12″ Edition of 36. Numbered. Riso Looseleaf cover / back art printed at Looky Here.

$60

On the evening of Friday April 10, 2020 Marcia Bassett and Samara Lubelski set up their gear in Brooklyn’s Sunview Luncheonette. With the assistance of Barry Weisblat (“The Lumberjack of Sound”) they got the amp mix just right, and as 7 PM rolled around, they proceeded to take the tops of our heads clean off.

They played two new pieces, and both were doozies. On the first, “Sunview 1,” the swoop of violin and guitar made me think of B-25s crossing the Pacific at night on their way to light up Imperial Japan. The music was tense and rolling and ominous in a way that kept reminding me of Pere Ubu’s “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” —  a tune whose structure it resembled not at all, but whose brutal underpinning was effortlessly evoked. Truly amazing. 

The second, “Sunview 2,” was a smoking coda to the first piece. It seemed to detail a barn dance type event at an officer’s club following the the raid. Samara’s violin and Marcia’s guitar see-saw back and forth, like two different chunks of the same rainbow, each trying to glow more brightly than the other. A phantom rope rises magically into the air like a snake charmer’s cobra popping out of a basket, only to collapse in a quiet burst of phosphorous as the piece ends. Another jaw-dropper.

Hope you were there.

-Byron Coley, 2020