Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Lay all over it - Never too fat to fly on Laboratory Standard


I saw that Jason Ajemian is playing a couple of places in Brooklyn this week. Tomorrow, Aug 13th @ Tea Lounge and Aug 14th @ Zebulon.
I saw one of Jason's performances a while back where he conducted an orchestra playing Black Sabbath 'Into the Void' backwards. His brother 'performed' the lyrics backwards as a percussion section broken up into individual pieces of the drum kit attempted to play crashes, high hats and snare sounds backwards. Completely bizarre and amazing. I was blown away by the concept and hearing it being performed live was really one of those special moments where you have to appreciate NY a little more than you did already.
I highly recommend picking this 10" up, in fact I'm amazed that Sun Magi still has this available to order. Although now that I look at it it may just be the Mp3's.


Jason has a lot of projects going on, the list of active bands he's a part of on his website is out of control. I ws browsing his discography when I noticed this single from Laboratory Standard records, and I thought I actually might have it already. I placed an order with them a long time ago and literally just found it in an old box of singles. I knew I remembered that sleeve for some reason.
Apparently both sides of this single originated as a single story/song from his Uncle, and have been reinterpreted by Jason with two different approaches on two sides. It's all delivered by Jason in this jazz sing song spoken word style.
On Side A of 'Never too fat to fly' a saxaphone minimally randomly bleets, an upright bass gets bowed, and a far off snare is played with brushes. It's that kind of beats free jazz where everyone sounds improvised, but this kind of thing has to be rehearsed...it's too chaotic. I'm still trying to piece together the narrative of the story on both sides. There's a lot of great lines, I just wonder if I'm missing out on the bigger punchline. I keep getting drawn away by the music.
The B-Side has two different beats that work together in different channels in headphones. It's not echoed, they are two separate old school breakdown beats.
It's pretty amazing on this release there was this interesting starting point for the music. Another layer to just an improvised jazz session. There's a long an interesting history to the original as well. I like it working on all those levels.

He's making me think this morning and my brain is overheating.

Asked to make a single for Labratory Standard, LayAllOverIt took Ajemain’s uncle, Michael Ajemian’s song Never Too Fat to Fly and did two versions. One spectral and floating in a
soft doppler effect. And the other side, locks into 2 overlapped back beats. Each side holds half the story dictated in Uncle Mike’s original.

Available from Laboratory Standard or Sund Magi

2 comments:

  1. been watching your blog for a long time. was pleasantly surprised to check in and see this posted. thanks for the kind words!

    best,

    LSR

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sure thing...been waiting to tie it in with a Jason post. Thanks for reading by the way....

    ReplyDelete