Buscar:trans mania

Includes unlimited streaming of The Bitter Glow LP via the free
Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more

After releasing their early punk classic Pure Mania and touring with Iggy Pop, The Vibrators continued with the follow-up album V2 ten months later. V2 was a commercial success, landing in the UK album top 40. The single The single ""Automatic Lover"" even led to a Top of the Pops appearance. The album also contains the punk classic ""Troops Of Tomorrow"", which became a highly acclaimed cover by Scottish punk band The Exploited. V2 is available as a limited edition of 750 individually numbered copies on translucent red colored vinyl and includes an insert.

Pressed on heavy-weight 3xLP 180g curaçao vinyl GIANTS is an ambitious video game concept album, meticulously crafted over six years by Tokyo-based record label Brave Wave Productions under the direction of Mohammed Taher. The colossal 98-minute album showcases the talents of legendary composers known for their iconic work on series like Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, Panzer Dragoon, Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy, among others. The album is a rich tapestry of new, gameinspired compositions from these celebrated artists, paired with innovative remixes from their classic catalogue as reimagined by their contemporaries. A highlight of the album is its emphasis on collaboration, exemplified by original tracks like Ultramarine_the first collaborative effort from Mega Man 2's Takashi Tateishi with Mega Man 3's Harumi Fujita and Sonic Mania's Tee Lopes. Another standout track, Ronin, marks a historic reunion for the Ninja Gaiden composer trio_Keiji Yamagishi, Ryuichi Nitta, and Kaori Nakabai_collaborating for the first time since their work on the NES Ninja Gaiden titles. The collaborative spirit extends to the remixes as well, such as Final Fantasy series composer Yoshitaka Suzuki's cinematic reimagining of Mega Man 2's Wily Stage, featuring Bayonetta co-composer Takahiro Izutani on acoustic guitars and producing, as well as Celeste composer Lena Raine's tranquil rendition of Panzer Dragoon Saga's Art Thou the Holy One, crafted in harmony with original composer Saori Kobayashi. GIANTS transcends traditional boundaries, featuring a diverse array of genres and styles brought to life by over two dozen talented musicians, making it a celebratory anthology of game music's rich history and evolution, led by Brave Wave's in-house rock band Super Strikers and a legion of legendary game composers.

Psalms Of Yellow House“ folgt auf das 2020 erschienene Projekt, „Mania/ Post Mania“, das von BIRP.fm, Indie Shuffle, Maison Kitsuné und Stereofox gelobt wurde. Wie bereits erwähnt, arbeitete Yellow House mit ODESZA an der im letzten Jahr erschienenen EP, „Flaws In Our Design“, einer verträumten, transformativen Verschmelzung von Yellow House' psychedelischem Alterna-Folk und ODESZAs epischen, symphonischen Kompositionen, die von Dancing Astronaut sowie American Songwriter - die die EP als „atemberaubende, kopfnickende neue Traummusik“ beschrieben - gelobt wurde. Die EP brachte Yellow House auch den Einstieg in die Billboard Hot Dance/ Electronic Songs Charts mit der Leadsingle, „Heavier“.

Pure Mania is the debut album by The Vibrators, who have always been considered one of the most important punk pioneers in the UK. The band was formed in 1976 by Ian 'Knox' Carnochan, Pat Collier, John Ellis and John 'Eddie' Edwards. In 1976 they were backed by Sex Pistols producer Chris Spedding, who recommended the band to the successful RAK label. The band had legendary shows on John Peel's BBC Radio 1 and played the pioneering punk venue: London's Roxy Club. The band supported Iggy Pop and Mott the Hoople frontman Ian Hunter. Pure Mania has always been considered a true punk classic that was essential to the birth of the British punk scene. Even the Stiff Little Fingers took their name from a track on the album. The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music also named Pure Mania as one of the 50 greatest punk albums of all time. Pure Mania is available as a limited edition of 1000 individually numbered copies on translucent magenta coloured vinyl.

"The Eighties spawned many iconic films such as Footloose, Dirty Dancing, Ghostbusters, Rocky and The Breakfast Club. Despite all the different genres, they all had something in common: great film music. 80’s Movies Hits Collected is a collection of music that is inextricably linked to Eighties movie classics, including Queen, Billy Ocean, Lionel Richie, The Bangles, Duran Duran, Pat Benatar, Tina Turner and Survivor amongst many others. 80’s Movie Hits Collected is available as a limited edition of 1500 copies on translucent blue (LP1) and gold (LP2) coloured vinyl. This 2LP-set includes an insert with liner notes, photos, and credits. "

80'S Movie Hits Collected by Various Artists, released 24 May 2024, includes the following tracks: "Philip Oakey & Giorgio Moroder - Together In Electric Dreams (From Electric Dreams)", "Limahl - Never Ending Story (From The Never Ending Story)", "Los Lobos - La Bamba (From La Bamba)", "Ray Parker Jr. - Ghostbusters (From Ghostbusters)" and more.
This version of 80'S Movie Hits Collected comes as a 2xLP. This release comes with (a) Insert(s).

The vinyl is pressed as a translucent, blue disc. Another vinyl is pressed as a translucent, gold disc.

High Roller Records, transparent blood-red vinyl, ltd 300, A4 cardboard insert, 425gsm heavy cardboard cover

Limted version on 2LP transparent violet vinyl in gatefold sleeve, 300 copies! ‘Lefto presents Jazz Cats' is back with volume 3 and still doing what it does best: putting you in the front row of what the thriving Belgian jazz scene currently has to offer and revealing a melting pot of the musical talent.



'Lefto presents Jazz Cats' is back with volume 3 and still doing what it does best: putting you in the front row of what the thriving Belgian jazz scene currently has to offer and revealing a melting pot of the musical talent coming out one of the smallest countries in Europe. Never change a winning team they say, so we're happy to have Belgian DJ and eclectic connoisseur Lefto on board again.

Although you expect thecompilation to be talking jazz, volume 3 explores a broader array of styles, genres, and sounds than ever before, arriving at a point where the 'young cats' of today don't bother no more. It may focus on the Belgian scene, but let's face it, seeing the influences, this one could be compiled from all over the world. From the empowering and bittersweet voices of Oriana Ikomo and Adja, over the more acoustic-electronic productions of Moodprint, Ciao Kennedy, Kassius and echofarmer. It's even expanding the Jazz Cats universe to dub and bass-heavy tracks with Kin Gajo and Le Ministère, Ethio-jazz from Azmari, while sending you back to earth with bodies' swirling sax and drums. That saxophone still rings in your ears when you end up in the orbit of the march-like drums of Bodem, Orson Claeys' piano testing your ability to follow him, slamming the breaks to go smooth cruisin' with HONEY (Morricone meets Khruangbin, anyone?), to crashing in a raging tempo on that last track of Bruno x Soet x Moene. And there you are, back with us.



2018's 'Lefto presents Jazz Cats' included tracks from some of Belgium's biggest hitters, including Black Flower, STUFF. De Beren Gieren and Glass Museum who have all gone on to receive global acclaim. The album was given the accolade of 'Album of the Week' on Worldwide FM and also received further radio support from Jazz FM in addition to numerous glowing reviews. The 2022 follow-up 'Jazz Cats volume 2' paved the way for a new generation inspired by its peers, entering another era of very talented individuals and collectives. Maybe even more so than 4 years before. It uncovered a beautiful balance of more established but also obscure musicians and artists. Opening up to electronics and dance, enter bands like ECHT!, Stellar Legions and TUKAN. Thrilling innovative soundscape grooves and jazz fusion with Bandler Ching and L?p?GangGang, not to forget about the weaving musical odyssey that is M.CHUZI. In addition, there's the balanced unease of One Frame Movement, the laidback 'acoustic electronica' of Boombox Experiments, the classic funky jazz stylings of Cargo Mas and cinematic The Brums, all of these have set volume 2 on the map as an essential release for any jazzhead with a passion for new sounds.

Tastemaker, selector, curator, DJ and producer, these words often get mentioned when Lefto's name pops up in discussions. And rightly so. If you've ever had the pleasure to listen to one of his incredible Boiler Room sets or one of his many radio shows, you'll know why. Famed for his gloriously eclectic taste on the decks, he switches effortlessly between hip hop, funk, breaks, neck-snapping beats, future bass, South-American influences, bruk riddims, some wild African rhythms and of course, jazz.

Growing up as a child, his father would have the sounds of jazz flowing through the speakers. Which led him to bars around town to hear the latest jazz ensembles. Falling in love with the genre, he would later refine his knack for record digging and fine ear for music working at Belgium's legendary Music Mania record store in his hometown Brussels. Which makes that Lefto is consistently a couple steps ahead. He doesn't wait for the next thing to land in his lap, but actively seeking it out.

Lefto on Jazz Cats volume 3:
"Another release in less than two years! I am very impressed by the amount of creative "jazz" talent we've managed to compile over the last couple of years. Thanks to the internet, young musicians find inspiration from around the globe and incorporate diverse influences into their work. Given the history and heritage of jazz in this country, it has managed to create a healthy jazz scene supported by festivals, venues, press, and labels. Therefore, I am very proud to present to you the thirdinstallment of Jazz Cats. This compilation is dedicated to the young and hardworking musicians who are the present and the future of Belgium's jazz scene."

Tides is the brand-new studio album from Hybrid Minds. Presenting 13 incredible tracks, including the hits ‘If Love Could Have Saved You’, with Venbee and ‘Lights’, with Charlotte Plank. Get ready to sit back and enjoy the sonic journey that Tides takes you on, transcending listeners beyond the genre’s more typical environments with their own unique Hybrid Minds take on the Drum & Bass style.

Original 1998 album remastered and pressed on 180 gram virgin vinyl."I met them in full flower, in the depths of their mania, pursuing contemplative music with the kind of intensity normally found in psychopaths. No detail was too small to sweat, no crack in the veneer not worth gluing and clamping. We built a common language, equal parts philosophy, rock music, and disdain for the dullness around us." - Steve Albini, on recording Transaction De Novo.

Having announced that Snapper Music will be representing Porcupine
Tree’s Transmission label worldwide, new CD and LP reissues of the band’s catalogue continue to be rolled out throughout 2021.

The concept for ‘The Incident’ (the band’s much lauded 10th and most recent studio album from 2009) emerged as Porcupine Tree’s creator Steven Wilson, was caught in a motorway traffic jam whilst driving past a road accident.
“There was a sign saying ‘POLICE - INCIDENT’ and everyone was slowing down to see what had happened... Afterwards, it struck me that ‘incident’ is a very detached word for something so destructive and traumatic for the people involved. The irony of such a cold expression for such seismic events appealed to me, and I began to pick out other ‘incidents’ reported in the media and news, I wrote about the evacuation of teenage girls from a religious cult in Texas, a
family terrorising its neighbours, a body found floating in a river by some people on a fishing trip, and more.

Consisting of 18 tracks, each song is written in the first person, attempting to humanise the detached media reportage of each associated event. The first 14 tracks form part of a 55-minute song cycle, with the last 4 having been recorded later (and originally released as a second disc to stress their independence from the song cycle).

The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Surround Sound Album and reached the Top 25 in the US and UK album charts. It was awarded “Album Of The Year” in Classic Rock and German magazine Eclipsed.

‘The Incident’ marked another step forward in the incredible journey of the band that began as a solo studio project and grew to a multi-Grammy nominated act and one of the world’s most revered live bands, selling out arenas across the globe and wowing fans with their incredible performances.

This new Transmission 2021 reissue of ‘The Incident’ remains faithful to the original artwork and all 18 album tracks are presented on one disc housed in a digipack with 8-page booklet or as a gatefold double LP on 140g black vinyl.

“An intriguing and truly inspiring album” - Rock Sound
“The title suite is the Tree’s finest hour: a mounting drama of memoir and realnews trauma, animated with slicing guitars, ghost-song electronics, mile-high harmonies and smart pop bait - Rolling Stone

Classic madness and violence! Death Metal history, the ultimate edition! Death Strike need little introduction to anyone who would consider themselves seasoned in the realm of Death Metal, the legendary Paul Speckmann’s debut foray into the genre has garnered pretty much cult status now as a genre classic and not without good reason. This reissue of 1991 album compiles the debut demo from ‘85 together with four other tracks for the rather aptly titled “Fuckin’ Death”, and being brutally honest, could you possibly have a more suitable description for the sensory annihilation present on these recordings? It’s that fact that half this material was recorded back in the mid-eighties that really makes it stand out, Death Metal was still in its infantile stages back then with extreme metal making a transition between the Crust influenced filth of Hellhammer and the ilk to a more brutal strain with bands like Possessed and Slaughter emerging out of the underground with a significantly more potent and brutal form of metal unlike anything heard before, and when you realize it came out at the same time as two monumental releases by the aforementioned bands you wonder why the fuck it never got quite as much attention as it was just as influential if not more so than those classics. If you’re one of the unenlightened still wondering who the fuck Death Strike are, “Fuckin’ Death” was essentially just the first Master album under a different moniker, and along with Master’s debut and “On the Seventh Day...” are Death Metal classics. The first four tracks as previously mentioned are from 1985 and astonishingly ahead of their time. It’s basically ‘Hellhammer on crack’, fast brutal and utterly primal Death Metal with that huge hardcore influence shining through. Paul’s vocals are a maniacal and wretched reverbed howl that just add to the chaos conjured with Kirk’s unbridled leads, the d-beat styled drumming and thundering, bowel shaking bass. Songs like “Pay to Die” and “Re-Entry and Destruction” are impossible not to like, it’s extreme metal heaven (or hell, whichever you prefer), straight-forward, catchy and downright punishing.

This is a Double LP Gatefold Silver plate !

Bacchus Harsh is the alias of Melbourne based multi-disciplinary artist Christian Bishop. Predominantly known in international music circles as Australian breakcore pioneer Xian, Bishop has expanded his already widescreen musical horizons to embrace an even broader creative cosmos under this new alias. Bacchus Harsh is the sonic embodiment of occult-themed electronics and deconstructed club music. De-territorializing exotica, occult psychedelia and industrial techno with polyrhythms and distorted blast beats, Bacchus Harsh confuses the dance floor.

Caveat Tumultum is an expansive double LP of icy post-breakcore industrial heaviness, where hallucinogenic cinematic atmospheres collide with sample-driven mania and complex mechanical rhythms. The resulting album is a 60-minute masterclass in foreboding electronic production, dystopian sonic manipulation and the thrillingly visceral experience of true underground party music.

Sometimes, a change of view can transform a person’s world. On ‘Don’t Come Down’, the artist formerly known as Matt Pond PA can be found with his “shoulder on the concrete” of a pavement, scoping out the world anew. This granular realignment of perspective serves as an open door to the debut album from The Natural Lines. At once clearly Pond’s work yet a huge leap forward in its measured songcraft, melodic immediacy, collaborative detail and wryly questioning lyrics, the result is a gorgeous album of intimate reflections from a relocated, renamed, revivified talent.

Recorded with close collaborators and friends over a period that saw Pond make vital adjustments to his life, its stealth emergence reflects his desire to set a fresh pace for himself and come from somewhere new, somewhere more open.

Now based in Kingston, New York, with his partner and wild dog Willa, Matt explains the album’s gestation thus. “It was something different from the start. I wanted to write as purely as I could. Instead of getting stuck in the ‘tour, write an album, release an album, tour’ cycle, which is not a natural way of writing or living, I wanted to write an album and when it was done I wanted to make sure it was done. I didn’t want this feeling of, ‘Oh, we didn’t have time’, or, ‘I don’t know whether I believe in the songs but it’s coming out anyway.’ I used to be always racing to the finish line, but I’m not anymore.”

For Matt, the call to ring the changes came with the recognition of “a certain nihilism or narcissism” involved in making music. “In some ways, you have to get in your own head and I think I went too far with that, with drinking and shutting people out. In something that I believe is collaborative, it’s not helpful.”

“I quit lying,” he adds. “I checked my harsher tones. I cut my drinking down. I went to therapy and figured out how to stop shouting at cars.”

Car troubles inspire ‘No More Tragedies’, the album’s standout second track, where he wryly details his desire to dampen his twinned impulses to take pictures of license plates blocking his parking space or take bricks to said car windshields. Warming melodies and harmonies soothe his rage, a balance maintained elsewhere on the album.

A need for connection underpins the lilting ‘Alex Bell’, where Matt’s lyrics playfully reference the inventor of the telephone over a plaintive cello and bubbling keyboards – evidence of the album’s carefully nurtured arrangements. With nimble sequencing, ‘My Answer’ follows with a question: do artists really need to get messed-up to create? Matt may not have the answer, he admits, but he articulates the question beautifully, channelling the influence of Blue Öyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’ into a song of fleet, melodic electric-folk drive.

Featuring 17-year-old MJ Murphy on misty backing vocals, the softly insistent ‘Don’t Come Down’ is an album centrepiece, detailing a need to see things anew. Like The Flaming Lips writing a classicist piano ballad, the twinkling ‘Artificial Moonlight’ finds Matt writing late at night, illuminated by the lights from streetlamps. Finally, ‘Mahwah’ closes the album on a note of arrival. While Matt Pond PA’s albums emerged from the disconnection of touring and living in vans, Pond is now happily – cruel winters aside – ensconced in Kingston. “I have found a place I love. Mercury Rev lives near here. It is a cool place to be, an artistic, mountainous, wild place to live. So – maybe this is it.”

In the case of The Natural Lines, a sense of arrival suggests itself. For Matt, the album follows two decades’ worth of Matt Pond PA records and soundtrack works. In a career he once described as “a series of benign mistakes,” Matt travelled far, moving from his band’s starting point in Philadelphia to Florida, Oakland and beyond while releasing 14 well-received albums. In 2017, he declared his intent to retire the Matt Pond PA name, though it lived on briefly in the reissue of The State Of Gold and EPs such as Free Fall, a tribute to Philadelphia.

Now, the name change honours his collaborators. Among a revolving cast, one constant presence in his work has been Chris Hansen, who plays guitar, bass, keys, saxophone and vocals on The Natural Lines’ debut. Matt’s partner, Anya Marina, contributes vocals. Other band members number Hilary James (cello/vocals), Kyle Kelly-Yahner (drums), Louie Lino (keys), Sarah Hansen (horns), Sean Hansen (drums/bass), Kat Murphy (vocals) and, also on vocals, MJ Murphy, for whom Matt brims with praise: “She can do anything she wants to musically.”

A heartening rebirth for Pond and his friends, the result also pays warming, witty, reflective and infectious testimony to the value of reconfiguring one’s outlook. “Once I took control of my mind, I could see what I wanted to say more clearly,” says Matt. “Instead of random floods of mania and panic, I felt like I was composed and composing. It has become as simple as reading the words of a sentence in the right order. As small as the pause before I hit ‘send’.” A development, you might say, conducted along the most natural of lines.

2023 REpress
A North American road trip of coming of age garage soul mapped by Ivan Liechti, Ghost Riders is Efficient Space’s latest narrative compilation, hovering in a liminal emotional ravine between moonlight melancholy, teenage heartache and unchecked, unrealised ambition. Across seventeen open hearted ballads recorded 1965-1974, the 2LP collects and connects dots between British Invasion fanatics, child prodigies, the loners and the luckless, in a kind of trans-continental survey of those swept up in rock’n’roll mania and buoyed by local newspaper ads promising fame and gold records.

From the tangerine dreams of 8th grade all-girl combo The Mod 4 to the tri-state jukebox aspiring echoes of The Tempters, The Yardley’s poetic Farfisa vamp and lilting folk pop, and The Landlords’ weepy break up b-side blues, these are mostly one shots by dreamers whose experience was brief before being checked back to the reality of suburban normality and realistic career options. Hailing from the regional backwaters of Illnois, Arkansas, Nevada, Massachussets, Ohio, Idaho, Texas and beyond, the licensed artists were scouted by way of local fire departments, spiritualist fellowships and animal welfare centres, often barely a stones throw from where their contributions were originally laid.

A barely teenage Dennis Harte's ‘Summer’s Over’ perhaps best taps the collection’s essence. A gut-wrenching lament of the passing of the season as if it was the last on earth. Flanked by players from The Left Banke, Harte, a now-piano tuner to the stars, is from the minor segment that found longevity in showbiz. Likewise with Michigan icon Lyn Nowicki who cast her ghostly voice over Beatles cover song chameleons The Common People and Jerry McGee, The Ventures member and conduit of Dr. John’s ‘Twilight Zone’.

Ghost Riders simmers with the scent of youthful summers, the pang of schoolyard romance, and the excitement (and disenchantment) of teenage naïveté, delivered via a deceptively simple and frequently wonky garage band set up. The vision of record collector and graphic designer Ivan Liechti, these eternal psych-folk howlers are further crystallised by Colin Young’s fastidious audio restoration, the original artwork of Elise Ganebin-de Bons and an aptly penned forward from Sonic Boom.

Hate Propaganda's far too overlooked 2019 debut EP "World War 666" sees a much needed reissue on vinyl, remastered and enhanced by brand new artwork commissioned for the purpose by Xerox master P. Van Trigt. When it was first released on cassette tape back in 2019 by War Arts Productions, this war-torn debut offering of primeval warnoise by the mysterious Portuguese war criminals stood out immediately as a crown jewel debut for the genre and as one of the year's most definitive and underrated manifestations of extreme metal's most hateful and berserk fringe. Packing in nineteen minutes of absolute hatred, the annihilating MLP manifests as a nightmare hallucination of complete violence and negativity, evoking eons of perennial apocalyptic global planetary war and terror on the wings of its nefarious design of achieving maximum annihilation in the shortest amount of time possible. To harness this bleak pantheon of ruin, the Portuguese conquerors have assembled a weaponized and uncontrolled sonic chain reaction where grindcore, black metal, death metal and hardcore punk are all accelerated and instigated into an inescapable payload of death aimed straight at the vital sinews of humanity. A sonic maelstrom churned into shape by an onslaught of obscure violent riffs, psychotic leads and ominous laughter which, parallel to a pulverizing drum performance, emanates from oblivion with an antediluvian, negative aura. Comparisons to bands like Diocletian, Heresiarch, Tetragrammacide and Nuclearhammer will run abound, yet these would be only easy superficial conjectures as this is a manifestation of sonic extremism which dwells on a plain of excellence entirely its own. Its uniqueness transpires particularly in the maniacal drumming which underlines the band's hardcore and punk influences, and is exalted further by an unusually crystalline production and by a masterful onslaught of uber-audible riffs hiding behind nothing and seemingly going in the opposite direction of the homogenous and indiscernible sensorial smothering the genre usually opts to go in. Tracklisting: 1. World War 666 2. Neverending Mass Graves 3. Violent Nature of Human Annihilation 4. Welcoming the Nuclear War With Open Arms 5. Let the Sirens Signal the End of Times

As the sun sets on a quaint East Nashville house, a young man bares a piece of his soul. Facing the camera, sporting a silky suit jacket/shirt/slacks/fingerless gloves ensemble that announces "singer" before he's even opened his mouth, Lee Tracy Johnson settles onto his stage, the front yard. He sways to the dirge-like drum machine pulse of a synth-soaked slow jam, extends his arms as if gaining his balance, and croons in affecting, fragile earnest, "I need your love… oh baby…"

Dogs in the yard next door begin barking. A mysterious cardboard robot figure, beamed in from galaxies unknown and affixed to a tree, is less vocal. Lee doesn't acknowledge either's presence. He's busy feeling it, arms and hands gesticulating. His voice rises in falsetto over the now-quiet dogs, over the ambient noise from the street that seeps into the handheld camcorder's microphone, over the recording of his own voice played back from a boombox off-camera. After six minutes the single, continuous shot ends. In this intimate creative universe there are no re-takes. There are many more music videos to shoot, and as Lee later puts it, "The first time you do it is actually the best. Because you can never get that again. You expressing yourself from within."

"I Need Your Love" dates from a lost heyday. From some time in the '80s or early '90s, when Lee Tracy (as he was known in performance) and his music partner/producer/manager Isaac Manning committed hours upon hours of their sonic and visual ideas to tape. Embracing drum machines and synthesizers – electronics that made their personal futurism palpable – they recorded exclusively at home, live in a room into a simple cassette deck. Soul, funk, electro and new wave informed their songs, yet Lee and Isaac eschewed the confinement of conventional categories and genres, preferring to let experimentation guide them.

"Anytime somebody put out a new record they had the same instruments or the same sound," explains Isaac. "So I basically wanted to find something that's really gonna stand out away from all of the rest of 'em." Their ethos meant that every idea they came up with was at least worth trying: echoed out half-rapped exhortations over frantic techno-style beats, gospel synth soul, modal electro-funk, oddball pop reinterpretations, emo AOR balladry, nods to Prince and the Fat Boys, or arrangements that might collapse mid-song into a mess of arcade game-ish blips before rallying to reach the finish line. All of it conjoined by consistent tape hiss, and most vitally, Lee's chameleonic voice, which managed to wildly shape shift and still evoke something sincere – whether toggling between falsetto and tenor exalting Jesus's return, or punctuating a melismatic romantic adlib with a succinct, "We all know how it feels to be alone."

"People think we went to a studio," says Isaac derisively. "We never went to no studio. We didn't have the money to go to no studio! We did this stuff at home. I shot videos in my front yard with whatever we could to get things together." Sometimes Isaac would just put on an instrumental record, be it "Planet Rock" or "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" (from Evita), press "record," and let Lee improvise over it, yielding peculiar love songs, would-be patriotic anthems, or Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe tributes. Technical limitations and a lack of professional polish never dissuaded them. They believed they were onto something.

"That struggle," Isaac says, "made that sound sound good to me."

In the parlance of modern music criticism Lee and Isaac's dizzying DIY efforts would inevitably be described as "outsider." But "outsider" carries the burden of untold additional layers of meaning if you're Black and from the South, creating on a budget, and trying to get someone, anyone within the country music capital of the world to take your vision seriously. "What category should we put it in?" Isaac asks rhetorically. "I don't know. All I know is feeling. I ain't gonna name it nothing. It's music. If it grabs your soul and touch your heart that's what it basically is supposed to do."

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Born in 1963, the baby boy of nine siblings, Lee Tracy spent his earliest years living amidst the shotgun houses on Nashville's south side. "We was poor, man!" he says, recalling the outhouse his family used for a bathroom and the blocks of ice they kept in the kitchen to chill perishables. "But I actually don't think I really realized I was in poverty until I got grown and started thinking about it." Lee's mom worked at the Holiday Inn; his dad did whatever he had to do, from selling fruit from a horse drawn cart to bootlegging. "We didn't have much," Lee continues, "but my mother and my father got us the things we needed, the clothes on our back." By the end of the decade with the city's urban renewal programs razing entire neighborhoods to accommodate construction of the Interstate, the family moved to Edgehill Projects. Lee remembers music and art as a constant source of inspiration for he and his brothers and sisters – especially after seeing the Jackson 5 perform on Ed Sullivan. "As a small child I just knew that was what I wanted to do."

His older brother Don began musically mentoring him, introducing Lee to a variety of instruments and sounds. "He would never play one particular type of music, like R&B," says Lee. "I was surrounded by jazz, hard rock and roll, easy listening, gospel, reggae, country music; I mean I was a sponge absorbing all of that." Lee taught himself to play drums by beating on cardboard boxes, gaining a rep around the way for his timekeeping, and his singing voice. Emulating his favorites, Earth Wind & Fire and Cameo, he formed groups with other kids with era-evocative band names like Concept and TNT Connection, and emerged as the leader of disciplined rehearsals. "I made them practice," says Lee. "We practiced and practiced and practiced. Because I wanted that perfection." By high school the most accomplished of these bands would take top prize in a prominent local talent show. It was a big moment for Lee, and he felt ready to take things to the next level. But his band-mates had other ideas.

"I don't know what happened," he says, still miffed at the memory. "It must have blew they mind after we won and people started showing notice, because it's like everybody quit! I was like, where the hell did everybody go?" Lee had always made a point of interrogating prospective musicians about their intentions before joining his groups: were they really serious or just looking for a way to pick up girls? Now he understood even more the importance of finding a collaborator just as committed to the music as he was.

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Isaac Manning had spent much of his life immersed in music and the arts – singing in the church choir with his family on Nashville's north side, writing, painting, dancing, and working various gigs within the entertainment industry. After serving in the armed forces, in the early '70s he ran The Teenage Place, a music and performance venue that catered to the local youth. But he was forced out of town when word of one of his recreational routines created a stir beyond the safe haven of his bohemian circles.

"I was growing marijuana," Isaac explains. "It wasn't no business, I was smoking it myself… I would put marijuana in scrambled eggs, cornbread and stuff." His weed use originated as a form of self-medication to combat severe tooth pain. But when he began sharing it with some of the other young people he hung out with, some of who just so happened to be the kids of Nashville politicians, the cops came calling. "When I got busted," he remembers, "they were talking about how they were gonna get rid of me because they didn't want me saying nothing about they children because of the politics and stuff. So I got my family, took two raggedy cars, and left Nashville and went to Vegas."

Out in the desert, Isaac happened to meet Chubby Checker of "The Twist" fame while the singer was gigging at The Flamingo. Impressed by Isaac's zeal, Checker invited him to go on the road with him as his tour manager/roadie/valet. The experience gave Isaac a window into a part of the entertainment world he'd never encountered – a glimpse of what a true pop act's audience looked like. "Chubby Checker, none of his shows were played for Black folks," he remembers. "All his gigs were done at high-class white people areas." Returning home after a few years with Chubby, Isaac was properly motivated to make it in Music City. He began writing songs and scouting around Nashville for local talent anywhere he could find it with an expressed goal: "Find someone who can deliver your songs the way you want 'em delivered and make people feel what you want them to feel."

One day while walking through Edgehill Projects Isaac heard someone playing the drums in a way that made him stop and take notice. "The music was so tight, just the drums made me feel like, oh I'm-a find this person," he recalls. "So I circled through the projects until I found who it was.

"That's how I met him – Lee Tracy. When I found him and he started singing and stuff, I said, ohhh, this is somebody different."

=

Theirs was a true complementary partnership: young Lee possessed the raw talent, the older Isaac the belief. "He's really the only one besides my brother and my family that really seen the potential in me," says Lee. "He made me see that I could do it."

Isaac long being a night owl, his house also made for a fertile collaborative environment – a space where there always seemed to be a new piece of his visual art on display: paintings, illustrations, and dolls and figures (including an enigmatic cardboard robot). Lee and Issac would hang out together and talk, listen to music, conjure ideas, and smoke the herb Isaac had resumed growing in his yard. "It got to where I could trust him, he could trust me," Isaac says of their bond. They also worked together for hours on drawings, spreading larges rolls of paper on the walls and sketching faces with abstract patterns and imagery: alien-like beings, tri-horned horse heads, inverted Janus-like characters where one visage blurred into the other.

Soon it became apparent that they didn't need other collaborators; self-sufficiency was the natural way forward. At Isaac's behest Lee, already fed up with dealing with band musicians, began playing around with a poly-sonic Yamaha keyboard at the local music store. "It had everything on it – trumpet, bass, drums, organ," remembers Lee. "And that's when I started recording my own stuff."

The technology afforded Lee the flexibility and independence he craved, setting him on a path other bedroom musicians and producers around the world were simultaneously following through the '80s into the early '90s. Saving up money from day jobs, he eventually supplemented the Yamaha Isaac had gotten him with Roland and Casio drum machines and a Moog. Lee was living in an apartment in Hillside at that point caring for his dad, who'd been partially paralyzed since early in life. In the evenings up in his second floor room, the music put him in a zone where he could tune out everything and lose himself in his ideas.

"Oh I loved it," he recalls. "I would really experiment with the instruments and use a lot of different sound effects. I was looking for something nobody else had. I wanted something totally different. And once I found the sound I was looking for, I would just smoke me a good joint and just let it go, hit the record button." More potent a creative stimulant than even Isaac's weed was the holistic flow and spontaneity of recording. Between sessions at Isaac's place and Lee's apartment, their volume of output quickly ballooned.

"We was always recording," says Lee. "That's why we have so much music. Even when I went to Isaac's and we start creating, I get home, my mind is racing, I gotta start creating, creating, creating. I remember there were times when I took a 90-minute tape from front to back and just filled it up."

"We never practiced," says Isaac. "See, that was just so odd about the whole thing. I could relate to him, and tell him about the songs I had ideas for and everything and stuff. And then he would bring it back or whatever, and we'd get together and put it down." Once the taskmaster hell bent on rehearsing, Lee had flipped a full 180. Perfection was no longer an aspiration, but the enemy of inspiration.

"I seen where practicing and practicing got me," says Lee. "A lot of musicians you get to playing and they gotta stop, they have to analyze the music. But while you analyzing you losing a lot of the greatness of what you creating. Stop analyzing what you play, just play! And it'll all take shape."

=

"I hope you understood the beginning of the record because this was invented from a dream I had today… (You tell me, I'll tell you, we'll figure it out together)" – Lee Tracy and Isaac Manning, "Hope You Understand"

Lee lets loose a maniacal cackle when he acknowledges that the material that he and Isaac recorded was by anyone's estimation pretty out there. It's the same laugh that commences "Hope You Understand" – a chaotic transmission that encapsulates the duality at the heart of their music: a stated desire to reach people and a compulsion to go as leftfield as they saw fit.

"We just did it," says Lee. "We cut the music on and cut loose. I don't sit around and write. I do it by listening, get a feeling, play the music, and the lyrics and stuff just come out of me."

The approach proved adaptable to interpreting other artists' material. While recording a cover of Whitney Houston's pop ballad "Saving All My Love For You," Lee played Whitney's version in his headphones as he laid down his own vocals – partially following the lyrics, partially using them as a departure point. The end result is barely recognizable compared with the original, Lee and Isaac having switched up the time signature and reinvented the melody along the way towards morphing a slick mainstream radio standard into something that sounds solely their own.

"I really used that song to get me started," says Lee. "Then I said, well I need something else, something is missing. Something just came over me. That's when I came up with 'Is It What You Want.'"

The song would become the centerpiece of Lee and Isaac's repertoire. Pushed along by a percolating metronomic Rhythm King style beat somewhere between a military march and a samba, "Is It What You Want" finds Lee pleading the sincerity of his commitment to a potential love interest embellished by vocal tics and hiccups subtlely reminiscent of his childhood hero MJ. Absent chord changes, only synth riffs gliding in and out like apparitions, the song achieves a lingering lo-fi power that leaves you feeling like it's still playing, somewhere, even after the fade out.

"I don't know, it's like a real spiritual song," Lee reflects. "But it's not just spiritual. To me the more I listen to it it's like about everything that you do in your everyday life, period. Is it what you want? Do you want a car or you don't want a car? Do you want Jesus or do you want the Devil? It's basically asking you the question. Can't nobody answer the question but you yourself."

In 1989 Lee won a lawsuit stemming from injuries sustained from a fight he'd gotten into. He took part of the settlement money and with Isaac pressed up "Saving All My Love For You" b/w "Is It What You Want" as a 45 single. Isaac christened the label One Chance Records. "Because that's all we wanted," he says with a laugh, "one chance."

Isaac sent the record out to radio stations and major labels, hoping for it to make enough noise to get picked up nationally. But the response he and Lee were hoping for never materialized. According to Isaac the closest the single got to getting played on the radio is when a disk jock from a local station made a highly unusual announcement on air: "The dude said on the radio, 107.5 – 'We are not gonna play 'Is It What You Want.' We cracked up! Wow, that's deep.

"It was a whole racist thing that was going on," he reflects. "So we just looked over and kept on going. That was it. That was about the way it goes… If you were Black and you were living in Nashville and stuff, that's the way you got treated." Isaac already knew as much from all the times he'd brought he and Lee's tapes (even their cache of country music tunes) over to Music Row to try to drum up interest to no avail.

"Isaac, he really worked his ass off," says Lee. "He probably been to every record place down on Music Row." Nashville's famed recording and music business corridor wasn't but a few blocks from where Lee grew up. Close enough, he remembers, for him to ride his bike along its back alleys and stumble upon the occasional random treasure, like a discarded box of harmonicas. Getting in through the front door, however, still felt a world away.

"I just don't think at the time our music fell into a category for them," he concedes. "It was before its time."

=

Lee stopped making music some time in the latter part of the '90s, around the time his mom passed away and life became increasingly tough to manage. "When my mother died I had a nervous breakdown," he says, "So I shut down for a long time. I was in such a sadness frame of mind. That's why nobody seen me. I had just disappeared off the map." He fell out of touch with Isaac, and in an indication of just how bad things had gotten for him, lost track of all the recordings they'd made together. Music became a distant memory.

Fortunately, Isaac kept the faith. In a self-published collection of his poetry – paeans to some of his favorite entertainment and public figures entitled Friends and Dick Clark – he'd written that he believed "music has a life of its own." But his prescience and presence of mind were truly manifested in the fact that he kept an archive of he and Lee's work. As perfectly imperfect as "Is It What You Want" now sounds in a post-Personal Space world, Lee and Isaac's lone official release was in fact just a taste. The bulk of the Is It What You Want album is culled from the pair's essentially unheard home recordings – complete songs, half-realized experiments, Isaac's blue monologues and pronouncements et al – compiled, mixed and programmed in the loose and impulsive creative spirit of their regular get-togethers from decades ago. The rest of us, it seems, may have finally caught up to them.

On the prospect of at long last reaching a wider audience, Isaac says simply, "I been trying for a long time, it feels good." Ever the survivor, he adds, "The only way I know how to make it to the top is to keep climbing. If one leg break on the ladder, hey, you gotta fix it and keep on going… That's where I be at. I'll kill death to make it out there."

For Lee it all feels akin to a personal resurrection: "It's like I was in a tomb and the tomb was opened and I'm back… Man, it feels so great. I feel like I'm gonna jump out of my skin." Success at this stage of his life, he realizes, probably means something different than what it did back when he was singing and dancing in Isaac's front yard. "What I really mean by 'making it,'" he explains isn't just the music being heard but, "the story being told."

Occasionally Lee will pull up "Is It What You Want" on YouTube on his phone, put on his headphones, and listen. He remembers the first time he heard his recorded voice. How surreal it was, how he thought to himself, "Is that really me?" What would he say to that younger version of himself now?

"I would probably tell myself, hang in there, don't give up. Keep striving for the goal. And everything will work out."

Despite what's printed on the record label, sometimes you do get more than one chance.

As the sun sets on a quaint East Nashville house, a young man bares a piece of his soul. Facing the camera, sporting a silky suit jacket/shirt/slacks/fingerless gloves ensemble that announces "singer" before he's even opened his mouth, Lee Tracy Johnson settles onto his stage, the front yard. He sways to the dirge-like drum machine pulse of a synth-soaked slow jam, extends his arms as if gaining his balance, and croons in affecting, fragile earnest, "I need your love… oh baby…"

Dogs in the yard next door begin barking. A mysterious cardboard robot figure, beamed in from galaxies unknown and affixed to a tree, is less vocal. Lee doesn't acknowledge either's presence. He's busy feeling it, arms and hands gesticulating. His voice rises in falsetto over the now-quiet dogs, over the ambient noise from the street that seeps into the handheld camcorder's microphone, over the recording of his own voice played back from a boombox off-camera. After six minutes the single, continuous shot ends. In this intimate creative universe there are no re-takes. There are many more music videos to shoot, and as Lee later puts it, "The first time you do it is actually the best. Because you can never get that again. You expressing yourself from within."

"I Need Your Love" dates from a lost heyday. From some time in the '80s or early '90s, when Lee Tracy (as he was known in performance) and his music partner/producer/manager Isaac Manning committed hours upon hours of their sonic and visual ideas to tape. Embracing drum machines and synthesizers – electronics that made their personal futurism palpable – they recorded exclusively at home, live in a room into a simple cassette deck. Soul, funk, electro and new wave informed their songs, yet Lee and Isaac eschewed the confinement of conventional categories and genres, preferring to let experimentation guide them.

"Anytime somebody put out a new record they had the same instruments or the same sound," explains Isaac. "So I basically wanted to find something that's really gonna stand out away from all of the rest of 'em." Their ethos meant that every idea they came up with was at least worth trying: echoed out half-rapped exhortations over frantic techno-style beats, gospel synth soul, modal electro-funk, oddball pop reinterpretations, emo AOR balladry, nods to Prince and the Fat Boys, or arrangements that might collapse mid-song into a mess of arcade game-ish blips before rallying to reach the finish line. All of it conjoined by consistent tape hiss, and most vitally, Lee's chameleonic voice, which managed to wildly shape shift and still evoke something sincere – whether toggling between falsetto and tenor exalting Jesus's return, or punctuating a melismatic romantic adlib with a succinct, "We all know how it feels to be alone."

"People think we went to a studio," says Isaac derisively. "We never went to no studio. We didn't have the money to go to no studio! We did this stuff at home. I shot videos in my front yard with whatever we could to get things together." Sometimes Isaac would just put on an instrumental record, be it "Planet Rock" or "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" (from Evita), press "record," and let Lee improvise over it, yielding peculiar love songs, would-be patriotic anthems, or Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe tributes. Technical limitations and a lack of professional polish never dissuaded them. They believed they were onto something.

"That struggle," Isaac says, "made that sound sound good to me."

In the parlance of modern music criticism Lee and Isaac's dizzying DIY efforts would inevitably be described as "outsider." But "outsider" carries the burden of untold additional layers of meaning if you're Black and from the South, creating on a budget, and trying to get someone, anyone within the country music capital of the world to take your vision seriously. "What category should we put it in?" Isaac asks rhetorically. "I don't know. All I know is feeling. I ain't gonna name it nothing. It's music. If it grabs your soul and touch your heart that's what it basically is supposed to do."

=

Born in 1963, the baby boy of nine siblings, Lee Tracy spent his earliest years living amidst the shotgun houses on Nashville's south side. "We was poor, man!" he says, recalling the outhouse his family used for a bathroom and the blocks of ice they kept in the kitchen to chill perishables. "But I actually don't think I really realized I was in poverty until I got grown and started thinking about it." Lee's mom worked at the Holiday Inn; his dad did whatever he had to do, from selling fruit from a horse drawn cart to bootlegging. "We didn't have much," Lee continues, "but my mother and my father got us the things we needed, the clothes on our back." By the end of the decade with the city's urban renewal programs razing entire neighborhoods to accommodate construction of the Interstate, the family moved to Edgehill Projects. Lee remembers music and art as a constant source of inspiration for he and his brothers and sisters – especially after seeing the Jackson 5 perform on Ed Sullivan. "As a small child I just knew that was what I wanted to do."

His older brother Don began musically mentoring him, introducing Lee to a variety of instruments and sounds. "He would never play one particular type of music, like R&B," says Lee. "I was surrounded by jazz, hard rock and roll, easy listening, gospel, reggae, country music; I mean I was a sponge absorbing all of that." Lee taught himself to play drums by beating on cardboard boxes, gaining a rep around the way for his timekeeping, and his singing voice. Emulating his favorites, Earth Wind & Fire and Cameo, he formed groups with other kids with era-evocative band names like Concept and TNT Connection, and emerged as the leader of disciplined rehearsals. "I made them practice," says Lee. "We practiced and practiced and practiced. Because I wanted that perfection." By high school the most accomplished of these bands would take top prize in a prominent local talent show. It was a big moment for Lee, and he felt ready to take things to the next level. But his band-mates had other ideas.

"I don't know what happened," he says, still miffed at the memory. "It must have blew they mind after we won and people started showing notice, because it's like everybody quit! I was like, where the hell did everybody go?" Lee had always made a point of interrogating prospective musicians about their intentions before joining his groups: were they really serious or just looking for a way to pick up girls? Now he understood even more the importance of finding a collaborator just as committed to the music as he was.

=

Isaac Manning had spent much of his life immersed in music and the arts – singing in the church choir with his family on Nashville's north side, writing, painting, dancing, and working various gigs within the entertainment industry. After serving in the armed forces, in the early '70s he ran The Teenage Place, a music and performance venue that catered to the local youth. But he was forced out of town when word of one of his recreational routines created a stir beyond the safe haven of his bohemian circles.

"I was growing marijuana," Isaac explains. "It wasn't no business, I was smoking it myself… I would put marijuana in scrambled eggs, cornbread and stuff." His weed use originated as a form of self-medication to combat severe tooth pain. But when he began sharing it with some of the other young people he hung out with, some of who just so happened to be the kids of Nashville politicians, the cops came calling. "When I got busted," he remembers, "they were talking about how they were gonna get rid of me because they didn't want me saying nothing about they children because of the politics and stuff. So I got my family, took two raggedy cars, and left Nashville and went to Vegas."

Out in the desert, Isaac happened to meet Chubby Checker of "The Twist" fame while the singer was gigging at The Flamingo. Impressed by Isaac's zeal, Checker invited him to go on the road with him as his tour manager/roadie/valet. The experience gave Isaac a window into a part of the entertainment world he'd never encountered – a glimpse of what a true pop act's audience looked like. "Chubby Checker, none of his shows were played for Black folks," he remembers. "All his gigs were done at high-class white people areas." Returning home after a few years with Chubby, Isaac was properly motivated to make it in Music City. He began writing songs and scouting around Nashville for local talent anywhere he could find it with an expressed goal: "Find someone who can deliver your songs the way you want 'em delivered and make people feel what you want them to feel."

One day while walking through Edgehill Projects Isaac heard someone playing the drums in a way that made him stop and take notice. "The music was so tight, just the drums made me feel like, oh I'm-a find this person," he recalls. "So I circled through the projects until I found who it was.

"That's how I met him – Lee Tracy. When I found him and he started singing and stuff, I said, ohhh, this is somebody different."

=

Theirs was a true complementary partnership: young Lee possessed the raw talent, the older Isaac the belief. "He's really the only one besides my brother and my family that really seen the potential in me," says Lee. "He made me see that I could do it."

Isaac long being a night owl, his house also made for a fertile collaborative environment – a space where there always seemed to be a new piece of his visual art on display: paintings, illustrations, and dolls and figures (including an enigmatic cardboard robot). Lee and Issac would hang out together and talk, listen to music, conjure ideas, and smoke the herb Isaac had resumed growing in his yard. "It got to where I could trust him, he could trust me," Isaac says of their bond. They also worked together for hours on drawings, spreading larges rolls of paper on the walls and sketching faces with abstract patterns and imagery: alien-like beings, tri-horned horse heads, inverted Janus-like characters where one visage blurred into the other.

Soon it became apparent that they didn't need other collaborators; self-sufficiency was the natural way forward. At Isaac's behest Lee, already fed up with dealing with band musicians, began playing around with a poly-sonic Yamaha keyboard at the local music store. "It had everything on it – trumpet, bass, drums, organ," remembers Lee. "And that's when I started recording my own stuff."

The technology afforded Lee the flexibility and independence he craved, setting him on a path other bedroom musicians and producers around the world were simultaneously following through the '80s into the early '90s. Saving up money from day jobs, he eventually supplemented the Yamaha Isaac had gotten him with Roland and Casio drum machines and a Moog. Lee was living in an apartment in Hillside at that point caring for his dad, who'd been partially paralyzed since early in life. In the evenings up in his second floor room, the music put him in a zone where he could tune out everything and lose himself in his ideas.

"Oh I loved it," he recalls. "I would really experiment with the instruments and use a lot of different sound effects. I was looking for something nobody else had. I wanted something totally different. And once I found the sound I was looking for, I would just smoke me a good joint and just let it go, hit the record button." More potent a creative stimulant than even Isaac's weed was the holistic flow and spontaneity of recording. Between sessions at Isaac's place and Lee's apartment, their volume of output quickly ballooned.

"We was always recording," says Lee. "That's why we have so much music. Even when I went to Isaac's and we start creating, I get home, my mind is racing, I gotta start creating, creating, creating. I remember there were times when I took a 90-minute tape from front to back and just filled it up."

"We never practiced," says Isaac. "See, that was just so odd about the whole thing. I could relate to him, and tell him about the songs I had ideas for and everything and stuff. And then he would bring it back or whatever, and we'd get together and put it down." Once the taskmaster hell bent on rehearsing, Lee had flipped a full 180. Perfection was no longer an aspiration, but the enemy of inspiration.

"I seen where practicing and practicing got me," says Lee. "A lot of musicians you get to playing and they gotta stop, they have to analyze the music. But while you analyzing you losing a lot of the greatness of what you creating. Stop analyzing what you play, just play! And it'll all take shape."

=

"I hope you understood the beginning of the record because this was invented from a dream I had today… (You tell me, I'll tell you, we'll figure it out together)" – Lee Tracy and Isaac Manning, "Hope You Understand"

Lee lets loose a maniacal cackle when he acknowledges that the material that he and Isaac recorded was by anyone's estimation pretty out there. It's the same laugh that commences "Hope You Understand" – a chaotic transmission that encapsulates the duality at the heart of their music: a stated desire to reach people and a compulsion to go as leftfield as they saw fit.

"We just did it," says Lee. "We cut the music on and cut loose. I don't sit around and write. I do it by listening, get a feeling, play the music, and the lyrics and stuff just come out of me."

The approach proved adaptable to interpreting other artists' material. While recording a cover of Whitney Houston's pop ballad "Saving All My Love For You," Lee played Whitney's version in his headphones as he laid down his own vocals – partially following the lyrics, partially using them as a departure point. The end result is barely recognizable compared with the original, Lee and Isaac having switched up the time signature and reinvented the melody along the way towards morphing a slick mainstream radio standard into something that sounds solely their own.

"I really used that song to get me started," says Lee. "Then I said, well I need something else, something is missing. Something just came over me. That's when I came up with 'Is It What You Want.'"

The song would become the centerpiece of Lee and Isaac's repertoire. Pushed along by a percolating metronomic Rhythm King style beat somewhere between a military march and a samba, "Is It What You Want" finds Lee pleading the sincerity of his commitment to a potential love interest embellished by vocal tics and hiccups subtlely reminiscent of his childhood hero MJ. Absent chord changes, only synth riffs gliding in and out like apparitions, the song achieves a lingering lo-fi power that leaves you feeling like it's still playing, somewhere, even after the fade out.

"I don't know, it's like a real spiritual song," Lee reflects. "But it's not just spiritual. To me the more I listen to it it's like about everything that you do in your everyday life, period. Is it what you want? Do you want a car or you don't want a car? Do you want Jesus or do you want the Devil? It's basically asking you the question. Can't nobody answer the question but you yourself."

In 1989 Lee won a lawsuit stemming from injuries sustained from a fight he'd gotten into. He took part of the settlement money and with Isaac pressed up "Saving All My Love For You" b/w "Is It What You Want" as a 45 single. Isaac christened the label One Chance Records. "Because that's all we wanted," he says with a laugh, "one chance."

Isaac sent the record out to radio stations and major labels, hoping for it to make enough noise to get picked up nationally. But the response he and Lee were hoping for never materialized. According to Isaac the closest the single got to getting played on the radio is when a disk jock from a local station made a highly unusual announcement on air: "The dude said on the radio, 107.5 – 'We are not gonna play 'Is It What You Want.' We cracked up! Wow, that's deep.

"It was a whole racist thing that was going on," he reflects. "So we just looked over and kept on going. That was it. That was about the way it goes… If you were Black and you were living in Nashville and stuff, that's the way you got treated." Isaac already knew as much from all the times he'd brought he and Lee's tapes (even their cache of country music tunes) over to Music Row to try to drum up interest to no avail.

"Isaac, he really worked his ass off," says Lee. "He probably been to every record place down on Music Row." Nashville's famed recording and music business corridor wasn't but a few blocks from where Lee grew up. Close enough, he remembers, for him to ride his bike along its back alleys and stumble upon the occasional random treasure, like a discarded box of harmonicas. Getting in through the front door, however, still felt a world away.

"I just don't think at the time our music fell into a category for them," he concedes. "It was before its time."

=

Lee stopped making music some time in the latter part of the '90s, around the time his mom passed away and life became increasingly tough to manage. "When my mother died I had a nervous breakdown," he says, "So I shut down for a long time. I was in such a sadness frame of mind. That's why nobody seen me. I had just disappeared off the map." He fell out of touch with Isaac, and in an indication of just how bad things had gotten for him, lost track of all the recordings they'd made together. Music became a distant memory.

Fortunately, Isaac kept the faith. In a self-published collection of his poetry – paeans to some of his favorite entertainment and public figures entitled Friends and Dick Clark – he'd written that he believed "music has a life of its own." But his prescience and presence of mind were truly manifested in the fact that he kept an archive of he and Lee's work. As perfectly imperfect as "Is It What You Want" now sounds in a post-Personal Space world, Lee and Isaac's lone official release was in fact just a taste. The bulk of the Is It What You Want album is culled from the pair's essentially unheard home recordings – complete songs, half-realized experiments, Isaac's blue monologues and pronouncements et al – compiled, mixed and programmed in the loose and impulsive creative spirit of their regular get-togethers from decades ago. The rest of us, it seems, may have finally caught up to them.

On the prospect of at long last reaching a wider audience, Isaac says simply, "I been trying for a long time, it feels good." Ever the survivor, he adds, "The only way I know how to make it to the top is to keep climbing. If one leg break on the ladder, hey, you gotta fix it and keep on going… That's where I be at. I'll kill death to make it out there."

For Lee it all feels akin to a personal resurrection: "It's like I was in a tomb and the tomb was opened and I'm back… Man, it feels so great. I feel like I'm gonna jump out of my skin." Success at this stage of his life, he realizes, probably means something different than what it did back when he was singing and dancing in Isaac's front yard. "What I really mean by 'making it,'" he explains isn't just the music being heard but, "the story being told."

Occasionally Lee will pull up "Is It What You Want" on YouTube on his phone, put on his headphones, and listen. He remembers the first time he heard his recorded voice. How surreal it was, how he thought to himself, "Is that really me?" What would he say to that younger version of himself now?

"I would probably tell myself, hang in there, don't give up. Keep striving for the goal. And everything will work out."

Despite what's printed on the record label, sometimes you do get more than one chance.

Having announced that Snapper Music will be representing Porcupine
Tree’s Transmission label worldwide, new CD and LP reissues of the band’s catalogue continue to be rolled out throughout 2021.

The concept for ‘The Incident’ (the band’s much lauded 10th and most recent studio album from 2009) emerged as Porcupine Tree’s creator Steven Wilson, was caught in a motorway traffic jam whilst driving past a road accident.
“There was a sign saying ‘POLICE - INCIDENT’ and everyone was slowing down to see what had happened... Afterwards, it struck me that ‘incident’ is a very detached word for something so destructive and traumatic for the people involved. The irony of such a cold expression for such seismic events appealed to me, and I began to pick out other ‘incidents’ reported in the media and news, I wrote about the evacuation of teenage girls from a religious cult in Texas, a
family terrorising its neighbours, a body found floating in a river by some people on a fishing trip, and more.

Consisting of 18 tracks, each song is written in the first person, attempting to humanise the detached media reportage of each associated event. The first 14 tracks form part of a 55-minute song cycle, with the last 4 having been recorded later (and originally released as a second disc to stress their independence from the song cycle).

The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Surround Sound Album and reached the Top 25 in the US and UK album charts. It was awarded “Album Of The Year” in Classic Rock and German magazine Eclipsed.

‘The Incident’ marked another step forward in the incredible journey of the band that began as a solo studio project and grew to a multi-Grammy nominated act and one of the world’s most revered live bands, selling out arenas across the globe and wowing fans with their incredible performances.

This new Transmission 2021 reissue of ‘The Incident’ remains faithful to the original artwork and all 18 album tracks are presented on one disc housed in a digipack with 8-page booklet or as a gatefold double LP on 140g black vinyl.

“An intriguing and truly inspiring album” - Rock Sound
“The title suite is the Tree’s finest hour: a mounting drama of memoir and realnews trauma, animated with slicing guitars, ghost-song electronics, mile-high harmonies and smart pop bait - Rolling Stone

Following up their hugely respected 2 demos (also available as a compilation) and fairly recent 7”, CHAOTIAN are back to release ultimate Death Metal barbarity into the underground in the form of their debut full length. Storming into life with a rotten amalgamation of putrescent riffing and blastbeats, the instrumental unity of this Danish titan is a juggernaut of pure filth. It is telling when a band can have those super groovy pinch harmonic laden riffs and not making them sound like all the others. This may seem a weirdly specific observation (perhaps a guitarist just being a guitarist) but it makes all the difference with heaviness, intensity and also the catchiness on the records. When met with the sewer-spewing vocals and weird dissonant spasms in the music, it doesn’t take long to recognise this will be a truly warped and maniacally brutal experience of Death Metal might. Interlinking primitive hooks that grasp you by the throat then transcend into these weird effects or spacious riffs, there’s nothing predictable about the album yet it has that familiar feeling that all good Death Metal has where it feels a bit daunting, unnerving and yet you cannot escape it. Obviously Denmark and this trio does not let the scene down. Amazingly this small country seems to have so much diversity in their rotten underground movement and CHAOTIAN are a shining example who embody the grotesqueries, masterful songwriting and tight musicianship that has become associated with this otherwise pretty and peaceful nation. It explains that mysterious gurgling from the sewers at least! Bludgeoning, cavernous and ultimately otherworldly, CHAOTIAN masterfully combine the cerebral and cosmic with brutish, old school music that is damned heavy and doesn’t feel pretentious nor directionless. Their debut LP is not just as strong as their previous works, but a more refined and complete vision, showcasing the bands full potential (so far)…