(“God Is Winded” from Frozen Bears’ disc “Hey! That’s A Good Lookin’ Sportcoat”. Directed by Adam Waller.)
Message to anyone that has a working Tascam Portastudio: Guard it with your life or sell it for what it’s worth. Right now, your 4-track cassette Portastudio will have vultures(myself included) circling around until you sell it. For voice interviews, I recently switched back to recording with audio tape cassettes. Ask Bob Pollard or anyone with Guided By Voices if in retrospect, if they would’ve rather recorded “Bee Thousand” in digital. Don’t dare ask Frozen Bears such a ridiculous question either. The same ingenuity could not be realized. Aural morphing via an analog palette versus tinkering with zeros and ones are spoken English and Russian, respectively.
Frozen Bears 2000 and Hey! That’s A Good Lookin’ Sportcoat are not for the masses, they are indeed for the passionate ones. Baton Rouge LA based music journalist Alex V. Cook named FB 2000 the most intriguing area album for 2009 in a writeup in 225 Magazine. The fandom of passionate ones is becoming geographically widespread, based on WFMU airplay and respect from Chuck Eddy, specialist of music critique of the acrobatic via books such as Stairway To Hell and periodicals(tangible and online) The Village Voice and Rhapsody.
The craft in recording these albums aside from merely putting them on audio tape cassette must be rather inventive in order to get the varied results of tape saturation heard on these efforts. I didn’t ask specifics on this, nor should I. The mysteries involving this shall remain veiled. Kevin Hurstell does explain many things involving the creative process during this two-part LIR Podcast interview.
frozenbears.org
Frozen Bears on myspace
LIR Podcast: Frozen Bears(part one of two)
LIR Podcast: Frozen Bears(part two of two)
In this podcast, you can find out the answer to the gripping question: What came first? The cool name or the music performed associated with it?
Kevin Hurstell(pron. “Her-stell” and incorrectly by me in this interview) has logged time in a few notable bands/projects(Slobot, Otasco, Frozen Bears) that endeared themselves to passionate music fans from Lafayette to New Orleans.
Calvin Hairstyle is basically all Kevin…oops I mean “Calvin”, from start to finish of the debut experimental recording. Even when actual drums are played. Don’t look for sameness from track to track here, ears with peripheral tastes are encouraged. The debut disc is titled “Fried Ice”.
There have been live shows performed primarily at Jon Loubie’s house in Baton Rouge under the name “Calvin Hairstyle & Fried Ice”.
This podcast is pretty surreal. It was recorded at Red Star in Baton Rouge on a Tuesday night at 9pm. Who would’ve thought a progressive symphonic quartet would have been booked there on that night, that early? Our apologies to anyone there that might’ve been offended by doing a podcast interview while the music was in progress. They actually sound pretty good.
http://calvinhairstyle.typepad.com
LIR Podcast: Calvin Hairstyle(part one of one)
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