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(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)
Bowery Electric is a New York-based duo
(Lawrence Chandler on guitar and Martha Schwendener on bass) whose double
EP Drop (Hi-Fidelity, 1995) aligned them to British
shoegazers Loop and
Spacemen 3.
Their first album, Bowery Electric (Kranky, 1995), is a collection of
lengthy guitar drones.
Pieces such as Next To Nothing
are quite trivial toys of rocket-like guitars over solemn drums, but the
ten-minute Slow Thrills concentrates enough guitar fuzz and feedback
to qualify as pleasant psychedelic muzak.
On the downside, the vocals are terribly "lo-fi" and quite unnecessary.
The eerie beginning of Another Road and
the dark, revolving cloud of Out Of Phase
add an element of suspense and mystery that is not fully developed.
Finally, Deep Sky Objects rediscovers "rhythm" and rocks out solemnly
with heroic, Helios Creed-ian strength.
This was a tentative, embryonic work that hardly broke any new ground.
(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)
Beat (Kranky, 1996) marked the transition toward a more technological music, the adoption of dub and ambient techniques, the use of sampling and drum machines. The loops on Beat nonetheless avoid the deafening sound of drumnbass and keep the pressure very low: vortices of guitar, bass figures, female whispers and hypnotic beats possess something solemn precisely because they are so understated and blurred. The good news, in short, is that rhythm no longer destabilizes the duos subliminal art. Without Stopping even acquires an ethnic strength thanks to a slow, dark beat within a sinister drone of guitar chords: Schwendeners sigh seems to hover in Jon Hassells fourth world.
Fear Of Flying, the most rock-oriented song, is also one of the most hypnotic, thanks to a more insistent rhythm and harsher chords (strummed almost in raga style), a rhythmic warmth that seems to naturally exude the singers gentle trance.
A good half of the album, however, remains in the territory of the stasis of the previous record, and in some cases achieves even more sensational effects: Under The Sun lets the bass figures float within a cosmic hum.
Black Light is the most psychedelic track, a mantra with almost no development, accompanied by a normal drum kit. A hallucinogenic torpor also pervades Inside Out.
Rhythm disappears in the final track, Postscript (17 minutes), which is actually the most sophisticated of all, based on a minimalist technique: the main pattern is a drone that continuously drifts and undergoes a series of slow and ephemeral variations until it merges with other guitar waves and becomes a faint signal in nothingness.
The duos music is not all-instrumental, but it is as if it were: the singing is imperceptible.
Vertigo (Kranky, 1998) is the remix album drawn from Beat, some of which perhaps surpass the originals, if only because they renounce the distracting hip-hop rhythms and stretch Bowery Electrics music back into the stasis from which it came. The single Blow Up/ Electro Sleep (Happy Go Lucky, 1998) is less ambient and more drum'n'bass.
(Original English text by Piero Scaruffi)
Lushlife (Beggars Banquet, 1999) changes direction. A dense, careful,
magnetic arrangement reinvents the band's mission in life.
Bowery Electric are caught flirting with trip-hop
(Shock Ones), dream-pop (Lushlife),
dance-music (Saved), even
soundtrack music (the instrumental Soul City).
The single Freedom Fighter sums up their new style, adorned with
syncopated beats, guitar distortions, lush keyboards and
Martha Schwendener's celestial vocals.
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