John Cale - Vintage Violence - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

RSD. CD EP of InchExtra PlayfulInch w/ 2 exclusive bonus tracks. John Cale is forever ready to jump off the edge and take everyone with him. Extra Playful EP leaps from Pop's edge with glee, freewheeling through springy beats, snaking, shonky guitar lines and zones of exciting texture that gesture to Cale's role as a master producer. His lyrics veer from richly poetic to extra playful; at times it's as though he's having a little word in your ear, which is welcome from a voice as charming and smart as he is here. He's asking you to have fun with him, and who can say no when he's offering whimsical art rock this fine, beguiling and invigorating.

While on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea for a film festival performance, Christina Vantzou experienced what she characterized as Incha moment of focusInch-a specific vision for the sprawl of raw recordings she'd been amassing for her fifth album. Upon relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, she situated herself outside at a patio table with a laptop and headphones, taking brief breaks to swim, and began the Inchreductive processInch of shaving and shaping the source material into uneasy but lyrical movements, alternately austere and adorned with strange inflections glottal groaning, cavernous water, glittering eddies of modular synth, languorous silences. Mixing the pieces herself without outsourcing to an engineer compounded the intimacy and autobiographical dimension of the music; she refers to Nº5 as Inchalmost like a first album.InchDrawing on sessions staged in February 2020, Vantzou's editing instincts emphasize process and isolation, spotlighting resonance and restraint, liquidity and long tails. Fleeting configurations of piano, wind, strings, synthetics, and field recordings, these are spaces as much as compositions, surreal grottos of shifting light, suffused with a sense of invisible divinity. Although seventeen musicians appear on the record, the proceedings feel minimalist and malleable, sculpted from interstitial moments and oblique synchronicities. The definition of a composer as Inchone who joins thingsInch is here both plumbed and proven; Vantzou describes Nº5 as Incha letting go,Inch a place of Inchsoft borders,Inch unfixed and undefinable.

John Cale was never very kind to his solo debut, Vintage Violence. When it was released in early 1970, Cale had been out of The Velvet Underground for less than two years. He wanted to prove he could be the songwriter, the person penning the words and melodies behind which a band could work. InchI was masked on Vintage Violence,Inch he wrote much later. InchYou're not really seeing the personality.Inch Indeed, Cale's personality as a polyglot seemingly interested in everything emerged more and more on his next two solo albums, his only two for Reprise 1972's bracing and exploratory classical sojourn, The Academy in Peril, and 1973's masterclass in anxious but accessible songcraft, Paris 1919. By reissuing both records in tandem, Domino-Cale's home now for a dozen years-affirms the artistic fearlessness Cale then fostered at the edge of 30, when all of music seemed like one inviting playpen.This artist-sanctioned reissue of The Academy In Peril is remastered from the original tapes.