The Squid's Ear Magazine


VRIL (Drake / Simonis / Cutler / Omer): The Fatal Duckpond (Recommended Records)

VRIL's 2nd incredible album of tongue-in-cheek lyrical guitar instrumentals, led by Lukas Simonis with Bob Drake and now 3rd guitarist Omer, with Chris Cutler on drums.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Chris Cutler-drums

Bob Drake-bass, guitar

Lukas Simonis-guitars

Pierre Omer-guitars


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UPC: 752725027229

Label: Recommended Records
Catalog ID: ReR Vril2
Squidco Product Code: 11867

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2009
Country: Great Britain
Arranged by VRIL and recorded 'live' at Studio Midi-Pyrenees, France July 15-25, 2007 by Bob Drake.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"After a break of six years, Chris Cutler, Bob Drake and Lukas Simonis, now with added ingredient Pierre Omer, present the second volume of recordings by the elusive VRIL - a band who revive and update both the great institution of the guitar instrumental and the now sadly neglected practice of collective arrangement, intense rehearsal and live studio performance. Appropriate to the half century that has passed since the birth of the form, these hits dodge about, get bored easily and blend both concentration and complexity with the still indispensable traditional qualities that made the genre great: hummability, crafted sounds, nifty arrangements, ridiculous gimmicks and ensemble playing. 'Neither tribute nor parody, these enigmatic pieces are never more nor less than exactly what they are'.... wrote Lothar Preen in his Melbourne concert review....'but perfectly realised'. With film stills, misleading sleeve-notes and storyboard by the Diogenesian recluse Frank Key."-Chris Cutler, ReR Megacorp



This album has been reviewed on our magazine:

The Squid
The Squid's Ear!

Artist Biographies

"Chris Cutler started messing about with banjo, guitar and trumpet at school, settling for drums and playing shadows and other instrumental covers in his first band in 1963. Subsequently he played in R'n'B and Soul Bands, winding up in 1967 playing in London's psychedelic clubs. At the start of the seventies, with Dave Stewart, he co-founded The Ottawa Music Co, a 22 piece Rock composer's orchestra, eventually joining British experimental group Henry Cow with whom he toured, recorded and worked in dance and theatre projects until it's demise in 1978. In 1977 Henry Cow, The Mike Westbrook Orchestra and Frankie Armstrong formed a big-band and toured around Europe. After Henry Cow, Cutler went on to co-found a series of mixed national groups Art Bears, News from Babel, Cassiber, The (ec) Nudes, P53 and The Science Group. He was a permanent member of American bands Pere Ubu, Hail and The Wooden Birds and now works sporadically with John Rose, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins, Iancu Dumitrescu, Peter Blegvad and Stevan Tickmayer.

Other lasting collaborations have included Aqsak Maboul (Belgium), Lussier/Derome and Les Quatre Guitaristes (Canada), The Kalahari Surfers (Africa), Perfect Trouble (Germany), Between (Sweden), N.O.R.M.A., (Italy), Telectu (Portugal), Mieku Shimuzu (Japan),The Hyperion Ensemble (Romania), The Film Music Orchestra, 'Oh Moscow', Gong, The Work and Towering Inferno (UK), The Residents (USA), and stateless Tense Serenity and Mirror Man. There have also been countless improvisational groupings and solo performances. Recent projects include Radio pieces with Lutz Glandien and Shelly Hirsch, Live Soundtrack for Carl Dreher's Vampyr (with Italians Musci and Venosta), his Timescales project and work with David Thomas and Linda Thompson.

He also founded and runs the independent label and distribution service ReR/Recommended and, until 1991, the East European specialist label Points East. He is editor of the New Music magazine Unfiled and author of the theoretical book File Under Popular as well as of numerous articles and papers published in 14 languages. He lectures intermittently on theoretical and music related topics. He has appeared on more than 100 recordings."

-Chris Cutler Website (http://www.ccutler.com/)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Bob Drake was born in Cleveland, Ohio on December 6, 1957, and spent his youth in Watseka, Illinois. There he taught himself how to play guitar and drums, but after hearing Yes's Fragile in 1972, Drake decided he wanted to be a bassist and bought himself a Rickenbacker 4001 bass guitar, which he still uses today. Henry Cow also had a big influence on him: "[T]hey were doing something I felt was a lot closer to what I was imagining I'd like to do - 'complex' intricate songs and arrangements, noisy things going on which fit organically in the music, and less emphasis on 'perfect' studio overcooked impersonal perfection."

Drake experimented with recording techniques and "warped rock", but soon found that no one was interested in "new and strange music" in his rural Midwestern home town. He moved to Denver, Colorado in 1978 where he worked for a while as a sound engineer on B horror movie sets. He also spent time recording local underground bands and playing bass guitar and drums with some of them. Drake put an advertisement at a local music store requesting a guitar player "into Henry Cow, Yes ...", and met up with experimental rock guitarist and composer Mike Johnson. Drake and Johnson played in a few cover bands before forming Thinking Plague in 1982. By 1990 Thinking Plague had recorded three albums and established a name for themselves in progressive circles.

In the late 1980s the Denver music scene "just evaporated" as musicians seeking "greener pastures" moved elsewhere. Drake, "flat broke" at the time, moved to Los Angeles where he found a job as a recording engineer. There he established a name for himself working with several mainstream artists like Ice Cube, Tina Turner and Engelbert Humperdinck. During this time he also formed an alternative rock group, Hail with ex-Thinking Plague's singer Susanne Lewis, and joined Dave Kerman's avant rock group, the 5uu's. Hunger's Teeth, the 5uu's' third album was praised for its "challenging music" and "production values", and made Drake a "sought-after engineer and collaborator".

Drake released his first solo album, What Day is It? in 1994. It was a limited edition (1,000 copies) self released record that Drake pressed himself. He later made five more solo albums, which were all released on ex-Henry Cow drummer Chris Cutler's UK independent record label, Recommended Records. In 1994 Drake and Kerman moved to an old farm house owned by Cutler and Henry Cow's sound engineer EM (Maggie) Thomas in Caudeval, southern France. They converted it into a studio which they called Studio Midi-Pyrenees. Later Drake worked closely with Cutler on a number of projects for Recommended Records, including the remastering of several albums and box sets, for example The Art Box (2004) and The 40th Anniversary Henry Cow Box Set (2009). He also joined Cutler's avant-rock band The Science Group in 1997, in which he played and engineered/produced the group's two albums.

Drake continued to work on and off in the 2000s with Thinking Plague and the 5uu's. In 2007 he formed his own group, Bob Drake's Cabinet of Curiosities to perform material from his solo albums live on stage. The group comprised Drake (guitar, vocals, violin, banjo), Kerman (drums), David Campbell (guitar, bass guitar, vocals) and Jason DuMars (soprano/alto saxophones, keyboards). They played at NEARfest in Pennsylvania in June 2007 with guests Olivier Tejedor (keyboards) and Lynnette Shelley (vocals)."

-Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Drake_(musician))
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Lukas Simonis has his roots as an instrumentalist and musical 'activist' in the industrial music and noise rock of the Eighties ( Throbbing Gristle, the Residents, Pere Ubu, Sonic Youth and beyond). Being a part of the Rotterdam jazzbunker scene (a collective that consisted of heavy drug induced punk rockers, freejazzers, early electronic musicians and pre-postrock combo's) he discovered the delimited world of improvisation. In the meantime & after he played in bands like Dull Schicksal, Trespassers W, Morzelpronk, AA Kismet, Liana Flu Winks, VRIL, Stepmother, Perfect Vacuum and Coolhaven. At the same time he was/is organising concerts, events and films, first at the Jazzbunker in Rotterdam later on the Dissonanten festival, the Dissidenten festival, Popifilm, Dodorama , WORM, a multimedia centre for experimental art and finally stichting KLANGENDUM since 2013.

Nowadays he collaborates with lots of people from different backgrounds. For instance; Kruk (with Nina Hitz and Sato Endo), STEPMOTHER (with Jeroen Visser, Bill Gilonis and David Kerman), Jim Whelton (London), Ergo Phizmiz (UK), Dave Brown (Melbourne), The X Static Tics (with Henk Bakker and various others). Other people he worked with; Eugene Chadbourne (USA), Goh Lee Kwang (Kuala Lumpur), Bohman Brothers (UK), Anne La Berge (USA/NL), Faces (with Huib Emmer, NL), Peter Stampfel (USA), Eddie Prevost (UK), etc."

-Lukas Simonis Website (https://lukas.home.xs4all.nl/english/lukas.html#shortbio)
3/13/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. Duckpond 2:49

2. Beppo gets crunched 2:16

3. The desperate twins 3:12

4. Baffling calcium lantern light 2:15

5. Stalking contessa 0:43

6. A base knave behind the arras 2:39

7. Casa incognita 3:04

8. Things get lopped 0:57

9. Albino hen coop 2:42

10. Poisoned tunic 1:01

11. Why is the king grunting? 2:22

12. Enter Pabstus Tack 2:58

13. "He mesmerised a duck" 2:33

14. Fateful speech impediment 2:00

15. [Cut from the film at Primrose Dent's whim] 2:36

16. Seven ignorant cousins 1:37

17. The flight of Beppo 1:02

18. Gone with the window 0:55



All compositions by Lukas Simonis.

Related Categories of Interest:


Rock and Related
Progressive Rock
Guitarists, &c.
Cutler, Chris
Drake, Bob

Search for other titles on the label:
Recommended Records.


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