is something bigger than what he witnesses yet much smaller, as well. We are faced with ourselves and our own world. We see Andy and, in the brutality of his honesty and observations and the severity of his love and disdain, we see our own faces. In it all, he shows us, there is good and bad and then there is all that’s locked up in between. His laughter is ours. His pain is ours. His confusion is ours. He is a conscientious objector with a gun and no bullets.

Andy has lamented, “There is no punk rock piano playing”, noting at the same time that “maybe that’s why all my friends play guitar”. Thankfully Andy never gave much time to the memorization of rock and roll history like a good little indie rock boy should… He was too busy pining over the “genius of John Prine” (as he says) and playing gospel music to do it. Even given the time to he would’ve ignored it all anyway. Strangely, though, it’s easy to imagine placing Andy Grooms; replete with a beat up Acrosonic piano and a Southern drawl (slow and mesmerizing enough to allow for, even demand, the two hours it takes for him to fully tell his detailed and uniquely observant stories) in New York City circa 1977. Not up on stage at CBGB’s or in the crowd at a Ramones show. That was never punk rock, anyway. Andy would’ve done as he does now. But he would’ve been tracked by those who understood what the punk rock ethos really was and made the music they made without regard for the standardized sounds associated with it; those like Tom Verlaine and Jonathan Richman. That ethos was upheld well before anyone donned a leather jacket and shredded jeans. Andy came by it naturally. Honestly. Just as he does his other roots. (more…)

John Murry on Hi Electric

Hi Electric..

Enigmas are easy to come by these days. Pseudo-sensitive art-as-rock bands dripping irony from their records like blood from their teeth. So I suppose that, in reality, the enigmatic is found in the band that refuses to be an enigma.

Memphis, Tennessee has been repeatedly stabbing itself in the back and refusing to pay the hospital bill since Chris Bell wrapped himself and his car around a light pole. Arguably, the greatest drummer in rock and roll history was murdered there and no one remembers his name. It’s Al Jackson, Sr.,  if you yourself need reminding. Here’s to hoping you didn’t. But you did. So pay attention:

When a kid with a ragged heart on his sleeve, not a silver one or one for the girls to swoon over and chase after; when a kid with every card on the table decides to make a record, refuses to stop until it’s done (really fucking done), brings in Kevin Cubbins – an equally obsessive producer – and demands more guitar repetitiously, you inevitably end up with something. Maybe anything. But not with Neil Bartlett. It’s more than something.

Neil’s a bit too smart for it, a bit too full of self-doubt and equal parts self-will, and likes rock and roll. Do you remember when people still did that? When they wrote songs about actual things and people and shit that mattered to somebody? Before “indie rock” became a global circle jerk? When a solitary 15 year old might throw on a record and get goosebumps? Fucking turn it up so loudly he destroys the 50 dollar boombox his brother handed down to him?

DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN PEOPLE PLAYED GUITAR? DO YOU???

Neil does. (more…)