Notes From The Record Room: Dave Allen, Al Barile, Clem Burke, and David Thomas (RIP), 7 Seconds, Ceremonial Abyss, Shifting Heigo, METZ
Record Room: Sunday 4/27
To whom it may interest,
Sunday evening. High winds. I unintentionally let a lot slip this month, just failing to find those few minutes for thoughts and words. I began typing this entry out in a quiet corner at the Doylestown Starbucks, the month young enough then to seem manageable. I blinked and twenty days went by with no further insight, comment, or… activity.
Punk rock was sadly hit with heavy losses this month:
New Wind, the 1986 LP from 7 Seconds, is being reissued in its original form by Trust Records along with a newly reconsidered version of the album, remixed by Ian MacKaye and Don Zientara, titled, Change In My Head. The previously unreleased title track from this new project might be the best 7 Seconds song I’ve ever heard:
Links:
7 Seconds — Instagram
Trust Records — Instagram
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of another/side:
Trust Records is honored to announce the reissue of 7Seconds’ New Wind in its original form, as well as Change In My Head, which is a completely new take on the classic album with tracks remixed in their entirety by its original producer, Ian MacKaye alongside Inner Ear Studios’ Don Zientara. Restoring and reimagining New Wind’s unreleased tracks “Change In My Head” (available today) and “Compro” from the original 1985 D.C. Session, Change In My Head is a fresh snapshot of 7SECONDS in transition, but still very much of a hardcore punk band.
By 1986, 7SECONDS was a band at a crossroad. Spearheaded by brothers Kevin (Seconds) and Steve (Youth) Marvelli along with drummer Troy Mowat, the Reno-born band had emerged alongside first-generation hardcore trailblazers including Minor Threat to become a positive force in their own right. Having released the landmark album, The Crew (1984) and the scene-galvanizing Walk Together Rock Together EP (1985) on the Better Youth Organization label, 7SECONDS took melodic, singalong hardcore to inspirational ends. Yet, by mid-decade, they were evolving as musicians and looking towards more personal territory in much the same way their Dischord DC brethren were doing during their own Revolution Summer. New Wind embodied that change. Produced in two sessions: one with longtime friend, Ian MacKaye at Inner Ear Studios in Washington D.C. in the Fall of 1985 and a second at Radio Tokyo Studios in Venice, CA early the following year, New Wind was the work of a band with their ethics rooted firmly in their punk origins while being unafraid to blaze new directions away from a scene choking on its own self-imposed rulebook.
Kevin Seconds tells,
“The whole time period, between the winter
of 1985 and all throughout 1986, was arguably
the most important and life-changing period for 7SECONDS. We all were starting to feel like the adults that we fought so rigorously to never become. Members were getting married, having kids, trying to hold down real jobs and face responsibilities while still maintaining our so-called "hardcore cred"
and attempting to feel relevant. It was an incredibly emotional and complicated time for all of us
but man, did it ever make us tough and more determined to do what we wanted to do as
creative people and as a band.”Steve Youth adds,
“There were certainly bands that came before us. Bad Religion, they made records like Into the Unknown, where they shifted their sounds.
People were calling T.S.O.L. L.O.S.T, but I loved their second album, Beneath the Shadows, which is more melodic and psychedelic. The Rites of Spring
record was also very important to me. Egg Hunt.
The boys were listening to U2 as well as the
Buck Pets. I was listening to nothing but metal:
Metallica, Megadeth, Dark Angel,
but I was also listening to a lot of R.E.M.”While the album is inspirational with 7SECONDS classics, including “New Wind” and “Still Believe”, it’s unafraid to shift gears towards more melodic, lyrically personal directions with “Grown Apart” or “Opinion of Feelings”. Kevin’s voice and the band’s playing is more capable and richer, full of emotion and fire: showing traces of early U2 as well as the likes of Embrace or Marginal Man. An important record, New Wind was a divisive record for its time, garnering praise as well as critique. It also was the beginning of a new chapter for the band who made its name on aggression without anger.
New Wind and Change In My Head will be sold as one release, available across all digital retailers and in stores on May 23 via Trust Records, in partnership with BYO Records. New Wind’s original tapes were restored by Dan Johnson of Audio Archiving Services and was remastered by Grammy Award winning engineer Michael Graves. The vinyl version comes with a 24-page oral history with unseen photographs, flyers and memorabilia all laid out by Bryan Ray Turcotte.
Ceremonial Abyss
Despair
Editions Camille
Released: 4/5/25
Ceremonial Abyss could not be a more appropriate name for the author(s?) of this album, the graceful and melancholic ambient work aptly titled, Despair.
A two-sided cassette release, each track (“Part 1” and “Part 2”) being of considerable length, Despair contains the expected hallmarks of a drone / ambient piece, generated fields of free floating and slowly undulating airspace. Throughout, though, tonal shapes and layers are pressed and held, carrying a similar breathiness as funerary bagpipes or even faintly resembling the slow drag of a bow across taut cello strings. It’s difficult to know if this near-hour-long piece was mostly improvised or composed, but it carries a grandness and depth to it that bears the impression of an ensemble. It’s easy to get lost in its vastness, almost as if forced meditation was meant to be the consequence of engaging with the piece.
This cassette is issued in an edition of 50 and is currently available to purchase from Editions Camille. There is also an accompanying book titled The Exact Reel, written by Carlos Lara, that’s available as an “intertextual” supplement.
Links:
Ceremonial Abyss — Instagram / Bandcamp
Editions Camille — Official
Shifting
Heigo
To Model Phenomena
Benshi Records
Scheduled to release: 5/9/25
Shifting Heigo’s composed tonal frequencies and hurried electronic percussion seem to embrace the archetypal mechanized environs detailed within the pages of science fiction paperbacks, a serious air that calls to mind cold circuitry and a future set in conflict between wonder and fear.
I’m reading into this, but… it’s what I hear.
“Everett” and “Simetría,” the two singles preceding the release of Shifting Heigo’s upcoming album, To Model Phenomena, rely on repeated motifs and the expansive swells of dread-inducing hums and drones. Results are effective.
Links:
Shifting Heigo — Bandcamp
Benshi Records — Instagram
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Clandestine Label Services:
Shifting Heigo's work sits comfortably somewhere in the pocket of some of the more focused work by Autechre while exploring the current of playful synth work we heard by artists like Nala Sinephro last year. This push and pull between the clinical and the organic follows the album's conceit of “modeling phenomena" - which describes the “computer’s ability to emulate, regardless of whether the emulated phenomenon exists outside its circuits or is purely imaginary." The interplay here between two living brains - one human and one computer - is a fascinating jumping off point to explore Shifting Heigo's work- one where the lines between the two are blurred beyond recognition.
I felt like the wound had nearly scabbed over.
For me, the recently defunct METZ (who went out with the excellent coda to their quality-laden discography, 2024’s Up On Gravity Hill) represented a standard for live performance that I decided was the perfect gauge with which to rate any artist or band worth a fuck.
The first time I saw METZ perform—a Church gig in 2013 where they shared the bill with Iceage, Night Birds, and White Lung—their intensity warranted an audience member to yell “calm down” at them. I was elated. I did not want them to “calm down.” In fact, I was pissed off that an audience member would so embarrassingly fail at recognizing when they were being treated to something real, an act that followed through on the promise of their recorded work by surpassing its indisputable quality on a live stage. Why would anyone ever settle for anything less from a performer you paid money to see?
METZ decided to remind their fans of the void they’ve left behind, reuniting long enough to perform “A Boat To Drown In” from 2020’s Atlas Vending for an episode of Everybody’s Live With John Mulaney.
Dicks.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
