Gowns
RECORDING RED STATE, BY ERIKA
“So we are back in ‘Lost Angles’ finally after a very long time away. The weather has barely changed. We spent a month in South Dakota during one of the most beautiful times of the year where the air cools a bit and the mosquitoes die and the air turns golden, gets this golden quality to it where all the countryside looks like an old ’70s photograph and the river gets a little higher and the grass begins to lose its green. I haven’t been home in autumn for 5 years, and it had quite a strange effect on me, and then as we were about to leave i realized that i hadn’t taken a single picture of our whole time there. I have pictures from Bloomington to Brooklyn of possessed devil cats and warlocked theramin players, giant desert tortoises in New York back yards, couples giving each other sneaky hand jobs on the lawn in central park, Ezra lying down in the asylum cemetery, row house palaces in Balitmore, everybody looking like shit in the van, even a spot in Utah where we were going to make out until some hikers came around the corner (hurried rearranging of clothes, innocent headscratching). But no South Dakota.
No shallow prairie lake where Ezra felt ghosts underneath the bridge, no house across from the cow field where there was huge scary thunder and lightning every night. EVERY NIGHT. The outside lit up every half-second like from a giant strobe light and huge BOOM!s every half minute so that you had to look out to see that the field wasn’t on fire, unplug all the computers, sit in the dark. No pictures of the country cemeteries, not even the one with the gravestone from the 1800s that says “BABY” on it. None of the indian burial site where the teenage stoners got murdered by prison escapee brothers in the 1960s, the one with the UFO sightings. The middle of nowhere bars with rocky mountain oysters on the menu. None of it.
Who’s to say that we were even there? It seems hard to believe. The only proof being a half-done record. But THAT, maybe that is proof enough. Because when you listen you can tell that it could have only been recorded in a shit-ass meat-packing city in the midwest where people shoot crank mixed with grape soda-pop and the grocery checkers don’t even know what tofu IS and all there is to do is get shit-faced at the bar and ask everyone how their kids are doing. We are about to mix it and it’s going to be strange to listen again because i know that we sound just a little bit downright scared. Scared of the thunder and lightning, scared of the huge sky and the punyness, the emptiness, the arbitrary nothingness below it.” “Out here, there is nothing to hide behind”.
Red State is released on CD in Europe by Upset The Rhythm.
ERIKA ANDERSON grew up in the dive bars and rotten graveyards of South Dakota. She played guitar and oscillators in the cultworthy southern Calfornia noise-folk outfit Amps For Christ, co-fronted the halloween hospital rock band Blue Silk Sutures with Tara Tavi, and has her own impressive stable of four-track acoustic death rock songs. She is a fierce and beautiful Nordic freak and an effortless memorizer of pop lyrics.
EZRA BUCHLA was born in the same crumbling Berkeley mansion the Gowns practice in today. He is the son of synthesizer inventor Don Buchla and is an accomplished music technologist in his own right. He contributed the signature disjointed horror show vocals, noise slices and sour church melodies to the first four (or six?) albums by the Los Angeles rock band Mae Shi, thereby garnering piles of jittery praise and crushing disdain. He has also recorded an absurd number of half-baked solo and collaborative experiments.
COREY FOGEL was born in Flatbush New York! He is a ruthlessly intelligent and disturbing percussionist, or “drummer.” His collaborations are far too numerous to list in full, but he has worked live and in the studio with Wadada Leo Smith, Mark Dresser, Gerry Hemingway, William Winant, John Oswald, Barbez, The Mae Shi, Carla Bozulich, The Curtains, and The Mountain Goats.