PAUL DASKEN - Speckled Ax EP (1988) RARE LO-FI Outsider LP HANDMADE 300 Pressed
$
60
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Description
Hello and welcome to my auction! Up for your bidding consideration today is:
PAUL DASKEN - Speckled Ax EP (1988), self-released, with 4 tracks. Includes original response card.
VERY RARE - ONLY 300 COPIES PRESSED!
"Speckled Ax has gained formidable resonance with the passage of time. It's a key piece of loner Americana on wax, as personal and unique as records come"
This self-released, outsider vinyl rarity was produced in a limited pressing of 300 copies, with cover art hand-pasted on recycled LP covers.
"The following is a press release written up to go with complimentary copies mailed in 2006 to several college and independent radio stations:
'Gil Scott-Heron declared “winter in America” in 1973, but it couldn’t have been later than autumn, because the winter that seems to continue to this day didn’t really start until 1980, the year Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon and Ronald Reagan conned his way into office. Born in ‘75, I’m too young to remember the political climate during Reagan’s presidency, but I’ve read and reread (among other things) Paul Slansky’s day-by-day media digest of those two terms, The Clothes Have No Emperor, and I can appreciate the creeping despair that defined those years for thinking people, the sense that America had embarked on a decline that might well end in total annihilation. Another instructive refraction of eight years under Reagan can be found on Paul Dasken’s one and only record release, a 12”, four-song EP called Speckled Ax. The handmade packaging beckons the intrepid listener -- though its oblique newspaper layouts pasted over old record covers give little indication of what lurks within. Each side consists of two elements: a plaintive piano recording and a reinterpretation of Jimmy Webb’s 'Wichita Lineman' as protest music. Dasken is a conceptualist first and a musician second; each performance is site-specific and unabashedly amateur. His piano pieces will resonate with anyone who ever sat down at a piano without a lick of training but the will to peck out a pattern of notes that almost resembles a composition, if only to the player. That is to say they are intimate, singular, “real piano,” and beautiful. The first 'Lineman' finds Dasken taking on a manic street preacher, singing the song to a beat tapped out on a coke bottle, an abstract form of heckling that weirdly puts bogus fundamentalism in its proper, ridiculous place. The second take finds him at a 1988 campaign rally for Bush the Elder, where the wild applause that follows each of the candidate’s proclamations and an efficient team of secret service agents renders Dasken’s protest little more than a barely-noticed exercise in futility. Paul Dasken keeps a low profile. I found my copy of his record in a South San Francisco thrift store in 2003 and searched for him in vain until this past summer, when Dasken googled his record and found it featured on my website. I got him to talk about where he was coming from and the significance of 'Wichita Lineman.' “There was a sense of trying to oppose the sham realm of politics with something more genuine. There was also a sense of frustration with the usual way in which music was presented and with music itself . . . . There was definitely an idea of challenging the listener by putting together two very different and almost incompatible kinds of music, the piano stuff on the one hand and the Wichita Lineman covers on the other . . . . It was certainly my aim to do something uncompromising . . . . I don’t have any formal art or music training and there was a conscious decision to take a completely instinctive approach. I was a brash young man.” Speckled Ax has gained formidable resonance with the passage of time. It's a key piece of loner Americana on wax, as personal and unique as records come. In the wake of 9/11, the fears and upset of the Eighties seem almost quaint, but Dasken’s voice in the wilderness burns brighter than ever as a fire to warm oneself by in this very long winter in America.'
- Douglas Mcgowan, October 2006"
Condition: LP : NM Sleeve: VG+ (Hand Made Sleeve)
Thanks for looking, and be sure to check my other auctions for more great LPs and 45s!
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