This is an album I discovered a few year ago after hearing one of the tunes late at night on the radio. Thank God for the small fraction of freeform stations still operating in the US. Amazing ambient/experimental rock that has shamefully gone out of print in recent years, leaving people like Evan and I to expose the world to it. The whole album was edited together from hours of recorded sessions. You know, like early Faust? I guess that would be an apt comparison if the bands sounded anything alike…
AllMusic says: “Rome’s dreamy, disorienting debut is a warped, slow-motion paste-up job, featuring elements of dub, ambient, and foamy electronics against a solid, time-shifting backbone of live drums and loping bass. The most dub-like of the “post-rock” lot, Rome are also the least-derivative, running their influences through enough compositional randomizers to come up with something both immediately compelling and enduringly satisfying.”
“Unlike other Thrill Jocky artists such as Tortoise and Trans-Am, however, Rome draw less obviously from the past, using instruments closely associated with dub (melodica, studio effects), ambient (synthesizers, found sounds), industrial (machine beats, abrasive sounds), and space music (soundtrack-y atmospherics), but fashioning from them a sound which lay clearly beyond the boundaries of each. Perhaps best described as simply experimental, Rome formed in the early ’90s as the trio of Rik Shaw (bass), Le Deuce (electronics), and Elliot Dick (drums). Based in Chicago, their Thrill Jockey debut was a soupy collage of echoing drums, looping electronics, and deep, droning bass, with an overwhelmingly live feel (the band later divulged that much of the album was the product of studio jamming and leave-the-tape-running styled improvisation). Benefiting from an early association with labelmates Tortoise as representing a new direction for American rock, Rome toured the U.S. and U.K. with the group (even before the album had been released), also appearing on the German Mille Plateaux label’s tribute compilation to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, In Memoriam. Although drummer Elliot Dick left the group soon after the first album was released, Shaw and Deuce wasted no time with new material, releasing the “Beware Soul Snatchers” single within weeks of its appearance. An even denser slab of inboard studio trickery, “Soul Snatchers” was the clearest example to date of the group’s evolving sound, though further recordings failed to materialize.”
Rome
Rome
MegaUpload DL Link
Tracklist:
01. Leaving Perdition
02. Intermodal
03. Lunar White
04. She’s A Black Belt
05. Rohm
06. Radiolucence
07. Deepest Laws
