Pleasure Seeking

Sometimes you just need to strip it all back and just enjoy something for what it is. Garage rock is one of those simple surface pleasures. Fun times and dumb times, raw music that jerks and jives, joy for the players and for the listeners.

The Pleasure Seekers were an all-girl Detroit band that started in the mid-60s. What A Way To Die name checks different beers and celebrates drinking, while rattling along with a rockabilly feel and almost punk vocals, all distortion and howling.

It's a terrific record that's highlighted in Simon Reynolds' latest book Shock & Awe. While it's about glam rock and its legacy, and The Pleasure Seekers were definitely not glam (or glitter as it was apparently referred to in the US, a sobriquet that would'nt work over here any more), the chapter on Suzi Quatro does talk of her early days - and her first band was The Pleasure Seekers.

So this is a heads up that there may be more glam rock posts in the next couple of weeks. May. I'm not a massive fan of glam but I am of Reynolds, so we'll see. Schlitz all round.

Sugarloaf

Sugar Loaf railway station in Powys is the least used in Wales. In 2014 it averaged 5 passengers a month. I tried to imagine what it is like to wait there, on that single platform in the middle of nowhere.



I used this picture from Wikipedia as the stem. Through chopping and moshing, PixelSynth and Fruity Loops, and scrunching it together on Audacity, I came up with Sugarloaf. Peace, repetition, isolation, engine rumbles, storms are what I'm trying to convey. 

Blocks & Dots

I've been lost in Podcast Land again. Old Podcast Land to boot. Old episodes of The Bugle, Athletico Mince, No Such Thing As A Fish. Voices and humour - blocking thoughts and dropping dots of serotonin.

It happens. It always does. It passes. It always does.

Music goes out the window. Yet it eventually finds a way back in. I can't listen to my classics, I tear them apart. So it has to be something new. Something that flows, that distracts but also intrigues. Blocks and dots.

Creep Zone is a monthly show on NTS (hey it almost exclusively fills up my feed on MixCloud). It's put together by Marc Schaller and James Pants, he of Stones Throw and my favourite Boiler Room Set. It's really weird. "Dreamy electronics, wired sounds and experimentation" is how they have it. It's really quite good. I like it anyway. The tracklist means nothing to me, the only thing I clocked was David Lynch's Gordon Cole having a boogie in Twin Peaks.



Hello.