Heathen Disco Music Reviews #0041 (November 12, 2024)

Hey gang –

Felt like the right time to revisit this. I’m having some discomfort with the past and my place in it, triggered by a milestone anniversary of a close friends’ death, and interfacing (at a remove) with people in that same small circle over last weekend at the Orchid reunion show in Chicago. The show was good, the band sounded like I remembered, but that feeling of life and times that’ve slipped away, both in seeing those guys up on stage, and then going down to the merch room once I’d had my fill only to encounter an even closer old friend, hit me hard.

As a corrective, I wanted to look at something I did back then which counters that, work that is still out there, work that makes me feel good to have participated in rather than just experience. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time with this record since 2011 and since it’s on my terms, not something that’s drifted away or moved to a town where I can still walk into a room and not know anyone, is on its face a positive connection to what I’ve done and what I can still do.

Before we get there, I managed to squeeze out a new Heathen Disco set last Friday, mostly new or newly reissued music that I’ve either covered here, am about to, or otherwise felt you needed to hear. It starts off in disco mode and breaks rank. I like it, hope you do too.

• Bill Summers & Summers Heat – Straight to the Bank

• Public Image Ltd. – Death Disco

• Curtis Mayfield – Do Do Wap Is Strong in Here

• Al-Dos Band – Doing Our Thing With Pride

• UMCs – Jive Talk

• The New Birth – I Can Understand It

• Imagination – Flashback

• Coffin Prick – Laughing (Dan Bitney remix)

• The Green Child – Easy Window

• Chimers – People Listen (to the radio)

• Why Bother? – Out of Tune

• Joe Sampson – Gasping for Air

• Ned Collette – Shot Through

• Sorrow – Love Dies

• Peter Perrett – Mixed Up Confucius

• Ceremony East Coast – One Morning

• HHY & the Macumbas – Mão Esquerda

• Pleasure Forever – Chemical Priest

• The Serfs – Regen

• Nidia & Valentina – No Promises

• Kris & Tavi – Class X

• Jim Nothing – Wildflowers

• Humdrum – Wave Goodbye

• It Thing – … In Ruins

• PyPy – Erase

• Fake Fruit – Venetian Blinds

• Artificial Go – On Off

• The Submissives – You On My Mind

• Alvilda – Maladresse

• Nero – Jack-7

• The Cure – A Fragile Thing

• Louse – Bed of Knives

• Rosali – Hey Heron

• Jill Fraser – Beautiful Summer

To get in these halls with your own new record, you gotta get in touch or reach out with the music somehow. Here’s how you do it:

Mail: PO Box 25717 Chicago IL 60625 USAQ

Email: [email protected]

I’m still relatively low-volume over on Bluesky but you can find me there @heathendisco.bsky.social. Maybe show me how I get into one of those starter packs for middle-aged dudes who still think about records like they’re the most important thing in the world.

Without further ado, here is

SILK FLOWERS Ltd. Form LP (PPM, 2011)

I’d first encountered Aviram Cohen through the late Justin Chearno, who insisted I join him to see a band playing at Brownies called The Bad Form, a particularly rowdy, almost-falling-apart post-hardcore band for which Cohen was the vocalist. Four guys from Jersey, kind of in the Tight Bros From Way Back When vein, the kind of band that was like Fruit Stripe gum – the more they played, the more they lost their flavor, those chaotic qualities which always fade as a band becomes more proficient, makes goals for itself, etc.

I didn’t see Cohen for years, assuming he headed to a different part of the country. When I next ran into him it was 2007, outside of a Mika Miko show at Death By Audio. I was with John Sharkey from Clockcleaner, and if I’m remembering right they knew each other from somewhere, but Cohen was unrecognizable to me, both in look and demeanor. The wildman had vanished, and a very serious person was in his stead. The music of Silk Flowers, the electronic band he’d start with Peter Schuette (Cohen’s bandmate in Soiled Flowers and the Springs, and Ethan Swan) almost perfectly aligned with the person I encountered that night. Far be it from me to make this assumption about the group, who I’d never seen play. Cohen knew I wrote about records and sent me the second Silk Flowers LP to check out, and my former editor at Dusted, Otis Hart, assigned it to me not long after. Unlike Dusted, or any other Silk Flowers release, LTD. Form has stayed with me.

This is one of those lightning in a bottle kind of works, an early producer-artist pairing for Amanda Warner, who performs electronic music as MNDR. I knew Warner’s older sister Rachael from being around NYC (for real, if you’re in NYC and active socially in any capacity, and you don’t wind up meeting a lot of people, you did it wrong). I’d also heard some cheerleading about MNDR’s music from camps I didn’t often associate with being a platform for informing me about recent sounds, but both parties involved in the making of this record were brand new to me.

Looking back, Warner seemed to hear something in this band that everyone else had missed, and managed to bring out a sound that is distant but not alienating, idiosyncratic without being cold. There are very deliberate choices here, expansive yet clarifying, that they might not have found on their own, a young yet determined effort to put a signature on something, an act which, without big money or plenty of time, seemed out of reach for most groups in Silk Flowers’ stead. Starting a record with three instrumentals, on a pop record where only one-third of the songs have discernable vocals at all, isn’t something I’ve heard done often, before or since. It’s as if the record made the band, not the other way around. I can’t think about the individual songs on LTD. Form for this reason, and I remember going back and trying hard when writing about it to focus on tracks, which was kind of fruitless. It simply hangs together so well, more a suite or electronic concerto than a record with clear starting and stopping points.

Years after writing this I’d connected via email with Ethan Swan, after seeing that he’d written something kind about this review, to the effect of how any time he was feeling depressed or uncertain about his path, he’d go back to this review to get those endorphins back up. We’ve communicated a lot since then (I owe you an email, Ethan), and it brings up another wrinkle in that statement I made above: if you don’t have an avenue in a big city and all-hands scene to meet someone with whom you have this much to talk about, were you doing it right after all? I’ll admit that Silk Flowers’ brief ascendancy came at a time when I was getting really burnt out on the social aspects of music, was coping with the loss of my friend Jerry Fuchs (15 years ago last weekend), and I’d left Greenpoint/North Brooklyn conveniences for the comfort of Carroll Gardens/Red Hook, which was a pretty lengthy trek to get to Williamsburg or Bushwick where a lot of this stuff was going on. Maybe it was easier to connect later in life, and from this same distance, as it’s pretty interesting to realize how we were essentially dancing around one another in the same space. Anyway, you can find Ethan’s work at https://www.jabsjabsjabs.com — he’s about to publish a book entitled Killed of Kids, the oral history of Huggy Bear, which he edited, and it’s a wonderful and incisive read which you’ll hear about more over here in the coming weeks.

You can easily stream this record anywhere, and copies on Discogs are going for under $5 (less shipping) as I write this. I think LTD. Form would give just about anyone pause when they hear it, especially now. Maybe today is your day.

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