Electronic Vinyl Records

Long awaited retrospective “Best Of” the enigmatic Dutch musician Spike, whose four privately pressed LPs from the 80s are the stuff of legend. Officially certified by the Dutch government as a “fool”, and a conscientious objector to nearly everything, Spike Wolters refused to work, and after a few court cases, won the right to be able to claim unemployment benefit for life. Fiercely political, he dropped out of society and during the 80s and produced a string of LPs which he pressed and sold himself. These sank without trace but were happened upon a few years ago by an ardent digger.

Orange Cloud Nine presents 16 amazing tracks from the 4 LPs – shimmering, lo-fi oddball stoner pop played with a deft musicality. Clean concise pop songs, filtered through a heavy haze of marijuana, produced on cheap equipment, and almost entirely in isolation that have finally come of age. It’s meditative music that will uplift and mesmerize the listener. Sequenced to perfection, it has been lovingly remastered so well from the original tapes that it sounds better than the originals – and that’s according to Spike himself.

"The group's Balearic sound entered the wider dance music consciousness with Overcoat Heat, a 2010 release for Golf Channel. Since then, they collaborated with Ben Chasny of Six Organs Of Admittance and toured with Panda Bear. For II, Gala Drop have brought Detroit expat Jerry The Cat into the fold. He's known for his collaborations with Arttu on Clone Royal Oak and has also worked with Motor City mainstays Funkadelic, Parliament, Derrick May, Moodymann and Theo Parrish.

"Jerry draws comparisons between Detroit's mishmash of music scenes and what he's found in Lisbon. He says: "Detroit wound up a city with so much contamination between styles, from Motown to garage rock and then the birth of techno. Lisbon felt like that when I moved here too, I was going out to a techno club at the weekend but going to see a garage rock show or some free jazz band in the week. The post-Millennium Lisbon has been very fertile musically speaking." His bandmate Nelson Gomes also operates Príncipe, the label that brought DJ Marfox and his cohort to the world."
- Matt McDermott (Resident Advisor)

So, enter the label’s latest LP from Mind Fair’s housier alias The Central Executives, whose project could’ve formed weeks ago, or perhaps be unearthed recordings from a loft party that went a few weeks longer than planned back in ‘87. But regardless of when it was actually recorded, there’s a live-recorded exuberance that’s part Arthur Russell, part ACT UP protest, part disco-punk ensemble ironing out the kinks in their act in some Queens basement with black mould spreading all around the ceiling.Golf Channel has called this record “the back street escapism these troubled times demand”- and maybe escapism is the word that encapsulates the timeless anonymity of my favourite Golf Channel offerings. In any case, A Walk in the Dark is an absolute burner of an LP – there’s not a single moment on it that doesn’t reveal something new with every listen, and for all its retro influences, it’s still packed with surprises. It’s the gruff bodega owner who starts smiling at you after figuring out that you’re queer, but only when no one else is around. It’s smoking inside, it’s someone’s radio blaring out the window, it’s Broadway before Disney bought out all the bars – it’s New York.