Zach Phillips (Fievel is Glauque / Blanche Blanche Blanche / OSR Tapes)

I've been a fan since 2010 so it's kind of weird that he's having a relative moment in the sun with the Fievel album, Stereolab tour, James Acaster interview of all things... It is funny that his break out record was recorded live in mono on cassette, but in a way that's perfect (and possibly in part due to his trolling of the RYM hive mind in regards to it? I don't know)

I've listened to everything, but I'll try to focus on the question and say there's not too much else out there like that Fievel is Glauque album. Fievel being bit "straighter" than a lot of his stuff. I guess partially due to having a more traditionally "slick" singer, a live band and sounding a bit more in some kind of chanson/bossa nova/early-60s-pop tradition.

This recent Blanche Blanche Blanche "live-in-studio" retrospective is closest to Fievel with the instrumentation and kind of works as a nice overview of their stuff from their ~10 albums too. Try "In the Ring":

https://laloi.bandcamp.com/album/fiscal-remote-distilled

Blanche Blanche Blanche I guess were/are kind of his main project. Generally Zach Phillips on various keyboard instruments (more synthy early on, I think deliberately playing it that aspect down later on) with Sarah Smith singing, occasionally with guest musicians (and once with a kind of "rock band" for the whole album ("Breaking Mirrors")). People I've played them too always seem to get put off by the singing approach, but I love it and can't imagine it done any other way (especially early on when they both used to trade lines more).

I know "Blue" Gene Tyranny "Out of the Blue" is an avowed way-point and a bit more audible in the songwriting than some of the stuff he references (Royal Trux, Maher Shalal Hash Baz). For me, the main way I situate his stuff is with the rest of the spicier Vermont/Brattleboro people that he kind of came out of: Chris and Kurt Weisman, Ruth Garbus, Ryan Power... A whole world of amazing music there.

"Wink With Both Eyes" is a kind of the archetypal BBB album I guess but I really like all of them. Try "Mercantile Rugs":

https://blancheblancheblanche.bandcamp.com/album/wink-with-both-eyes-bbb-2

Their latest one "Seashells" is simultaneously more stripped-down, knottier and sillier (and funnier) at the same time. Try "In the Heat of the Moment":

https://blancheblancheblanche.bandcamp.com/album/seashells-bbb-10

Other than BBB, most of everything else he's been involved is under lots of different names - ala The Homosexuals - but is generally solo or at least primarily his songwriting.

This 7" under the name "Lilith Outcome" (only one release so far) would probably appeal to a FIG fan:

https://zachphillips.bandcamp.com/album/lilith-outcome

A lot of the stuff under his own name (particularly anything digital-only) are more like demo collections of song ideas. I'm into all of that stuff as well - and don't really agree with a demo/song dichotomy - but just something to be aware in the face of an imposing amount of music. The latest "Feed a Pigeon..." album being an obvious exception:

https://laloi.bandcamp.com/album/feed-a-pigeon-breed-a-rat

Generally anything pre-2010ish - Horse Boys, Sord, Heat Wilson etc. - is totally different, a lot of noisier tape collage type stuff.

Lots of dense interviews out there (and dense - but fun - music/lyrics in general) that read in a way that kind of betray what I believe is/was his day job in the American legal system...

So much to dig into and I'm glad it's getting out there beyond the 20 people that used to buy OSR tapes!

Add in both of his albums with CE Schneider (Kevin Barnes' partner and bandmate!) - they're quieter and more restrained than usual but there's magic in those murmurings

https://ceschneidertopical.bandcamp.com/album/look-who-showed-up-out-here

https://ceschneidertopical.bandcamp.com/album/antifree

(but that's a fabulous overview linee and plenty in there I need to check out still too...)

I also caught them with Stereolab and found them intriguing but difficult to parse. It was almost like what if jazzy Stereolab kept wandering off into microtonality and skronk improv. I'll definitely explore further, although I'm under the impression that their recorded output is not particularly representative.

xpost

Oh I *love* the CE Schneider Topical/Jepeto Solutions/Locate S,1 records too, The only reason I didn't mention them is that ZP was definitely in more of a supporting role with those and they're 90% Christina's songs. I would definitely put her stuff in my Brattleboro pantheon.

*

It struck me that on top of all of the names, there's definitely a bit of Bandcamp clutter but 95% of it all appears to be consolidated in the Zach Phillips one if people want a central source:

https://zachphillips.bandcamp.com/

(FYI there's a few non-ZP, stray OSR Tapes releases at the end - everything after Horse Boys' I)

Thanks linee, that's exactly the kind of informed overview I was looking for. I've been digging into Blanche Blanche Blanche – the vocals did put me off at first but I'm getting used to them. "Fiscal Remote Distilled" sounds really good - at times it kind of reminds me of The Waitresses?

New Fievel, from Flaming Swords LP, out Nov. 25. He don't miss:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7ytbH3KmRA

aw yeah

Love it

at some point he had the whole OSR catalog up on bandcamp for peanuts, i am still revisiting and finding good stuff years later

Just realized that's Fievel's arm on the left on the Flaming Swords cover lol

been listening to this on repeat; love how it keeps churning itself up into a frenzy. that daphne and celeste/max tundra line i've probably quoted on here before comes to mind - "hyperventilating in the factory of sound".

looks like Jake Tobin did the striking cover art. only one passing mention of him in the ILX archives so i''ll place this here as a PSA:

https://jaketobin.bandcamp.com/album/third-and-fourth-thoughts

loved the recent BBB "seashells" lp on reading group.

Their latest one "Seashells" is simultaneously more stripped-down, knottier and sillier (and funnier) at the same time.

Gotta echo the love for Seashells. I can't think of another album that's made me laugh out loud as much as this one. Totally unhinged lyrical brilliance/hilarity from Sarah Smith, amen, peace out, shoot your shot

jeepers creepers y'all

the uruguayan 100 track megamix is wild, highly recommended!

I totally missed that the closing track from Flaming Swords dropped last week:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7HtsvkBcrM

That long instrumental coda is unreal. This is how you prog the fuck out!

Flaming Swords is out and it's...challenging, in the best way possible. Each song is so densely packed with circuitous chord changes that veer in and out of dissonance that a lot of it washed over me on first listen. But it makes more and more sense with each replay, new moments of beauty and brilliance revealing themselves each time. It's also gorgeously recorded and mixed, with some nice precisely deployed signal processing throughout (e.g. the flange/chorus in the second half of "Wrong Item", the echo on the snare in "I'm A Place"). I love all the pedal steel flourishes that give the whole thing a glowing cosmic twang.

Also it's just really impressive that the whole album was recorded live to tape in a single marathon session; they talk about it here: https://www.stereogum.com/2206474/band-to-watch-fievel-is-glauque/interviews/band-to-watch/

It's really great, yes - as one RYM comment put it, almost a Canterbury Scene album in feel, but done in ZP's inimitable wrong-jazz way

I’ve pointed this out before, but Phillips has also published poetry. Here’s his most recent: https://www.gauss-pdf.com/post/678701135391014912/gpdf298gpdfe055-zach-phillips-human-light

Waiting until Friday to get the new FIG but very excited about it.

i had to double-check that I hadn't written J. Sam's post above... i've listened 5 or 6 times now and it just gets better

it almost feels kind of funny to highlight on something that's so much about the chord motion and harmony, but the drumming (and how it's recorded) is so great throughout.

Loving the new album

This guy is the Frank Zappa of The Girl From Ipanema

Oh, hey, turns out I unreservedly love this one. I've tried various tracks before and they just never stuck - can't quite remember what turned me off but my fuzzy memory is telling me the jazz was a bit too smooth and the melodies not quite strong enough? Feel free to shout at me and tell me I was wrong about that, but this one is definitely hitting me.

Won’t shout, but “The River” (either the single or the version from Aérodynes) is absolutely one of the catchiest songs I’ve heard this year, truly incredible imo.

YES I love "The River" so much. The Blanche Blanche Blanche original is great too in its haunted "glo-fi" way, but it deserved to get the full HD Fievel treatment

This is superb, thank u ilm

Don't miss out on Aerodynes (the EP from earlier this year) too! Hard to say yet which I prefer

link? I can't seem to find that one anywhere

slapp happy and henry cow were the first things I thought of when hearing this stuff, and there it is in the first post. I really like these past couple albums, the band is very tight live, but there's something about the band's work that seems pretty disposable, idk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6ZpBzUoqXY

new one is sounding grrrrreat. really impressive how much is packed into each tune but it rarely seems overstuffed.

link? I can't seem to find that one anywhere

finally getting around to the new one and wow! every song has a moment of casual virtuosity in either performance or composition, often both

amazing album

yeah i've listened at least once a day since it came out. there's a couple of songs i like less, but with the 1-2-3 punch of the first three songs you're already on the hydroslide and it's hard not to listen to the whole thing.

Don't call it Canterbury!

(thread)

as a self-taught weirdo who's always felt like a wack instrumental worm & who's in embarrassed awe of nearly every jazzer's musicianship, when people criticize Fievel in the vein of "this virtuosic Jacob Collier Berklee bullshit leaves me cold" it hits like the hugest compliment

— Fievel Is Glauque // Zach Phillips (@fievelisglauque) December 13, 2022

I think genres are a useful shorthand for describing how something sounds, but I get why one might bristle at being slapped with a label that has nothing to do with one's own conception of their music.

At any rate, AOTY for me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-s2KawCrzk

[VHS, phone & DV recordings from Aug/Sep 2021, Brussels BE at Kiosk Radio, VOLTA, & Brasserie de la Mule]
this video compilation mirrors (+ 1 extra song) the sequence of our first studio album "Flaming Swords," which was recorded in a single day the same week as these shows/rehearsals.

He just released a new album under the Martyr Group project (Zach on vocals/keys + 4 guitarists). Cassette pre-order and download: https://laloi.bandcamp.com/album/non-bloody-martyrdom.

I'm about halfway through and really digging it. It's noisier/spikier than the last Fievel and as harmonically/melodically/lyrically dense as ever. I haven't heard either of the two previous Martyr Group albums, so I have some catching up to do...

Notes from Bandcamp:

𝕬𝖑𝖇𝖚𝖒 𝕽𝖊𝖛𝖎𝖊𝖜, 𝖇𝖞 𝖎𝖙𝖘 𝕾𝖔𝖓𝖌𝖜𝖗𝖎𝖙𝖊𝖗
4/24/23, Brooklyn NY: I've just heard the new Martyr Group album. I'll tell the story so far: cemeterily crabbed by the curfewed Brussels of 2021 and psychosomatically/technologically thwarted from recording to my usual indiscernible specs, I still somehow managed to extract from the general shambles of my congenital brambles a season's batch of bad little birdies. These I entrusted to the direction of Quentin "Big French" Moore, who was charged with supervisorily forcing the cumulative transformation of my hasty Tascam 4-tracks and questionable charts into these here ersatz togethernesses of our geographically fractured Martyr Group. It was agreed I'd be disallowed from hearing the material again in anything but its eventual, mastered form.

Established 2014, Martyr Group's original premise was to make 100% live recordings of my dustiest songwriting with 4 guitarists -- Stephe, Quentin, Sam & Tommy -- rehearsed quickly (or not at all) using highly dubious charts, everyone playing direct-in to the Tascam 388, with zero percussive instrumentation and my vocal mic being the only air on the tape, mixed performatively in a deejay style. The sickly-sour air of fermenting mash meant for no potable purpose accordingly wafts from both our previous albums, but the stench off this third salmagundi is so ripe it partially lost us a member. Clocking the derangement of our enterprise, core affiliate Sam "Samuel Boat" Lisabeth immersed himself instead in the adult concerns of that external world these songs deny, though he did deign coquettishly appear, if only to tantalize the listener with his pointed scarcity. Sam's lovingly linear, da-Vincianly precise "coloring between the staves" usually offsets the rest of the group's gravitation toward what my ear tastes as "pickled major," so missing here is the garnish traditional to settle our stomach, and finally it is audibly alone the heroic hatch-battening of Stephe "Turbo World" Cooper (here in both mixing and performance capacities) that stems a would-be-fatal flood of superlydian vinegar.

Then there is Tom "Uncivilized" Csatari's fusional relationship with the guitar, for him more than the others appendage-like, the wagging finger of some deep-seated law. His appearance here is as consistently natural and unified as an old-growth wood bordering the crazy-tilt spires Quentin and Stephe built all over my house of cards, often in their hysterics eclipsing its foundation lines, these mostly to be glimpsed in ostensible highlight by the "unreliable narrator" drummers Nick Baker and Derek Baron. Tommy's peanut butter hedgeline and my original rhodes voicings are alike pierced again and again by the sharp frosting of Quentin's densest-yet agit-prop harmonic layer cakes, greedy greedy stacks that spurred even circumspect Stephe to go more than a bit toppings-mad. According to Stephe, Quentin provided stems almost equal in number to everyone else's trackings combined. No one said you couldn't come to this melee fully strapped, so my friend unrivaled in sideways swordsmanship rolled up like this was Blade 4, trenchcoat double-stuffed with goodies galore.

This dense thicket of words, by the way, derives not only from manic enthusiasm hopefully betraying tacit compliment for all concerned, but also my considerable psychological distance from the result of what originated as my writing, an odd enterprise from which I already find myself routinely removed. I do not, after all, remember writing any of these songs, but that in and of itself is hardly unusual -- what's new is my complete lack of involvement in their development and representation. So in the end, I hear this as a Quentin or Stephe solo album as much as one by Martyr Group. "Collaboration," a dirty word recalling the sins of Vichy, is wonderfully absent here, where it's "every man for himself" through cartoon mazes of button-mashed pentads. Instead of beautifying my little birdies with gratifying "contributions," Quentin and Stephe shunted them through serieses of sieves, dicing and reconstituting their spirits like high-priced deli snacks in a world none of us can afford, then exhibiting their munching. More than this perversion of impetus in the shape of a senselessly fine-wrought task I could not have dreamed. And as in half my favorite art, this excessive and directionally abstruse labor resembles that greatest of fools' errands, the martyr's quest for survival through death. The other half, of course, has never been the jurisdiction of Martyr Group.
-- Zach Phillips, 2023

Couple of new FiG tracks. w00t!

https://fievelisglauque.bandcamp.com/album/i-m-scanning-things-i-can-t-see-dark-dancing

^They don't miss. Also signed to Fat Possum and have finished tracking a new album.

https://www.thefader.com/2023/08/15/fievel-is-glauque-premiere-dark-dancing-im-scanning-things-i-cant-see-video

How did it take me until TODAY to hear Wink With Both Eyes, total colossal masterpiece obv