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Baker's Dozen

The Old Country: Steve Von Till’s Baker’s Dozen
John Doran , December 16th, 2020 10:06

The long-serving Neurosis guitarist and singer shares his deep dive favourites; 13 albums which have shaped the way he looks at music and informed his writing and solo work as Harvestman and Steve Von Till

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Flying Saucer Attack - Chorus
Flying Saucer Attack are fundamentally important for me, in the way I like to record here at home, making my psychedelic music and Harvestman recordings. I had difficulty picking which album to throw in here but I knew it was going to be from that period. When I bought this record I didn't know it was a compilation of different tracks. I love the way the voice is mixed back in with a kind of pop sensibility. It's pretty and it's very English. I don't think that the rural psychedelia part of this is something I really relate to, and it could be from any environment, but it feels like I can take Flying Saucer Attack's catalogue, Skullflowers' catalogue, and be heretical [regarding English music], and mix it with Hawkwind's catalogue, put Sandy Denny in there, and wrap it all up with the Joy Division sound and then it makes complete perfect sense to me. All of these records are speaking the same language. If I was standing in the middle of some open field out in the stone circle country in England, and I heard all of those sounds coming from different geographical directions, there's my dream right there and Chorus sits right in there. The way David Pearce used feedback reduced into volume, and reverb into reverb into reverb to the point the music becomes, like a watercolour painting of a specific thing that's had a glass of water spilled on it; having the colours all smear across the paper to the point you're only left with dreamy remnants of whatever that original subject was.