Slumberland Records & Tunnel Records present:
Lunchbox
(Record Release Show)
Evolver is a product of a distinct time and place, or rather three places: the pre-gentrification Oakland Rockridge neighborhood, where Donna and I lived in the so-called “Shafterhouse” with its basement studio, in walking-distance of crucial trumpet-friend Jeremy Goody who lived around the corner; the Mendocino coast up around the town of Gualala, whose rugged, slightly-spooky coastline was (and remains) an irresistible attraction for us (and was the source of all Donna’s photos for the cover and insert); and the city of Berlin, Germany, where we lived in the mid-late 1990s during my graduate research, indelibly stamped by post-Wall underground club culture and the crumbling beauty of a city we were haunted by and are still in love with. We played a number of Berlin shows, including one in the legendary techno-squat Im Eimer, a fairy-light lit crumbling former slaughterhouse with a giant hole in the top floor through which the band could look down into the rooms below onto an all-night Jungle dance party. Like playing inside a UFO.
The Evolver moment in time—right around the year 2000—was similarly a product of three influences: I was in graduate school at Berkeley and had a ton of time to work on records in the basement instead of writing my dissertation; we had been doing a live band since 1995 and were sick of the restrictions imposed by having a band, especially by the straightjacket of turn-of-the-century West Coast indiepop, with its pro forma sounds and gestures; and it was also—so I was informed—the moment of a rare astrological transit related, for me, to some kind of psychedelic awakening. Basically, Evolver was conceived and recorded in kind of a low-level acid trip, infused with a strong feeling that everything was alive and connected, part of an indissoluble whole. Those three time-related factors added up to a sense of freedom—Evolver was the first and last time that we really made a record just for us, with no concern whatsoever with how it would be received.
The sense of freedom was also bound up, crucially, with technology—Evolver is first and foremost a product of sounds that came out of specific pieces of equipment piled all around the Shafterhouse basement: a 1971 Micromoog; an array of Teac 2 and 4-track reel-to-reels; a barely-working Japanese Vestakaza RV-1 Reverb (impossible to find again, I’ve learned); various Electro-Harmonix boxes; and above all, two keyboards: one, an Everett home-market console organ that had keypads that not only made the dreamy Maj9 chords heard all over the album, but produced chord progressions that we would never have come up with on a guitar or piano; the other was a Mattel Optigan, a kids’ keyboard from the 1970s that used primitive optical sampling technology to reproduce the sounds of guitars, or pianos, or whatever. We had a full set of the flexi-discs containing the samples, which you inserted through a slot where they were read by a light sensor. Happily, you could also put the records in upside down, making the samples play backwards.
Other than the Everett and the Optigan, the most important basis of the recording process was the tape decks themselves. We recorded mostly onto a Tascam TSR-8 8-track, and a little onto a TEAC 3340 4-track. But the biggest feature of the decks was the tape delay you could get out of the various two-tracks we had sitting around. The whole record is steeped in tape delay: this is where a signal goes out of the main deck into a second tape deck, and the distance between the record and playback heads (and in dependence on the speed of the deck) produces a delayed signal that then comes back into the board. If you then send that signal back to itself, all sorts of fun stuff ensues, the decks serving as instruments in their own right, producing squalls of noise or deconstructive dubscapes.
In keeping with the spirit of the place(s) and moment, the machines kind of literally told us what to record, and we just sort of obeyed. The influence of drum ‘n’ bass, imbibed during our Berlin sojourn, as well as during our late-1990s run of London shows, is clear on the record. Also clear are shades of dub reggae and the dreamier side of indiepop. But we really didn’t strive to be one thing or another—we just tried to realize what was being given to us. It was easy, like surfing a wave. It will never be that easy again, that magical again, but we’re incredibly fortunate to have Slumberland Records come along to release a Twentieth Anniversary edition of a record that never came out on vinyl like it was supposed to and was basically lost. Now, it is found, and we couldn’t be happier. —Tim Brown (Oakland, CA, Winter 2025)
Now
"Now Does the Trick" all too well
With balance, harmony, and simplicity,
Now slips their hand into the pocketbook of modfathers
without being nicked by nostalgia
Harmony on every corner
“Beat Girl” playing on late night TV
The fantasy soundtracks People doing handstands at a party with Syd Barrett
Where the Soft Boys play in the background and no one crosses a picket line,
Like a long walk next to the train tracks on Ringo’s day out
with Sunlight Bathed in the Golden Glow:
A little blood in your teeth of an Andy and Edie bubblegum Dream.
The Kitchenettes
The Kitchenettes from San Francisco is a new addition to the local underground pop community, having just released their demo tape via Discontinuous Innovation last month. These 5 tracks are essential if you follow Cindy, Flowertown etc. Couldn’t find any photos of them but the above is a nice live video. The trio is led by Morgan Stanley who’s also in The Umbrellas. Charlie Ertola and Thomas Rubenstein are in The Telephone Numbers. —Record Turnover
with DJs Anorak Pop and Kid Frostbite
DOORS at 7:00 PM | MUSIC at 8:00 PM