White Fence
“I have cyclops vision now. But I’m not a giant. I changed my name and body only, and stabbed my social nous in the right ear. I still read fear but there are no police this year. I can repeat the same dream. I can let birds talk to me. I’m in jail. I have love and a whistle. I lay where the lotus lay and then spring the frozen flowers on any giving day. I apologize to those put in the trees, but I was gathering the Cyclops reap.
In the span of 4 1/2 years. I’ve lived in two different apartments and have used three different rooms during this time. All in Echo Park, Los Angeles, CA, only a couple miles from one another. After the death of my father in 2008 I started writing and recording non-stop in these rooms. I can’t say it was directly because of that trauma, but I think deep down it might have much to do about it. This record was initially going to be a collection of the many songs trapped between the 4 White Fence LP’s. As i was putting that together, there were more coming. a better crop. i couldn’t stop. So, instead of a retrospective i said “Fuck It”. might as well use the most current songs of the bunch. For the exception of “Make Them Dinner At Our Shoes” which is from 2009.”
Jessica Pratt
“To say that Jessica Pratt is an old soul would be a vast understatement,” says Jenn Pelly of Pitchfork. “The young San Francisco singer/songwriter’s deeply intimate folk sounds so sincerely cast in from the 1960s that it’s hard to believe she didn’t release a proper LP during that period of time.” Pratt’s spooky and seductive self-titled debut is the inaugural release on Tim (White Fence) Presley’s new imprint, Birth Records. “I never wanted to start a label,” Presley says, “but there is something about her voice I couldn’t let go of.”
Pratt’s debut release includes recordings from over the last five years, and steady advances in sophistication of recording and melody are evident throughout. To the artist, the record is a time-lapse document of discovery, both musical and personal. But in strangers’ hands, Pratt’s debut is another kind of discovery altogether. A fully-formed emerald artifact dug up cobwebby and cold but no less green for its time spent buried. Sun-bleached and sounding a thousand years old, Pratt’s debut is arrestingly brand dazzling new, and watch how the lights in your living room go soft and yellow when you put it on.
Pratt, who is planning to tour in March with Presley’s White Fence, has garnered praise in the Bay Area supporting acts such as Bart Davenport, Colossal Yes, Tim Cohen and Dominant Legs.
Jessica Pratt’s debut is now available digitally on iTunes andAmazon. CD/LP is available now at http://birthrcrds.com