Ball of Wax 60 Songs: Hauras and Jose Bold

Hauras: “Theme for Winterrose”
“Theme for Winterrose” is a stone cold rocker that I am convinced would sound even better if my speakers had literally any bass to speak of.

Jose Bold: “Timothy”
From the title, you might expect this song to be about someone named Timothy, and you would be correct.

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Ball of Wax 60 Songs: 4K and Sound Madrona

4K – “Glory to you, Dagon”
Utterly unexpected and elegantly complex.

Sound Madrona – “Out of Breadth”
The title of this song is a very clever wordplay and that’s honestly enough for me.

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Ball of Wax 60 Songs: Great Unwashed Luminaries and Red Weather Tigers

Great Unwashed Luminaries: “Warren Quarantino”
Ambient spooky groove or groovy spooky ambience: the choice is yours.

Red Weather Tigers: “The Lighthouse”
Bells and Biblical law echo down through the fog-shrouded eons.

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Ball of Wax 60 Songs: Tom Dyer and Pufferfish

Tom Dyer: “The Glass Cowell”
When Robert Fripp is your grade one math teacher and Keith Emerson accompanies on piano.

Pufferfish: “Thump60”
This song makes me feel like I’m sitting on a grassy knoll watching the clouds while, underground, the rabbits throw a dance party in their warren.

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Ball of Wax 60 Songs: Amy Denio and THEATH

Amy Denio: “All Together Now”
Seattle’s own brilliant and prolific Amy Denio spins a mystical and complex tonal landscape to perfectly present her simple and profound incantation, which is especially relevant these days: together.

THEATH: “Helocentric World”
Spend 60 seconds spiraling through photons and spinning across beams of warm light; you can feel the sun’s bright heat.

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Ball of Wax 60 Songs: Holly & the Dead Saints and The Deep Cove

Holly & the Dead Saints: “A Clean and Faded Calico Dress”
’80s lo-fi is recalled in these mysterious goings-on about a court and broken sticks and a calico dress, sandwiched between spates of bass and catchy drumming.

The Deep Cove: “Emergency Is My Emergency”
A ’70s vibe is recalled here, with synthesized harpsichord (back then it would have been merely electric) and intentionally-never-quite-in-tune vocals: we are promised that “what’s mine is yours,” but we’re never quite sure what that is.

 

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Ball of Wax 60 Songs: Hart Slights and The Ex-Optimists

[Ball of Wax 60 is made up of a lot of really short tracks. So we’ll be doubling up our blog posts for this one, with two one-sentence reviews each, between now and June 5th, the official release date. Enjoy! -ed.]

Levi begins a new volume of Ball of Wax with a glorious slowly-unfolding bang from Hart Slights, whose “Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski” sails in on crisp-but-relaxed drums and a bassline to die for while disembodied megaphone spirits conjure the ghost of Neruda by invoking the title of his darkest poem.

“Remembering Six” from The Ex-Optimists is the kind of thrilling romp that the late ’90s promised but too often failed to deliver except on secret college radio stations, its chug and grind overlaid with excellent guitar work and, through it all, a self-aware narrative in memoriam.

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Here Comes Ball of Wax 60!

Photo courtesy Flickr user Steve Austin

Well, it’s happened. As planned, we have assembled a mighty collection of sixty one-minute tracks from all over the world, in celebration of 60 volumes and 15 years of this ridiculousness. The release date will be Friday, June 5th (not coincidentally the next Bandcamp fee-free day), and we’ll do some kind of ludicrous Zoom-to-Facebook live explosion on Saturday, June 6th. Stay tuned for details, and look for Volume 60 track reviews to start rolling out today.

Stay safe and keep listening!

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Submit 60 Seconds of Music for Ball of Wax 60!

Photo courtesy Flickr user Steve Austin

For a while there I had a grand, Seattle-based plan in mind for Ball of Wax Volume 60, representing the completion of 15 years of whatever this is. That fell through, but never mind: I have a new grand – and global – plan! To wit:

The next volume of Ball of Wax will (I hope) consist of 60 tracks, each 60 seconds in length.

That’s right! 60 minutes of 60 60-second tracks, to celebrate 60 volumes of Ball of Wax. (That’s a lot of 60s.) So please send me 60 seconds of music/sound (a little less and we can extend with silence, a little more and we can fade out). Send some different tracks under different project names! It could be a song or a theme or a sonic mini-landscape . . . just go for it!

Deadline: April 1st, but earlier is always great.
Guidelines: Here.
Send to: lmf@denimclature.com

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Ball of Wax 59 Songs: Amanda Winterhalter – “Euptablisses”

At this point in my “music reviewing career” (I don’t think anybody appreciates more than me just how cool that sounds–in fact, it may only sound cool to me), there is no point in denying that I’m a fan of Amanda Winterhalter. Not that I would want to and not that anybody else would ask that of me. And if you haven’t listened to any of her material or watched her powerful live performances on YouTube, then I really feel bad for you.

I kicked off this review cycle by talking about the way that Jack Shriner’s Frames in Motion took Levi Fuller & the Library’s colossal “Colossal” (sorry, but there’s really no better way to state that) from one musical realm or genre and ran it through their very specific approach to composition and sound to end up with something all their own. In that, and really, throughout this compilation, we’ve seen transformations and interpretations and even melodic and harmonic shifts and THAT, my friends, is what makes the kind of collection that you want to keep in rotation.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have seen the thread of continuity and reinvention running through Ball of Wax 59: each artist is covering a song by the succeeding artist. Now we’ve come to the end and it’s Amanda’s turn to cover Frames in Motion’s chiming “Euptablisses.” And herein lies not just the closing track, but one of this volume’s neatest tricks. At the beginning, Frames in Motion turned ragged indie rock (indie Americana, if you will) into ’70s AM radio rock (if you dare suggest that I don’t mean this as high praise, I will challenge you here and now to a game of Sudden Death UNO)–and here at the end, Amanda Winterhalter is turning ’70s AM radio rock into dusty, dusky, wispy Americana. And so now you do with this compilation what you do with all great collections of music: YOU PUT IT ON REPEAT. There you go. Ya feelin’ it? I could be talking out the side of my head, but I’m calling this meta-recursion. I’ve coined it, it’s a thing now, and so let’s get past that and talk turkey.

You don’t listen to Amanda Winterhalter without taking note of the voice. Yes, she plays guitar. Yes, she normally records and performs with a band that can weep through country music’s real progeny and then growl through the bastard child of Midwest post-punk. No matter the context, her voice is the unifying force. It’s impossible to describe without using emotive or tactile adjectives. From her lower registers, through twangs both gentle and firm, and up to a falsetto that sometimes feels like it’s a secret note that exists outside of our Western 12-tone scale but complements it nonetheless. Take all of that and then throw it into the frightening (for artists) chemical solvent known as the “stripped down arrangement.” This is where the bells and whistles and most instrumentation get removed and a song is revealed for the strength and beauty–or weakness and mundanity–of its lyrics and lyrical melody. That’s exactly the solvent that Amanda has applied in transforming “Euptablisses” into her own beautiful folk tune and I am happy to report that Shriner’s solute (yeah, I dig chemistry) retains its magic and mystery.

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