Some of you may have heard Roberto Cacciapaglia first via a guest feature by Avey Tare at the honourable Altered Zones website. Half Machine Records are now reissuing ‘The Ann Steele Album’, where ‘My Time’, the track that Avey posted, is included. It is a very incredible thing, slipping through our mailbox of wonders rather than samey-ness, from a past (1979) that is a future the present has yet to overtake. Ann Steele, chanteuse, riffs over the Bruce Haack versus Sparks avant-prog-phonic backdrop like Debbie Harry after majoring on Marshall McLuhan BEng at the Chocolate Factory Metropolitan (Laurie Anderson was a guest lecturer, natch).

Through the gaudy chaos of the imaginary toy procession it soundtracks, we visualise an alternative branch of history where the gloom of the synthetic undead was balanced by the exertions of an odd-wave army of glamorous extravagants fighting for the futuristic utopia. It never happened because being fun is hard, and that is also why this album is something to cherish, maybe its rediscovery will jolt contemporary creators from their abstracted numbness and copycat jangle. We can only hope.

Roberto Cacciapaglia – Media

Pre-order it here.

In the forthcoming Ergo Phizmiz 7’’ in ‘Care in the Community Recordings’, R. Stevie Moore, middle age instigator of a zillion ectoplasmic fuzzcore ballads, transforms Ergo’s Warner Bros toon folk lullaby ‘Food and War’ into a power-pop missile that detonates upon the munchpit releasing a psychotropic primarily coloured cloud of good vibrations. Its super-smartly encrypted slacker guitar haiku, which reveals the seven principles a happy life, can only be decoded in high vitamin C, marshmallow powered & pretentiousness-sanitised environments. You better get on with the research.

Ergo Phizmiz – Food & War (R Stevie Moore Version)

Go get Ergo’s ‘Thing to do and make’ album.