Every month I write up the records I've actually had on at Juicy. Some are new in, some have been sitting in the racks. The running order doesn't mean anything and neither does the number. If a record's here it's because I kept going back to it, and there's a line or two on each one saying why. Nothing else gets in.
Records connected by mood, era and shelf logic.
More interviews, record notes and stories from the shelf.
The best half is the one you have to get up for.
Side one only has to be good enough to get you out of your chair. What comes after has to justify the trip. Seven albums where the flip is the whole point.
Read moreabout The best half is the one you have to get up for.
Many records get played over a Guinness. Not many hold one.
A basement in Sacramento, one sampler, and the album that broke a world record without a single original note.
Read moreabout Many records get played over a Guinness. Not many hold one.
A blurred bird on a sleeve, an architect who put a record on twenty-five years ago, and a harmonium played by someone who'd never seen one.
Wunderhorse - Midas
A blurred bird on the sleeve, coming apart at the edges. That's what got me across the room, which is a bad reason to go for a record and has worked out for me maybe twice. This is the second. Slater sings like he has no interest in keeping his voice intact, and nobody in the room seems to have suggested otherwise. They cut it at Pachyderm in Minnesota, starting each morning by playing Beggars Banquet or Rubber Soul before touching anything. That tells you what they were reaching for, even if what they got is better. Most played record of my month. I still don't know what the bird is.
Raye - This Music May Contain Hope
Seventeen songs, seventy-three minutes, built as four seasons, one per side, dark through to light. It only works if you get up and flip it, which is the whole argument for owning it rather than streaming it. It's been on all month here. Shortlisted for the Mercury last Thursday, which surprised nobody.
Bon Iver - Volumes: One
Live albums usually leave me cold. This one hasn't come off the deck since it landed. Eleven tracks pulled from ten different shows. Los Angeles, Jakarta, Milan. Then track seven is Red Hill Auditorium, February 2023. Perth. Twenty minutes up the road.
Somebody reading this was at that show.
Underground Lovers - Leaves Me Blind
An architect put this on for me about twenty-five years ago, back when I was doing graphic design. I've never really put it down since. 1992, out on 4AD, which meant an Australian band sitting alongside Cocteau Twins and Lush at the exact moment that meant something. Live drums and an 808 running together, guitars stacked over the top.
We spoke to Vince Giarrusso back in May. Still the record I go back to.
DJ Shadow - Endtroducing…..
The beats got me first and they still do. It's been heavy this month, which happens every couple of years and I've stopped questioning it. I don't put it on because I've decided to, it just turns up, usually when I'm doing something else entirely. He made the whole thing out of records pulled from the basement of a shop in Sacramento. Nothing on it was played, everything on it was found.
Kiasmos - Kiasmos
This has been my late afternoon record all month. Techno made with a string quartet and a grand piano, which shouldn't work and does.The hi-hats aren't hi-hats. They recorded a thumb piano, finger snaps and the metal wheel of a lighter, and once you know that you can't stop listening for it.
Most of it was written in two weeks in a Reykjavík studio by two friends who didn't know yet what they were making.
Pharoah Sanders - Pharoah
The calm of it got me. I hadn't heard this in years and it only came back to me because it finally turned up on vinyl. 1977, and it sat as a bootleg for decades before Luaka Bop did it properly. The harmonium running under "Harvest Time" is played by his wife Bedria, a trained pianist who had never seen a harmonium before she sat down at it.
He died in 2022, part way through the work on this reissue. Promises, with Floating Points, was the last thing he finished.