Replikants >> This is our machine

Replikants - "Patty's Trip"
(5 Rue Christine, 1996)

Replikants were a side project of Unwound, with that band's singer/guitarist, Justin Trosper, and its original drummer, Brandt Sandeno.  Trosper is one of my musical heroes and Sandeno is just a ridiculously great drummer.  He stepped away from Unwound's kit in the early '90s and was replaced by his friend, the equally great Sara Lund.  This album has the blunt manifesto This is Our Message as its title, and it was the inaugural release on Kill Rock Stars' experimental sublabel 5 Rue Christine.  (Fun Fact: The label was named after Gertrude Stein's address.)  Replikants were sort of a "post-everything" band, using tape loops, jazzy drumming, ambient soundscapes, Krautrock-style beats, Dadaist vocal samples, and some sax.  Though the liner notes claim "No samplers or drum machines were used on these recordings," they did do lots of actual tape splicing in order to sample from other songs; they just didn't use digital sampling devices / drum tracks.  Yes, tape splicing, where you cut the audio tape with a razor blade and literally tape it to another piece.  "Machine" samples Henry Rollins' primal shrieks of "I'm not a machine!" from Black Flag's "Machine."  The liner notes also say "Dedicated to music deconstructionists past and present and future," and "We recommend listening with headphones and on shuffle mode for the CD."  I bought this CD from Kill Rock Stars mailorder in summer of '98 when my Unwound obsession was consuming me, and got the LP about a decade later.  The CD version of this album has 11 bonus tracks (#'s 14-24).
I'm not sure what "Patty's Trip" is about, since it's built of apparently random word samples, including possibly ones from a Speak N' Spell toy, and some devastatingly cool drumming.  I kind of wish that I knew what the female voice was singing, or that the Dadaist samples made some sort of sense, but part of the mystique of the song is its reliance on chaos theory.  I put this song on a mix tape for a guy named David Reilly, singer of the band God Lives Underwater (whose sole hit "From Your Mouth" you probably know), in '99, after meeting him in a chatroom.  By a stroke of luck, he was friends with Trosper, and passed the tape to him later that year while they were hanging out on the West coast.  Reilly was one of the nicest and most musically knowledgable people I ever knew... He was a big Plexi (one of my top 5 fav. bands ever) fan and admitted that he once threw up at a Mogwai concert due to the sheer loudness.  He died of an apparently accidental drug overdose in 2005, after battling addiction most of his adult life.  Big-time tangent there... As usual, you can feel free to stop reading any of my paragraphs about halfway through, before they devolve.  This song goes out to END, and of course to David.

I'll post a drawing I made of this CD's cover art about 12 years ago once I find it... It's in my old journal for art class.

If you live in the South, you get inundated with bands every March as they travel to or from SXSW in Austin, so I saw 11 bands last week for $10 total.  The best were Des Ark (like Fugazi fronted by Patti Smith), Caspian, Pygmy Lush (like Three Mile Pilot), and Native; Low were a bit disappointing, since they only played new stuff; Thou were their normal sludgy screamy selves; Marathon are a spazzy new local post-hardcore type band; Chiaroscuro played slow, elegant instrumentals; Screaming Females had a lot funkier sound than I'd anticipated; locals Aiúa will probably get signed to a hip post-rock label any second now.  One band, Moving Mountains, cancelled.  I also got a cool little cactus on the day I saw Caspian, and decided to name it Casper as a nod to that band's name and the fact that it's very silver, in fact practically white under certain lighting.


Planets with similar climates: Ciccone Youth - "G-Force" & "Platoon II" (1988), Zoviet*France - "Look Into Me" (1990), Tortoise - "Djed (Bruise Blood Mix [by UNKLE])" (1996), Future Sound Of London - "Dirty Shadows" (1994), Massive Attack - "Teardrop" (1998).


Currently waiting for: The sky to share her quenching bounty