MAGNETOPHONE [U.K.]
lost in edit
magnetophone‘s ‘the man who ate the man’ slipped by me for a while, i only caught up with the cd many months after it was released. they’re a duo from birmingham in the uk, and ‘the man…’ is the 2nd album, following ‘i guess sometimes i need to be reminded of how much you love me’. it’s a fractured mix of intricate, often dense, guitars married with precision electronica – a fusion that can be tired and hackneyed in some hands, here however they pull it off. collaborators include breeders‘ sisters kim and kelley deal, as well as hms ginafore, fence collective and p.g. six. the above mp3 is a curio – j.m. lapham of the earlies creating a 15-minute re-edit of the album, including not only album tracks, but how own additional original material, studio out-takes and field recordings.
DEPARTMENT OF EAGLES [U.S.]
noam chomsky spring break 2002
department of eagles claim to have been started as a joke – literally pissing around in their shared college bedroom with samples and shoddy instruments, making self-described ‘beat pastiches’. fortunately, someone was of sound mind enough to give daniel and fred some encouragement, and many years later ‘the whitey on the moon uk lp’ arrives (‘whitey on the moon’ being their originally joke name, already owned by a uk band). with press claiming it to be a “less florid radiohead, low-tech underworld or even an upbeat robert wyatt” (london telegraph), it looks as if the project has surpassed DoE’s own expectations. much like magnetophone, it’s another successful marriage of electronics and traditional instrumentation, albeit a little more raw (and all the better for it).