Slang Editorial :: Never Underestimate The Value Of A Holla'

Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Collecting Every Shiny Pearl, Old and New

As you may know, I am an obsessive slave to my tastes, an epicure of the enrapturing sonic landscape, and when a musical act ascends into the upper sphere of my brain's delight there is no holding back my quest to track down every little dribble of aural errata the band has laid to tape.

In many cases, this diligence to Discovery is an involving and rewarding process, as some bands--Spoon, Beck, Pavement, to name a few--have some career-high type jewels buried in b-sides, singles and comp releases, and tracking them down not only provides you with more tunes by dudes you love but also helps fill out the overall picture of who exactly these folks are and what it is that they want to do.

Sometimes, of course, a band does have b-sides but ~~they're just terrible~~ would have been better off staying unheard. And then, there are the great many bands that just don't have any at all.

I am lucky that in my own personal blackbook of long-lasting groups dearest to my heart, the majority of them have much more to hear beyond the major canon (so that after I'd explored all their standard fare I was gifted with a new mission to delve into the apocrypha), falling into two categories of either having also recorded many albums worth of "extra" tunes (Deerhunter, My Bloody Valentine, Breeders), or else not having much in the way of b-sides but just having so so many official records that it doesn't matter (Eno**, Pink Floyd [yes, seriously]).

There are, however, a few for whom what you see is what you get and there ain't nothing else. Of them all, my most favoritist of favorites is the Louisville band The Rachel's, without doubt one of the most special-to-me bands ever.

I'm sure I've written about The Rachel's before (and I'd look for links if Slang's archives weren't so annoying to search through), so I'll spare you the whole nine, but suffice it to say that they are one-of-a-kind, and I love them more than I could possibly tell you. They also, however, have a depressingly small discography for a band that stayed together for twelve years, limited beyond their five albums to one 12 minute remix on a split EP, one 18 minute EP track and one 6 minute b-side on benefit compilation.

And that is it--three measly extras (which admittedly cover over 35 minutes of music, but whatever). I will admit that I just learned yesterday that there is allegedly a cd-r of demos and curios that was sold during their 2002 tours called Significant Others, but I have never known of anyone owning this or even talking about it on the internets, so I'm leaving that aside for the time being.

Of these three, two I have known and loved for some time: "Full On Night (Recension mix)", from the Full On Night split EP with Matmos, is a reinvisioning of the centerpiece track from the Rachel's debut record, Handwriting, and in my opinion bests the original. While the original clocked in at a slightly longer 14 minutes, it has only about eight minutes of music before fading into a full six minutes of ambient noise. However, the Full On Night version--apparently a stitching of live takes and studio re-recordings--just builds and builds into something more fast and furious than any other recording bearing The Rachel's name. It begins for the first four or so minutes at first sounding like a similar albeit more guitar-present version of the original, but a subtly louder guitar strum at 4:02 clues you in that things are going to head in a different direction and it only gets more intense from there. The "Recension mix" is a track that I have difficulty to recommending to general fans of the band because, frankly, the guitars at the end becomes so loud as to enter the category of "abrasive"###--a concept so alien to their music that "Recension" is the lone Rachel's track that my mom has ever asked me to turn off--but it is honestly amazing to me and I think represents a very high points of a possible future the band never explored$$$$.

"Technology Is Killing Music", on the other hand, does not fall outside the standard cradle of Rachel's sound but instead plays like an overture of Systems/Layers leftovers, craftily sutured into a full 18 minute suite of sound. Released in March 2005 as the last entry of a special Three Lobed Recordings EP series, it sadly also plays as an unexpected goodbye, as the band has released nothing since and are now officially in "deep hibernation". It doesn't come close to displacing any of their full-lengths (or even Full On Night) as essential Rachel's to own, but it is a very beautiful movement of prime last-period electronics/samples-influenced Rachel's, and is an invaluable addition to the collection of any Rachel's fan who like myself cannot get enough of their fascinating soundscapes and musical visions of the world.

As you might tell, both of these tracks I have heard too many times to count, nearly as many times (or more) than the tracks of the five albums proper. For that reason you might think that I, crazed obsessor over all minutae termable as "loose ends", had listened to the final b-side, "Those Pearls...", most of all, as it represents not only 33% of all extra-album Rachel's, but is also a considerably more palatable and brief 6 minutes of sound. But yet... for a number of reasons, I am pleased to tell you that I have only been able to track it down to listen to for the first time just yesterday. (Or should that be "!!?!"?)

Really? How could this be true--me, not only being a crazed lover of both Rachel's and b-side collections, but also one with an obsessively dogged determination in tracking down such items that runs second to none? The only answer is that it's a mystery to even me. If I were forced to say why, I think I would speculate that the difficulty I experienced in locating a copy of the out of print compilation from which it was taken, or even/therefore an mp3, made it a big challenge (I never did find a copy even, just a blog). And then that challenge seemed only to enlarge my fear of a lack of payoff if I tried too hard to find it and it turned out to be a nothing-at-all... and so I looked, found not, and moved on.

But so, now that I've finally found it, what do I think? Is it slept-on genius? Tossed-off and forgettable nothingness? What???

It's NICE. Really inconsequential, really not so special, and yet really really NICE. And sad. I know it was released in '96, placing it somewhere near the beginning of the band's life, but there's something soft and wistful to this song that sounds very sweetly like "good-bye"--even coming down to the quiet-break three minutes in where the thesis replays and the song then slowly fades--dies?--out, elegantly and tenderly. I don't confuse any of that to mean "great", but interesting and essential, to me? Oh, yes.

If you've stuck with me this long, allow me to reward you with each of the three tracks I've taken such pains to describe. If you like Rachel's or want to follow along, download and enjoy them all. And if you've never actually heard Rachel's before, stop right now and go download some of their records, starting with Selenography%%%%%, then Systems/Layers, and then The Sea and Bells. In fact, depending on what you want out of the band, I would say that all of their records are great starting points except perhaps the installion commission Music for Egon Schiele, which I find a little boring (it's just a trio rather than full band)--though even then it seems that half the Rachel's testimonials I find on the internet swear that Egon is die beste.

Anyway, thanks, and enjoy:

Rachel's - "Those Pearls...", from The Lounge Ax Defense and Relocation comp (1996)

Rachel's - "Full On Night (Recension mix)", from Full On Night split EP with Matmos (1999)

Rachel's - "Technology Is Killing Music", from eponymous EP (2005)

Special note: Thanks to ipickmynose.com for finally making "Those Pearls..." available to me after all these years.

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And up next, a look at yesterday's eMusic Selects band, Victoire...

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PEARLY ENDNOTES:

**: An Eno note on this subject: he is actually the creator of perhaps the single most lusted-after b-side I've ever dreamt of hearing, a cover of the Velvet Underground's "White Light / White Heat" which has a story befitting it of the greatest mythic b-side lineage ever. This track, recorded by Eno in 1997 to be sold at a Warchild benefit auction is so rare and hard to find that it almost does not exist. In Eno's words:

The song is sold with a CD cover I designed; it's the only copy in existence but it is to be sold with full exploitation rights. That means if somebody buys it they can release it; just like with an ordinary record, whoever releases it can take the profits that a record company would take, which are for the sales of the actual object itself, but as always, they pay a royalty to the artist. And these will go to War Child.

The recording allegedly sold that night for £40,000 and there were whispers that it might soon find it's way out for release, but twelve years later i've neither only seen anything nor even found mention of it. And so it goes...

###: All of this seems somewhat less crazy when keeping in mind that prior to Rachel's guitarist Jason Noble got his start in Louisville's shortlived post-rock band Rodan, folks who knew a thing or two about making a noisy racket.

$$$$: Also, I purposefully didn't mention it, but check out the other track on this EP, Matmos's "The Precise Temperature of Darkness". This 18 minute track is theoretically a second "remix" of "Full On Night", but it's clear that if any original Rachel's is indeed sampled, it comes entirely from the closing minutes of the "Recension mix"... which is a way of saying that it is more or less 18 minutes of music my mom would also rather I not play in the car with her.

%%%%%: One of my three favorite pieces of music of all time, and I couldn't be pressed to name the other two.

Labels: b-sides, loved sounds, mp3, music, Rachel's

posted by Nihilist Loves Hate, Hates Everything at 3/11/2009 10:37:00 PM 0 comments

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