Clearing House: Pt 4

In the whirlwind days of the mid-90s, there were plenty of times when I'd throw down cash for any old electronic shizz on a disc, and goddamn if those times weren't chock full of worthless comps. The excitement of a foreign genre was at full-time frenzy, and one of the treasure troves for the stuff was Kensington CD.

Kensington CD, located where an acoustic guitar store resides (well, at least when I left Calgary) behind Higher Ground (or thereabouts), was a fantastic place to be if (i) you were too lazy to leave the suburbs to head down to 17th, and (ii) you wanted to check out (and scoop) whatever the hell Sid and Faust were buying (the lady that ran the place would let me check their orders and buy out albums that came in ahead of them)(also: she also let me in on Sid's real name, a shocking revelation at the time). At some point I ran out of moolah and stopped frequenting the place, and thus I'm not overly sure when it packed up. Which is a good thing, because it wasn't overly long afterward that I noticed I spent a lot of cash on a whole lotta nothin'.

One compilation, Further Mutations on Lo Recordings, saddled that vague territory of electronic experimental music, which, in 96, would've also included the likes of Amon Tobin and Luke Vibert, even if only out of novelty. This comp came out before the plethora of laptop glitch, and certainly before anyone had caught on to Leaf Records. Kinda proves as a good nostalgia point, if high frequency squeals brings fond water to the eyes. Here's a selection:

Fish Out of Water featuring Robert Wyatt - "Cry From the City": notable for Robert Wyatt (on vocals and piano) and not much else


David Kristian - "See Sawing Sea": included purely because I'm a sucker for the musical saw. From what I gather, Kristian hails from Montreal, wherein he'd do his own soundtracks for whatever old sci-fi films were playing at the tv station he worked at.


Richard Thomas - "An Itch You Can't Fucking Scratch": I like to imagine this is avant garde scratch dj work, but now imagine it more as someone fucking around with pro-tools or some such early on. Now I just like the title.