Lisa Bouvier & Allt Ar Musik – Indian Ar Dod CS
Horowitz – The Knitwear Generation CS
(Fika Tapes)

Two items here from a new London-based / Scandicentric micro-label, both of them zipping effortlessly past my twee-defences and making me smile and get all ‘yay-for-handcrafted-objects-and-DIY-culture’ and so on, however much of a filthy anachronism starting a tape label in 2011 may be.

To address the Lisa Bouvier / Allt Ar Musik one first, if someone described the music herein to me before I heard it, my cynical grown-up self would hiss like a wounded snake and go hide in the airing cupboard until it was over. So it’s a good job that I saw Lisa B. play a real nice solo set prior to purchase, giving me the courage to press play and roll with whatever transpired. And what transpired is TOTALLY AWESOME, whisking me back to the innocent days before I had really clocked the existence of any “indie-pop scene”, when I would still meet any manifestation of polite, well-dressed kids ‘doing it for themselves’ with a hearty thumbs up and when I would still welcome the presence in my life of records on which white people play poorly recorded trumpets.

So let’s put the question right out there: how does the idea of mannered, bedroom-fi Swedish language covers of Mary Lou Lord’s “His Indie World” and Sebadoh’s “Gimme Indie Rock” grab you? Not so good? Well take a second look, because only an inveterate grouch would deny that these particular ones are a ton o’ fun. There’s a really great feeling of after-school four-track fun about these recordings that bypasses any/all reservations, and indeed sleevenotes from Lisa B. reveal how these are quite old recordings, dating from when she and the dude who is ‘Allt Ar Musik’ teamed up at college and just started goofing around with some music, expressing their joy at the joint discovery of the kind of up-with-people DIY/indie culture that us British or American kids are drenched in from an early age and basically sick of by the time we crawl into our mid/late ‘20s.

Cover art depicting the two of them sitting happily on some bedroom floor surrounded by cheap equipment is emblematic of the whole affair. Oh, to be a youngster again, to sit on that floor; drink tea, giggle, make songs. Good times.

Horowitz are a band who I’d imagine would be apt to share these wistful sentiments of badges-n’-Converse nostalgia, and whilst I’ve probably run out of original things to say about them by this point, their bleary-eyed fuzz-pop remains a thing of grandeur on this here Fika tape. In fact, it sounds better than ever busting out of a tape. Well, not really ‘better’ as such because my tape player turns everything into underwater sludge, but… aesthetically correct? Yes, definitely. I could describe Horowitz’s three songs here and tell you what they sound like, how they fit into the band’s oeuvre and such, but really all I want to say is goddamnit, there’s something about everything Horowitz record that just hits me right here y’know? Their home-taped drum machines and bubblegum Boyracer fuzz, their drifty, elegiac melodies and the big bearhug of lonely/star-gazing indie-boy emotion that goes into each one of their songs… it just makes me want to salute and wipe a tear from my eye, y’know? “This is why we fight”, all that kinda stuff (god help us if there’s a war).

Much as I shake my fist at the retro-tape craze (largely on the practical grounds that the tapedeck on my mini hi-fi grinds away so painfully I might as well have dropped it in a fishtank on the night John Peel died and left it there ‘til last summer), there’s no denying that these Fika tapes are real lovely pieces of work – brightly-coloured cassettes in hand-folded cardboard packets, each stuffed to bursting with a download card, a ramblin’ photocopied insert, a fruit teabag and a recipe for cake. The whole lovin’ package! Horowitz give us a recipe for beer-cake, and all is right with the world.

Each tape limited to 100, so if any of this sounds like the kind of culture you might feel a connection to, check ‘em out.

http://fikarecordings.com/
http://www.myspace.com/horowitzband
http://lisabouvier.se/

Labels: Horowitz, Lisa Bouvier, singles reviews, tapes