The Squid's Ear Magazine


Home of Easy Credit, The: (Blancarte / Eckardt) (Northern Spy)

Denmark to NY transplant Dam Eckardt Jensen blends her vocals, saxophone and flute work with Texan/NY bassist Tom Blancarte's furious playing to create unique sound worlds, including 5 hallucinatory and musical dreams.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Tom Blancarte-upright bass

Louise Dam Eckardt-alto saxophone, flute, vocals, electronics


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UPC: 722301231500

Label: Northern Spy
Catalog ID: NS 023
Squidco Product Code: 16940

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2012
Country: USA
Packaging: Digipack
Recorded by Colin Marstan at Menegroth, The Thousand Caves in Woodhaven, Queens during Fall and Winter 2011 and 2012.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"The Home of Easy Credit is the eponymous debut recording from husband and wife team Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen and Tom Blancarte. Taking their name from a department store sign in a dilapidated section of downtown Houston, Texas (Blancarte's native state), the duo draw their inspiration from the gradual awareness of the decline of civilization which permeates our culture.

Hailing from a remote rural region of Denmark, Jensen uses subtle and not-so-subtle electronics to blend her vocal, saxophone and flute work with Tom Blancarte's furious bass playing, creating one of the most unique sound worlds in contemporary music. Featuring tortured sonic landscapes that conjure up Stockhausen and Feldman as readily as Björk or Mike Patton, their debut on Northern Spy Records is a mediation on the bleakness of modern America and the western world in general.

The album contains a tightly-constructed musical narrative; five short auditory haikus named for permutations of the American Dream posited by Ted Ownby are interspersed between longer, open-form pieces whose titles reference cubicles, the dark side of Frank Lloyd Wright and the books of Michael Pollan and James Howard Kunstler, among other subjects. The Home of Easy Credit paints a musical portrait of a commercialized and homogenized consumer culture that is slowly waking up to realize that it is completely fucked."-Northern Spy


Artist Biographies

"For over a decade, Texan bassist Tom Blancarte has been contributing a vivid pallet of dark frequencies to New York's creative music scene, both as a freelance performer as well as a member of bands such as the electro-acoustic jazz ensemble the Peter Evans Septet, the banjo-shred power trio Seabrook Power Plant, New Timbralist free jazz noise trio Totem, an eerie post-apocalyptic duo with wife Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen (The Home of Easy Credit), improv doom tuba trio The Gate and Danish post-punk improv quartet Sweet Banditry.

A native of the Texas Hill Country in Austin, Texas, his formative years included a steady diet of fantasy and sci-fi novels, comic books and video games, and later on a total immersion in death and black metal. Accordingly, Blancarte has cultivated a demented and visceral instrumental practice that transcends the experimental bass canon and pushes improvisatory art to new extremes. He has toured extensively throughout Europe and North America, playing venues that range from dingy squatted basements to international festivals.

Recently, he has begun to perform improvised solos on the bass as an exciting new area of exploration, started reacquainting himself with the euphonium (his first instrument), as well as starting the Denmark-based record label Marsken Records. He is on the faculty at the Music and Theater Folk School in Toftlund, Denmark. He lives in Toftlund with his wife and daughter."

-Marsken Records (https://www.marsken.com/about-tom/)
3/13/2024

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


Track Listing:



1. Monolithic Insanity (dedicated to Robert Propst) 9:31

2. The Dream of a Democracy of Goods 2:30

3. The Feast of the Meal Replacement Bars 7:48

4. The Dream of Abundance 1:36

5. A Fireproof House for $5000 8:44

6. The Dream of Novelty 2:14

7. Arches of Gold 7:10

8. The Dream of the Pursuit of Happiness 3:16

9. Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation 7:56

10. The Dream of Freedom of Choice 0:52

11. The Geography of Nowhere 9:00

12. Only 827 Miles to Wall Drug - with FREE ICE WATER! 3:51

Related Categories of Interest:


Improvised Music
Electro-Acoustic
Electro-Acoustic Improv
NY Downtown & Metropolitan Jazz/Improv
Duo Recordings

Search for other titles on the label:
Northern Spy.


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