Yellow Swans

This tape is a weird one. We’re calling it a “covers album”, which in our fried brains it is, but you might disagree. When our first two gigs in 15 years landed on our calendar we wanted to do something unexpected, a ‘live one night only’ kind of thing. We're always improvising everything, but as OOP1 may (or may not) have demonstrated we usually go into our live sets with some kind of plan — a set of moves, themes, approaches, ideas, structures or feelings that we call “songs” but that probably only people who toured with us and saw 30 shows in a row would ever have known what the hell we were talking about. Still, we wanted to do something even more exclusive to these two gigs, so we landed on the idea of performing “covers” of songs we loved by bands that had influenced us who we thought repped the cities we were playing in.

Our first gig was in Austin thanks to the insanity and generosity of Oblivion Access. People who were there would have heard about two minutes of the 13th Floor Elevators’ “Slip Inside this House” dubbed to cassette and running unprocessed through Pete’s mixer into the house system, with the two of us nodding along and not doing shit. It was probably on the cusp of Andy Kaufman’s “Mighty Mouse” routine but honestly it felt pretty fucking good to listen to those wizards jam out through the PA in a capacity room on the cusp of a brutal Texan heatwave. The bar smelled like beer, John Wiese and Blank Hellscapes and Closed City had torn it up, and psych guitar legend Christina Carter was in the building. Then things got weird as Roky’s guitar and vox got thrown onto tape machine, panning and looping to infinity, and we started piling on our own psycho murk. And then it got even weirder and that’s where this tape starts. The Elevators are sometimes called the first band to use the term “psychedelic rock” and that would make sense, both in terms of psychedelic influence and practical effects. We’ve described ourselves as “psychedelic noise” for a very very long time, which still seems close enough to being true to stick with it. Also, I think you could argue that Pete’s been trying to land Tommy Hall’s electric jug sound for about two decades.

New York was a tough call since there is A LOT of music that could have come through, but I pulled hard for Suicide. (We had already “sampled” Das EFX on one of our earliest releases, so that was off the table…). Not even sure what I could say about that band that isn’t obvious from the first listen. “Cheree” has a particularly ecstatic vibe that just feels like a fever dream of drugs and love and late night delusion. Live at LPR it was the same “Mighty Mouse” schtick but again it was all transformed by the eerie transcendence of hearing that song in a crowded downtown NYC club blasting through the house system. For this release we went with a rehearsal take. It feels a bit more glazed than the full adrenaline live version. Probably worth mentioning that in our early Portland days we almost performed as a Suicide cover band for one of the annual Halloween punk shows but never got it together. Til now.

For all the obvious and annoying reasons you can imagine we had to cut the 2+ minutes of unaltered song for both sides and jump right into our tearing out the guts of the things. That said, the final product is way more alien than if we hadn't. Not sure if we’ll be doing this again at future shows… might be a 2023 thing… but you never know.