“Broadcast Muse”
January 31st, 2010
I never get around to blogging, so don’t be surprised that this album was released at the end of November! This is Radio Eris‘ best album, hands-down, and is a must for anyone who’s sick of the slickly overproduced sounds and clumsy high-school lyrics all over the radio, movies and TV these days. Full disclosure: I love this album and I love my cover for it. I can’t stop listening; each song is a blessed relief to my ears and heart. As if that weren’t enough, the band even put the album online so that anyone can listen to it for free! You should buy the CD afterward though. 
Following is the story of the album’s process as well as singer/songwriter Lora Bloom herself on the thoughts and emotions behind the songs.
BROADCAST MUSE recorded in 2008-2009 at Eris Temple, the band’s West Philadelphia headquarters/performance gallery is, as with all Radio Eris releases, a fully DIY operation, recorded and mixed by mad-professor keyboard/bassist Matt Stevenson. Amazingly, it is the band’s first album in a almost a decade (since Beautiful Losers in 2000) to feature their repoirtoire of written, studio-rehearsed songs. Previous albums Strength, Monkey Island, and The Cruel Tutelage of Master Hotei or Who is Toulouse Turac leaned more towards the band’s spoken-word, electronic, experimental and improvisatory sides, though with a rising tide of rock structure and progression that seems to coalesce into Broadcast Muse’s tightly-arranged bouquet of rock styles.
The suite of songs presented on Broadcast Muse will be recognizable to long-time fans of the band’s dynamic and unpredictable live performances. Radio Eris sets often involve a tension between free-form explorations and oddly-wrought songs. The avant-gardisms don’t stop them from indulging in sixties garage and seventies punk influenced moments, such as in the offbeat “Yellow” and bleak ”Deafend”, or in such classic rock moves as the blues jam that runs through a spectral take on the traditional song “Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child“ (discovered in an ancient Pete Seegar songbook).
The album also features a cover song: an epic, doom-laden take on Tom Waits’s “Dirt In The Ground” , one of a number of opportunities to showcase Dan “Redbeard” Baker’s psychotic mastery of the guitar solo. “Pale Lights” and “Work Song” offer 90s-vintage distortion and drone, while the delicately fractured piano ballad “Remember” and opener “Caul” with its chiming central guitar figure played by vocalist Lora Bloom, take place in a hushed, spacious sonic mode carved out by sound sculptor Kenneth “The Extremist”.
On a more somber note, this was the final album recorded with beloved drummer Lisa Sunshine, a vital aspect in the creation and development of all pieces on Broadcast Muse, who has moved on to pursue her solo songwriting career. Current Radio Eris drummer Brad Rothman takes the wheel gracefully and adds his unique energy to the live versions of these strange songs.
Radio Eris vocalist/poet lyricist Lora Bloom discusses lyrics and themes on Broadcast Muse:
“I feel it is a perfect partnership to be working with Delia Gable for the album art and Sara Sherr for the CD release because there is a strong female-energy that runs through the lyrics and a spirituality and deep emotional current behind many of the songs on Broadcast Muse.
Caul has all kinds of vaguely disturbing images of parts of women’s bodies, and Work Song and Pale Lights were both inspired by my experiences as an exotic dancer. Work Song was originally a spontaneous improvisation that was released as-is on the album Strength and it talks about the way it feels to make money so intimately, literally on your body, dollar by dollar, while Pale Lights has a more symbolic/emotional tone, the feeling of being under the lights, scrutinized for the pleasure of the crowd.
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child was originally sung by slaves on plantations and it seems to conjure a timeless and universal emotion of loneliness and despair. Remember is me imagining the dead looking back on life and how it would feel to them, which sort of juxtaposes with Dirt in the Ground, written by my hero Tom Waits, a song about the inevitability of death and the way this taints our lives.
Yellow was just sort of a playful romp making connections with the concept of yellow; I loved connecting the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine with the yellow submarine in the Illuminatus Trilogy. Deafend was written shortly after 9/11 and is about the silence at the heart of tragedy that we who try to live normal lives can neither express nor comprehend.”
More updates soon!
