“The Rude Staircase - the best combination of Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel and The Banana Splits I've ever heard.” –Kristian Hoffman, solo artist and member of 70's cult New Wave band The Mumps.The story of Eldridge Skell's The Rude Staircase begins with a hearty appetite for transpollinated thought patterns, a dead-end job doing thankless invigilation at the Mardi Gras Indian Museum in New Orleans, LA and a natural inclination towards the transcendentalism of misty hilltops. The group's founder and leader L. Skell honed his sonic hypnotism by woodshedding in the backroom of Misty Cleavage's Mississippi Moon Dancerie. But this night train would not flag the sundown lighter any longer. He soon moved his outboard vision quest to the cultural hotspot of Washington D.C. where he began a long distance disembodied stalking of Dagmar Krause.
It was around this time, while sleeping and rehearsing in a tiny scummy flooded basement, that he met his musical soulmates LoveLace-On-Tape and Vaclav Havel. This initial trio of Guitar, Mandoraphone and Electric Tuba sounded like a bangled stripper humping John Trubee's The Ugly Janitors of America after beating the cathartic raindrops out of both Wingtip Sloat and Tragic Mulatto. They continued crafting songs and playing gigs while hatching their masterplan for making a record of all out feathercloud mindfuckery and torrential lift-off! This was destined to be the best band to come out of DC since Beefeater and The Make Up.
This glorious recording process would begin in late 2003 mainly to capture Lovelace-On-Tape before he vanished into premature Hollywood Babylonian disappearance condition. The purposefully haphazard basic tracking of Theremin, Trombone and Cello was made at the Spinto University Tech Studio in Arlington VA. All subsequent ensemble material was recorded in a home studio using the latest TrUthQuEst technology. Eventually a psychic signal emanating from the underside of a magic suitcase facilitated The Rude Staircase's contact with the cult savory snack aficionado and genius engineer/producer Bob Drake. The studio mastery proved so successful that the group instantly ceased to exist upon its completion! The Ancient Ones were pleased….
The final product Sookie Jump is an elegant pile of songs reminiscent of the architectural innovations of Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water and Paolo Soleri's massive utopian concrete village Arcosanti. It builds tension and grabs attention by really cramming darkness into the spaces between sounds in an uneven interstitial bumpy car ride soundtrack on dusty dirt road donkey trail of desire. It suggests the single-minded mania of Pretties For You-era Alice Cooper but the sound is more full than the gregarious headdress of Samla Mammas Manna and playful like the precise hooliganism of Willem Breuker Kollektiv. By the end of this experience we will all feel like we've listened to the entire career output of The Cardiacs in one sitting with a warm belly full of crazy jalfrezi.
“Condor Moments summed up in a phrase? Camp S&M cabaret, and definitely not suitable for a PG audience. No matter what the truth may be, from hearing the demo I can only ever conjure up an image of a stage full of middle-aged men wearing PVC Speedos and singing a plethora of piano-accompanied expletives in the most operatic way possible, with completely straight faces.” – High Voltage
Spawned somewhere between the colored crystal rock caves of Preston and the elegant seaside hostility of Blackpool, The Condor Moments has seamlessly reinvented a music of ritual suicide and crack-party dengue fever. The group was formed in 1985 by keyboardist/singer Richy Midnight and drummer The Real David Grey from the still warm embers of the anarcho-pop theorists Cheap Kojak. Using tiki torches and water balloons the duo started writing some of the most challenging campfire songs to hit the dirt since Casey and The Sunshine Acid Blues Crawlers. Later joined by the miraculous bass player Gregory Pex they were now a true power trio fully prepared to press on and conquer with tender provocation while always ready for cooking a big roast. The sparkle donkey hides its young before it shines its rainbow…. Eventually the trio was joined by unhinged guitar legend Brucie Millions between his stints in regional penitentiaries of northern New Jersey, USA and nothing would ever be the same...
After years of kicking it about playing romantic waltzes in the moonlight of The Lake District or earth shattering dirges inside a fishing net atop a billiards table in one of the burliest leather bars in NYC, they finally perfected their most convincingly delusional and effervescent sound reminiscent of Charles Ives, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Raymond Wallbank, Ludwig Van Beethoven and The Homosexuals among others. They have become an impossible ideal ready to take both The United States and the United Arab Emirates by storm!
Most recently The Condor Moments have recorded a titan's breakfast report of songs in the remote foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains of southern France with the mad hermit engineer/producer/musician cult hero Bob Drake. This masterwork, ...And Though We're Told We've Got It All, The All We've Got Is Freezing Cold..., combines the band's shifting rhythmic ellipses, keyboard weirdness and tongue twisting vocal perversity with the unlimited epic revisionism of visionary flamboyant industrialists. For added tree hugging empowerment these cocksure wizards have added the meat rubbingly elegant vocals of Madge Daddy and Lady Dah of Blackpool's Twilight Golden Calf as well as the underworldy deepthroat vomitsounds of humansacrifice from the noise/actionist cover band Peeinmyfacewithsurgery.
This CD is the most amazingly complex and purehearted collection of cinematic songclusters to be recorded since The Sun City Girls' 300,003 Crossdressers From Beyond The Rig Veda, Ash Ra Tempel's 7 Up! and Fela Kuti's Coffins for Heads of State combined! It is capable of simultaneously promoting healthy nudist living while welcoming all listeners to their unremembered collective past lives and psychic marshes. This music is more than simply food, as it exists in the spirit of science fiction and the mode of sheer mindless bootyshakin' joy!
Both records were mixed by Bob Drake, a cult recording artist for Recommended Records and member of Thinking Plague, Hail, and The Science Group; a recording engineer who has remastered projects by Faust, The Homosexuals, Henry Cow, and The Art Bears; and engineered projects by Ice Cube, Englebert Humperdink, Tina Turner, Quincy Jones, Fred Frith, Hamster Theater, and Peter Sellers, among others. Sookie Jump was engineered in part by Nick Krill of The Spinto Band (Bar/None and Virgin Records) and in part by Chad Clark of Beauty Pill (Dischord Records) and T.J. Lipple of Aloha (Polyvinyl Records) at Inner Ear/Silver Sonya Studios.
Sookie Jump Track Listing:
Release Date: September 11, 2007
01. Variations On A Theme By Michael Jackson
02. A Gaggle Of Swans
03. In The Silo
04. Houses Are Burning (MP3)
05. Cranes (Detail)
06. Cranes
07. Here Come The Red Teeth
08. We Had Our Work Cut Out For Us, Francis
09. Telephone, Telephone
10. March Of The D9 Caterpillar
11. Shut Up!
…And Though We’re Told We’ve Got It All,
The All We’ve Got Is Freezing Cold… Track Listing:
Release Date: October 2, 2007
01. Butlins’ Rash
02. Palace Of Earthly Delights
03. Lord Protector, Milk Collector
04. Made For Love
05. (La Borde Basse)
06. Liquorice Fish Dish
07. Counterpoint Study
08. ‘Snot What They Want, But What’s Good For Them
09. (I Hope) Raymond (Is Still Alive) (MP3)
On The Web:
www.therudestaircase.com
www.myspace.com/therudestaircase
www.condormoments.co.uk
www.myspace.com/condormoments
www.whatdelicate.com
www.myspace.com/whatdelicate
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