FuManchu
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Posts: 33
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« Reply #3 on: June 30, 2011, 10:53:09 AM » |
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“What is this project exactly?”
When talking about His Name Is Alive, it’s hard to deal with concrete explanations. Mostly His Name Is Alive is Warn Defever, with a vast array of helpers, collaborators, & players. HNIA started out on 4AD (think along the lines of Cocteau Twins, very dreamy with lots of reverb and fuzz), but have always put out cassettes, records, and CD-Rs on their own in between their full-length albums. They sort of go through phases, but never seem like they are just style tourists. Influences range from Jimi Hendrix to free jazz to Motown to noise to just about every type of music under the sun.
The above-mentioned Ft. Lake was an album released in 1998 and seemed to focus on (amongst other styles) soul and r&b, but threw in a few rock and rockabilly songs. As with other HNIA records, lots of songs were recorded and reworked, with not all of them making it to the album. Those musicians who had recorded songs with Defever that had not ended up on the final release were acknowledged in the liner notes with the note "...recorded songs that regrettably will not be released at this time." Included in that list is a Jason Martin, but I was wondering if it was the same Jason Martin as our beloved SF59 frontman. Trey Many was the drummer for HNIA during this period, but was also doing his own thing with Velour100, and would later go on to be the drummer for SF59 (amongst other things).
Ft. Lake followed 1996’s Stars On ESP, which was a delightful Beach Boys pastiche with gospel flourishes thanks to Lovetta Pippen, my favorite HNIA vocalist. Stars On ESP plays like a label sampler for the fictional ESP label, with each track switching singers and styles, throwing in everything from country to slowcore. If you wanted to get into HNIA I’d recommend picking up the CD version of Stars On ESP off of Amazon for a few bucks. There is a 15-track version, but go for the 21-track version that has the Nice Day EP as bonus tracks.
Other past projects have included a Neil Young tribute recorded on a spool of wire, electric pinecones (and the accompanying soundtrack resulting from an amplified cone), various remix and tribute projects, a few ESP Family discs (faux Depression-era folk recordings), and a couple of 10-disc box sets collecting rarites.
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