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The Beautiful Losers

 
The Beautiful Losers
2 songs
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Named after the book by Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers was Peter Wright's conception. This project represented the realization of his longstanding desire to work in a “traditional” band context developing and improvising material with other musicians and, in particular, working with a drummer. Peter's experiences with Nick Hodgson's CM Ensemble had occasionally involved percussionists but, compared with Beautiful Losers, Nick's vaguely avant-garde jazz/classical inclined project was quite different in both sound and style. Although atonal abstraction and improvisation had a role to play in our music, so too did melody and structure. Beautiful Losers also constituted the latest in a long series of collaborations between Peter and myself which dated back to 1994 and the industrial rock 4-piece leonard Nimoy. For this particular project Peter (guitars) and I (keyboards) were joined by our good mate Rustle Covini (formerly of The Aesthetics) on drums and percussion. Working with each other over the years, Peter and I had either used electronic rhythm generators (leonard Nimoy) or largely dispensed with rhythmic percussion altogether (DiS). Rustle's solid, but nuanced, drumming and open-minded embracing of experimentation and unconventional techniques (drumming with toy plastic shakers on Blackbody for example) was central to the music we produced. In common with many projects spawned from the incestuous confines of the kRkRkRk recordings and/or Apoplexy labels, Beautiful Losers was of limited duration. The 3-piece lasted about nine months (June 2002 March 2003) with its activities cut short by Peter's departure overseas and my return to tertiary study. Nevertheless, we managed to perform a trio of gigs (all at the Christchurch Media Club on Armagh St.) and to record about two hours of music. What did this music sound like? Well like nothing else to be absolutely precise although a number of bands on the Kranky label (of which all of us were fans) provided inspiration: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Stars Of The Lid, Labradford etc not to mention late era Swans or that band's successor Angel's Of Light. What these projects had in common was a tendency to combine abstract dronescapes and electronics with more conventional forms of music. As far as Swans or Godspeed were concerned, on an album or even within the space of a single “song”, smooth transitions between abstract atmospherics and soaring instrumental rock were not at all unusual. After some years of experimentation with atonal and improvised music, melody and chord structures had made a bit of a comeback in Peter's music. One trigger may have been the purchase of a 12-string electric guitar around 2000/2001. His recent releases Distant Bombs (mid 2002), Catch A Spear As It Flies (2003 on Campbell Kneale's Celebrate Psi Phenomenon label) and Pariahs Sing Om (late 2003) clearly illustrate this trend. Rich, dense atonal drones are sensitively combined with simple, repetitive chord structures. There are even a few genuine “songs” on these albums even if Peter appears to be wryly poking fun at the medium. Compared with the dark and earnest sonic pop, industrial rock and folk-noir compositions of the 1994-97 In Vitro/Coitus era, Peter's mature music is much more worldly; much more thoroughly unpacked and divested of any need to follow rules or conventions. Funnily enough, even as Beautiful Losers saw Peter re-evaluating “structure” in music, for me it was a journey in the other direction. Having given up songwriting as a bad job with my third Drawing Room album The Garden I was keen to immerse myself in more ambient, abstract sound territories for the time being. Looking back on those earlier releases which still seemed worth the odd listen, it was the ambient/electro-acoustic projects which stood out. These included the early 2000 DiS Inferno album (a collaboration with Peter and Justine Sharp) as well as my 2 nd and 4 th Drawing Room releases: Evolving Sequence No.1 (mid 2001) and Music For Performance (late 2003). Occasionally Beautiful Losers embarked on something of an Ennio Morricone trip The Corridor and Yellow Light Reflected being obvious culprits in this respect. This had also been a feature of an earlier 3-piece with which I had played between early 1999 and mid 2000. Called BOCCTAHNE and featuring Ed Wilson and Megan Gallacher, this project superficially resembled Beautiful Losers although it did not use percussion and, musically, was somewhat more tentative and uncertain.
Anything else?
Other projects on soundclick with members of this band: David: http://www.soundclick.com/bocctahne http://www.soundclick.com/vaccine http://www.soundclick.com/leonardnimoy http://www.soundclick.com/mig21 http://www.soundclick.com/disnz http://www.soundclick.com/drawingroom Peter: http://www.soundclick.com/tma1 http://www.soundclick.com/leonardnimoy http://www.soundclick.com/peterwright http://www.soundclick.com/brainlego http://www.soundclick.com/disnz
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