Recently in REVIEWS Category
sometimes the bad reviews are better than the good ones
There's a nice, front page article about Honey and me and i guess keeping Portland weird on treblezine.com
been digging this awesome book:
that i got on tour at the equally vibratiously awesome Family Bookstore
i mean, for a long time i knew the father yod thing was heavy and awesome, and i have grooved deeply in the past to some of their heavy, heavy recordings, but reading this insider's scoop on how it all went down is really fun, surprising and inspiring. unlike the most famous cults of the 70's, the yahowha dudes never really had any huge disaster and in that way perhaps their story hints at a bigger picture of the 60's/70's explosion of communal/spiritual exploration. for every jim jones or manson, there were dozens, hundreds or maybe thousands of other small time "cults" just doing their thing. all the general public ever remembers are the poisoned kool aid mass suicides or that compound in waco going up flames or the serin gas subway terrorism in tokyo, or tom cruise being fucking crazy....our collective impression of "cults" is puritanical, ignorant and based in good old fashioned american christian fear more than anything else. not to say that tom cruise and scientology aren't fucking stupid, disgusting and lame. what fascinates me in all of this has always been the perpetual dialectic between enlightened spiritual purity and all-too-human melodrama. the cult as an avenue for spiritual freedom, exploration, experimentation, bliss, expanded consciousness on one hand, and a place of such deep opportunism, con-artists, megalomaniacs, murderers, Tony Robbins plastic self-help capitalists, T.M. pyramid schemes .
i undoubtedly inherited the interest in this stuff from my father, who studied "Comparative Religions" at UC Santa Barbara in the early 70's and then cruised down to L.A. to witness the cult explosion first hand. His own parents were into some rather esoteric turn-of-the-century "New Age" spiritualist christian stuff. just yesterday my father sent me this cool link to some awesome chakra sound healers....here's my favorite photo from their website:
anyway, anyone interested at all in the whole 70's spirituality explosion, SoCal New Age cults, west coast new age culture in general, cool robes, raw food gurus with 14 wives, hippie-communal psychedelic improv rock bands or any of that sort of shit should check this book "The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod, Ya Ho Wha 13 and the Source Family" out. if anyone has the Father Yod DVD maybe we could trade
once i'm finished reading this.
A LINK TO THE FATHER YOD AND YA HO WHA 13 ALBUM "PENETRATION"
(that link courtesy of this blog)
Here's another great review of Valet's Blood is Clean, this time from The Willamette Week/LocalCut.com written by the always right-on awesome Michael Byrne!
"VALET Blood Is Clean (Kranky)
[AMBIENT HAUNT]
We should expect nothing less than a devastating masterpiece from such a talented, prolific figure as Honey Owens, a.k.a. Valet. And Blood Is Clean—which was re-released internationally last week by Chicago’s renowned post-everything label, Kranky—is just that. It’s a devastating masterpiece of pulsating psychedelic chill, slippery haunting drone and solemn tribal percussion. Consider an empty, crumbling, mountainside Tibetan monastery. If it had a red-draped backroom lounge, Blood Is Clean is the sound that would seep from it.
Likewise, the record’s title track is certain to seep into listeners’ dreams, creepy swirls and all. It’s the most aggressive of the album’s nine tracks, punctuated by the line “My blood is clean/ But the devil lives inside me.” It’s at this phrase that the record moves from a ghostly ambient drift of layered vocal drones and bent-to-oblivion guitar lines into something truly and deeply arresting. A kick drum starts in, as does a simmering guitar line that sounds like what riding inside of an electrical cable must feel like: jagged, acidic, cold. The track alone is simply brilliant, even before considering the almost too perfectly timed train-engine wail that’s become a watermark of inner-Southeast Portland bedroom recordings (which this is).
Owens—a figurehead of Portland’s continuously ripening ambient scene (and sometime member of Jackie-O Motherfucker, Nudge and Dark Yoga)—trails “Blood Is Clean” with a wonderful, eerie few minutes of junkyard clatter (broken musical toys, found percussive objects) on “Burmajuana.” Dark, slow, loungy bass progressions then take over on “Tame All the Lions” before the record reaches a definitive (for both Owens and Valet) point with “My Volcano.” It’s a sublime appropriation of the freeform blues-folk reconsiderations that made Jackie-O’s Flags of the Sacred Harp—not to mention many Owens-involved electronic-based ambient projects—so wondrous. Its crescendo of deepening, droning organ, bent guitar notes and heavy, increasingly layered and looped strumming elicits pure chills.
But “My Volcano” is still merely the climax of a record built upon such chills. Every track here is a wonder of dark possession. It’s been almost a year since local CD-R label Yarnlazer originally released Blood Is Clean, but the record is already aging like the Gregorian chants its tracks glance upon: gracefully, or not at all."
another favorable review of valet's blood is clean, this time from a web magazine called lostatsea.net
"Valet
Blood Is Clean
Kranky
Rating: 7.2/10
Like Apple Martin, Grizzly Adams, and River Phoenix before her, Honey Owens has one of those names that precedes her persona. It is only natural to imagine the musician as a cotton candy-sweet pop starlet or a veteran lady of blues (like Koko Taylor or something). Given Owens' moniker, Valet, and a smattering of nondescript song titles ("Mystic Flood" or "Tame All The Lions"), it becomes easier to believe that her debut album could be readily described as subtle, personal, and experimental.
But the music of Blood Is Clean leaves little to such guessing games. Each numbered track is less like a song and more like a moment in Owens' creative lifespan, with sounds paralleling growing experiences and vocals vibrantly wavering as if emotional sensations. The recording process that fleshed out these eight mood-tunes was a series of single straight takes, with some of the final mixes including sporadic punch-ins for additional tracking. Owens cites Haitian voodoo music and Velvet Underground as some of her intrigues, and certainly in cuts "April" and "Blood Is Clean" one can hear the ghost of Nico's self-taught style, along with eerie makeshift tribal shakers and conga drums.
It is an overall spontaneity that makes this album distinguishable and extremely organic, as in "My Volcano" when Owens becomes lost in the repetitive and breathy chants of her freeform lyrics. During this time, Blood Is Clean's sound portrays the relationship between light and a mirror ball: a focused beam directed onto a constantly oscillating form, with jutting glints of light dancing about here and there. "My Volcano," as many of the album's other tracks, is centered upon the whirring flow of a droning chord (either from guitar or organ). For brief spans Valet is the exploration of what kind of euphony can be found when combining pedal effects, an electric guitar, a sampler, and an open mind.
Much of Blood Is Clean falls nicely in line with what people typically seek with avant garde, especially experimental, music. Tracks such as "North," the 13-minute closer, are based on productive extemporizing and finding noises. Compositions like this do not rely on pattern, rhythm, nor technicality, and many listeners need these conventions to have music appeal to them. Valet is an expression of one person's eccentric artistic palette, and sits high in the mood-sounds category.
Reviewed by Josh Zanger "
Today Valet's Blood is Clean has been officially released. Go to your local cool guy record shop and pick yourself up a copy! or order it now directly from Kranky!!!
Brainwashed.com reviewed it: (so did aquarius records...)
from brainwashed:
Valet, "Blood is Clean"
Written by Lucas Schleicher
Monday, 16 April 2007
I remember hearing a supposed "recording from hell" on Art Bell's Coast to Coast radio program years ago and upon hearing the latest project from Honey Owens (Jackie-O Motherfucker, Nudge), I was immediately reminded of those apparently satanic vibrations. Blood is Clean isn't particularly vicious, tormented, or evil in character, but Owens' ghostly voice and hazy songs on this record are uniquely haunting.
The sixth of April is associated with a number of events throughout history: the earliest recorded solar eclipse in 648 BC is attributed to this day, Petrarch's first vision of Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon also occurred on April the sixth, it was the day that the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, and it happens to be the day that Robert Peary claimed to have reached the North Pole. "April 6" is Valet's introduction to the world and it's probably helpful to think of each of these events as analogues of a sort to this record. Honey Owens is at her best on her Kranky debut, ushering alien and mystical sounds out of her mind and into the air, converting submerged rhythms into occult ritual, and turning out songs bathed in unquiet isolation and immutable violence. The supernatural are at work, conforming Owens' hands to a position reserved for an afterlife blues and shaping her lips into coded messages for the dead and the devils.
"April 6" opens with her spectral voice moaning wordless sounds into the air and is closely followed by ceremonial drums and tumbling winds. The sound of errata blow about in this storm of sound slowly closes the track, leaving an uneasy feeling in my belly and arousing suspicions about what might follow. Owens could've led the record down a predictably bombastic path at this point, rendering "April 6" nothing more than a prolonged tease in anticipation of some outward explosion. Instead, "Blood is Clean" converts all the stock piled tension into an internal hemorrhage, a whirlpool of fuzzed out guitars and rumbling bass. Her lyrics bring to mind no immediate ideas, but rather vague hallucinations of symbols and emotions that seem equally inviting and disconcerting. The guitar solo on "Blood is Clean" is perhaps one of the most phenomenal things I've heard all year. It tumbles out of the mix and practically destroys the rest of the song and pictures of war-torn landscapes or fire-scarred cities slowly evolve out of the music. It's a moment of musical and sonic brilliance, setting the tone for the rest of the record and completely erasing whatever preconceptions I might have had concerning Owens' music.
The whole of the album isn't quite as structured as "Blood is Clean;" songs like "Burmajuana" and "Tame All the Lions" sound less like songs and more like slowly evolving pictures that never quite acquire enough definition to become recognizable. Even when Owens sings, her voice is so removed and cold that it's hard to imagine it as an intentional part of the recording. It mixes well with the music, but instead of providing any order to the songs, it increases their apparitional qualities and further distances them from reality. They're elegant songs that evolve patiently, even if they don't immediately bring to mind traditional song structures. That is, perhaps, the stroke of artistry that sets Blood is Clean apart from the pack. So often artists will pretend to play with the idea of the song, stretching it beyond its classical limits either by destruction or some lesser form of decay. Owens' own approach maintains the artistry of song-craft and simultaneously expands its horizons.
By fluctuating between abstract and concrete music she creates a bizarre tension that's both enjoyable to the mind and entertaining in general. "My Volcano" combines these two approaches almost perfectly, mimicking the sometimes wandering nature of the otherwise well-defined and structured blues and inserting the more free-form nature of modern guitar performance into that style. It's my favorite piece on the album and perhaps the best thing Owens has ever written. "North" closes the album with a blur of washed out sound, a sound that brought to mind blizzards and the harsh landscape of the planet's polar regions. In a way it's a cleansing piece of music, washing away whatever relations to the world the rest of the album established by way of metaphor. In another way it calls to mind the strange and supernatural spirit of gothic America, immersing me, along with the rest of the album, in a frame of mind partially familiar, nightmarish, and wholly intriguing.
from aquarius records:
VALET Blood Is Clean (Kranky) cd 14.98
One of our favorite blasts of murky, moody cd-r bliss finally re-issued as a REAL cd by the fine folks at Kranky. And what a fine fit it is too.
Originally released on her own brilliantly named Yarn Lazer label, Valet is the work of one ex-San Franciscan called Honey Owens, who also does time now and again in Jackie O Motherfucker. We've mentioned it the past a few times, but there definitely seems to be a preponderance of vocal based music surfacing lately, Grouper, Bastard Wing, Pump Kinn, Lichens, and now Valet, who all use the voice as a major component of their sound. For Blood Is Clean, Owens twists and stretches her voice into broad sonic strokes and dreamy drones. But it's not just vocals, she also weaves darkly delicate little sound worlds, of muted tribal percussion, dark cavernous rumbles, lots of buzz and creak, alien transmissions, clattery minimal percussion, crumbling guitar grit, murky swirls of reverb and delay, the perfect sonic backdrop for all manner of processed and unprocessed vocals, ranging from sultry chanteuse like croon, to chopped and delayed Boredomsy "boop boop"s to breathy ambiance. Really beautiful and understated.
Packaged in a simple and striking cardstock sleeve, an expanded version of the original cd-r artwork...
honey's record blood is clean got a cool write-up today with a streaming song from a website i had never heard of called paperthinwalls.com. i like the format of this site. every review has a song you can listen to. anywaxy YAY honey! YAY valet! yay! blood is clean....cool TGIF!
http://www.paperthinwalls.com/
http://www.paperthinwalls.com/singlefile/item?id=572
"VALET - “Blood Is Clean”
Stream Download
from Blood Is Clean (Kranky)
Free-Psych // Out April 16
Am told that Oregonian Honey Owens makes her living trolling through Salvation Army centers and the like, recovering vintage clothing and reselling it all on eBay. Not unsurprising then that such discovery of threads of gold amid heaps of moldered finery translates into her recording project as Valet; her debut disc, Blood Is Clean, has a similar tinge of hermetic alchemy. Clean was recorded solo in her house on junked instruments, presumably late at night, as one can hear a night train bellowing past on the title track. Through the disc, there is an alternating current of comfort and unease in this blackness, as if being seduced by your babysitter. The effect is different if you imagine her being 16 versus 60, but Owens plays both roles, to where the sensuous and the sinister are impossible to parse. Over a turbid, clenched guitar strum, she incants that “my blood is clean but the devil’s in me.” Over such disquiet, the guitar grows incandescent as a flare, as caustic as colitis. Valet’s noise becomes less about strings and more about the history of electricity itself, seething as a live wire though the darkest night, writhing without insulation nor coating. - ANDY BETA
Mar 16 "
the willamette week shows its continued support (thank you mr byrne!) for reviews of the ghosting/bonecloud cdr this week and
the rob walmart CD last week...these after the
CDR label article that features yarnlazer from a while back and
the blogging of the valet CD - along with several other mentions or all things yarnlazer related...dang!
DEAR MICHAEL BYRNE: THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTINUED SUPPORT. it means a lot to all of us, for real!
the rob and ghosting/bonelcoud reviews in text form below:
someone (freshoutmedia.com? anyone heard of it?) reviewed the songs on my myspace? so weird. seems like they like the songs, though!
so yeah man, what a week. the festival crept into high gear just as i came down with a wicked cold in my chest. i blame curtis, and that darn little son of his. ooooooh you!!! tuesday we hung out at disjecta setting up, putting together a stage, building the PA, the backdrop screens and parachutes, and all that. i deeper night and i was sneezing like crazy. wednesday i went to work, trying to get it all done by well before 4 so we could continue getting ready. honey and mellisa and susan built the water balloon water bed and i set up the bbq grill. we got the food ready and all of that. around 5 or so a few kids had shown up but not enough to feel good about starting the sets. so we waited a while. of course, with 17 bands playing i was a little bit stressed that it was going to make us run really, really late. but it was cool. nick aka tunnels was a gentleman enough to play first and he started the day off with some deep minimal drones which seemed to connect cosmically with the sun in its slow decent from the sky. laurel did a beautiful little privacy set next and things started to get rolling. susan had talked to honey about doing a pash set at the festival about a week ago, and im glad we found the time to let her do that, her set was a quiet brief study in internal imaginations. people started to show up as the watery graves hit the stage, crunk piano and drum abstractions. i was already getting really really busy as the bands all started to show up and wonder when they were playing, people started cooking food and i was doing sound too. and stressing about time. grand junction played as the sun went down and the longest day faded into what would turn out to be a long long night. i ran home to get my gear to do a white rainbow set. my mind was racing. couldnt really calm down in the way that i like to before i play music in front of people. i felt like i took too long to set up and when i was playing all i could think about were the million other things about the festival racing through my mind. i brought the beats instead of doing much of an ambient set. its less strain on my brain. just get the drum loops going, play some phaser fuzz solos, and i was done. by the end of my set it seemed like the party was going full tilt, with tons of dudes showing up and hanging outside on the disjecta dock smoking drinking and making burgers. nova played a nice set of psychedelic blues, chrome becomes you were a nice folk duo and corvette was a deeply trippy journey into flange bass and very stark synth notes. with her voice floating freely on top it sounded to me, in all the best ways, like some sort of electronic female jandek. and i totally mean that as a compliment. jackie-o motherfucker were in rare form. seems like with dana and nick on drums and guitar, and tara jane on bass in the background, things were just clicking right for tom. it was a classic guitar psyche set that swayed nicely between like an early dark star era dead zone and total psyche freak blow out.
by this point, though, the festival was running about 2 hours behind schedule with 5 more bands to play. and these awesome dudes from a show across town ditched their show to try and play as well. and it was well past midnight. i feel bad that acre came all the way down from oly to have his show cancelled across town and then we couldnt find him a spot to play at the fest. dudes should come see him this friday at the towne lounge with white rainbow valet and lichens! davis did a fucking amazing a john henry memorial set after jackie-o, but i think a lot of the crowd was tired and ready for bed, and after he played, most of the crowd baled. this was a bummer for me because all of my favorite bands of the night had yet to play. liz's grouper set was deeply narcotic and made me feel sleepy. i only wish i could have just drifted off, but i had to keep on working! valet/w mark burden was my favorite set of the night. i know im very biased but honey kinda killed it. set started off with classic looped stark minimal tribal blues guitar and vocals, with mark rumbling in the background on a tom tom. it was when the loops built into the second song, with layer upon layer of vocal and buzz saw fuzz solo and then deep hassellian harmonized vocal wails, with mark getting louder and louder until it was a weird wall of psychedelic terror explosions, omg. yes. i felt bad that zach and j.p. had to play next. by this time it was only the deepest of trooper that were left and we were all exhausted. they pulled it out and im sorry i forget the drummers name but even at 230 in the morning he was a nice edition to the sound. i walked around the vast caverns of disjecta and let the tones soak through me. by the end of their set, it was debatable weather dark yoga should really play. matt was asleep in his car. i was kind of at wits end. honey had just given all her juice to her own set. but we decided to soldier through it anyway. im glad we did. it was the perfect way to go out. it felt llike the most festival oriented set of the night with dan and matt holding down a deep groove and brian and i wailing hendrix solos and honey chanting about freedom until well after 4am. then we all pretty much collapsed and went home. i could hardly sleep, it took me so long to let the stress of running a festival out of my system and i had to wake up at 8 to take some wine down to beaverton. thursday was one of the hardest days in my life. i ended up falling asleep at the table at l'astra while having lunch. honey took me home and i felt right to sleep and basically woke up on friday and worked again.
saturday honey and jason and curtis and davis and i all went back to disjecta to play another show. it was kind of absurd, but if felt good to be there and not feel responsible. what a crazy week. i feel open now, that nice feeling after you're done with a huge project. relaxed for the first time in a few weeks. ready to let new inspiration find me when it wants to. ready to gently ease back into all of the other projects that need to be completed. ready for the summer.
ps if anyone has any photos of the festival i would love to see them!