Kyle Still
I love this album - instrumental reworkings of VU's phenomenal second album. It's a joy to hear this group rework "The Gift," already an oddity of sorts in its original form, into a guitar workout that captures the eeriness of the Velvets' version.
Favorite track: The Gift.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
€5EUR
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Comes in a lovely vinyl gatefold card case, with liner notes in English and Spanish by Ignacio Juliá. Carpeta doble. Texto interior de Ignacio Juliá en inglés y castellano.
Includes unlimited streaming of White Light/White Heat
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 10 days
edition of 100
Purchasable with gift card
€25EURor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Comes in a lovely vinyl gatefold card case, with liner notes in English by Ignacio Juliá.
Includes unlimited streaming of White Light/White Heat
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
ships out within 7 days
edition of 50
Purchasable with gift card
€15EURor more
Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Formato vinilo cuadrado. Carpeta doble. Texto interior de Ignacio Juliá en castellano.
Includes unlimited streaming of White Light/White Heat
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
‘’White Light/White Heat was a real frustration”, Sterling Morrison, the underrated Velvet Underground guitar player, told me in 1985. “We wanted to do something electronic and energetic. We had the energy and we had the electronics, what we didn’t take into account was whether it could be recorded. If we went into a studio now, it would work, because they have the equipment; then they didn’t, so there’s incredible leakage from track to track. We could have done it if we had all played individually, but we didn’t like to, we liked to play simultaneously. We didn’t know the album was doomed until we actually mixed it down”.
Three years before, Lou Reed had made a similar statement when I pointed out that his song «The Blue Mask» sounded like that distorted 1968 album, like «I Heard Her Call My Name». “Yeah, I know that”, he said. “This is far better. More complex, better lyrics. I wanted to have a song like this recorded well for a change, so you could hear it. It always bothered me that in «Sister Ray» you couldn’t hear the lyrics. I wanted to be able to have the power but have it recorded well and yet still not have it be sterile just because it’s recorded well, so that was the goal”.
Let's jump four decades ahead and behold how those sonic venoms, compositions that propelled the rock’n’roll heritage into uncharted, cathartic, intoxicating and perverse territory, have survived dormant, alien eggs now deep fried by the intrepid band The Ostriches. Yes, like that first recording of commercial ambition by a young Lou before he met Cale. In the boy from Brooklyn via Long Island’s murky rebel stance, «The Ostrich» intended to join the hit songs that invented a fashionable dance, only this one seemed dangerous and dislocated (“You put your head on the floor and have somebody step on it”).
The Ostriches are Juancar Parlange and Alvaro Segovia. With only their electric guitars, the duo brings White Light/White Heat back to life. And it’s not artificial life, but proof that a music launched into the future —perhaps without the Velvets themselves being aware of it— continues to bear fruit as long as it is approached by creators with the intention of extending its legacy, not simple replicators of what is already known. The Ostriches’ take on White Light/White Heat is not a celebratory or reverential reading, which it also is, but a refoundation of a unique and historic act, lived in some New York studios at the end of the Sixties, that seemed unrepeatable but it turns out it wasn’t.
When the Velvets record their sophomore effort, the abrasive rock apostasy White Light/White Heat, they have fired the beautiful German model Nico and their manager Andy Warhol from the ensemble. The songs are inspired by Lou’s mystical or depraved readings: the essays by Alice A. Bailey, forerunner of new-age thought, and Hubert Selby. Jr’s sordid novels. With a repertoire that is torn between trepidation and ugliness, and the hostility resulting from the disagreements between Reed and Cale, they aspire to capture on vinyl the electric outburst of their live performances. At a time when rock is still tied to its blues roots, Cale has metabolized John Cage and LaMonte Young; Reed has a passion for Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler. The sound engineer quits; he doesn’t have to “put up with this shit”. He was referring to «Sister Ray», seventeen orgiastic minutes that made you forget there was a Summer of Love.
The mercurial recreation of that obnoxious album by The Ostriches is entirely instrumental; we only hear guitars. Percussion, organ, some voices, everything unfolds in perfect simulation invoked by guitars. The drums were recorded by hitting the strings of an electric; John Cale's viola, with a violin bow scrapping a cheap acoustic’s strings. The Vox organ is actually a guitar passed through a pedal that emulates it. The bass, and the choruses in «I Heard Her Call My Name» or Lou’s vocal interjections in «Lady Godiva's Operation», are also guitars. “It's been an exciting process to gut those songs and then create a little monster,” explains Parlange.
What about the lyrics? With Reed being New York's poet laureate, regurgitating White Light/White Heat without its blinding amphetamine flashes, its contemporary horror tales, its orgy of transvestites, sailors and junkies, might undo it. This is not the case here. Whoever spins The Ostriches on its turntable will very possibly know the original and its stories, so even something as literary as «The Gift» is not missing Cale’s recitation. Trapped in the corrosive virtuosity of the musical replica, one recalls the suspense of the story and wades through a reconstruction that respects the simulated vocal discourse on one channel, and the corpulent Booker T. riff on the other, as in the original.
“Electricity comes from other planets”, Lou Reed sang on another Velvet Undeground song. Well, after listening to this, maybe not: we carry it deep inside, in the neuronal synapses, in the unconscious. It is life itself.
Ignacio Julià
credits
released July 7, 2023
Personnel:
Alvaro Segovia: Lead Guitar
Juancar Parlange. Guitar
Produced by Juancar Parlange
Recorded and Mixed at El Tigre (Bilbao, Bizkaia)
Recording Engineer: Jon Aguirrezabalaga
Mixes: Jon Aguirrezabalaga & Juancar Parlange
Cover Design: Mario Riviere
Artwork: Niko Vázquez
Cover Concept: Andy Warhol
Liner Notes: Ignacio Juliá
The Ostriches, with only their electric guitars, bring White Light/White Heat back to life. And it’s not artificial life,
but proof that a music launched into the future —perhaps without the Velvets themselves being aware of it— continues to bear fruit as long as it is approached by creators with the intention of extending its legacy, not simple replicators of what is already known....more
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