Preening
Oakland’s Preening brought the avant-pop arts with their exciting new Greasetrap Frisbee EP available now from the imprint Ever/Never Records. Delivering something real & instant that everyone from the dadaists to the pop-art impresarios can agree & get along to—witness with your own senses a dynamic Bay Area group that transforms big-time conceptual aesthetics into musical manifestations.
And Preening like the greatest of groups exist in a category that is all of their own making. A group that would groove brilliantly with Guerilla Toss & other like-minded aesthetes; Alejandra, Max & Sam shape the sounds of future dadaist pop movements & more that will follow after them in the great tomorrow after. All the action bursts forth from the seams on the opener “Associated Press” that turns media conventions upside down & inside out. Postal amenities are chanted in head nodding progression sections on “PO Box” where the rhythms & sax engage in an interplay between the group’s recitations of the song title. The title track is a sound collage exercise in controlled chaos, spilling into the derelict poetic reading room of “Poison” as the EP finishes on the numbers “Face/On” that brings more of the group’s highlighting of the infinitely fascinating & generative relationship between the rhythm & brass sections. In the trio’s own words:
Greasetrap Frisbee was recorded in early March, 2017 at Joey Seward’s home-studio outside of Shelton, Washington during our first tour, a two-week jaunt around the Pacific Northwest. The night before, we played a house-show in Olympia with the great Scrivener. The studio is on a big, beautiful plot of land with various little structures. We recorded thirteen songs—all of our material at the time—in about six hours, and then drove to Portland to play a show with Lithics and Conditioner at The Know. The session yielded the recordings on our first EP, Beeters, and our second tape, Preening Demo Again, as well as the material on Greasetrap Frisbee. Opener “Associated Press,” inspired by Wire’s “Reuters,” is about the end of digital media in the wake of some sort of internet-destroying event such as a solar flare. The bridge features the sounds of power-tools and a tipped-over space heater. “PO Box” started as an ode to PO Box 3272 / Berkeley CA / 94703, but became stranger through joint composition. The title track, “Greasetrap Frisbee”, is Seward’s edit of extraneous sounds from the session, which we’ve discussed reinterpreting for a live version. “Poison” is a song that may or may not be addressing chemicals and pesticides in commercial agriculture, while “Face On” takes its name from the 1997 film “Face Off”. Greasetrap Frisbee is the name of the genre of music Preening play.
Preening’s Greasetrap Frisbee EP is available now via Ever/Never Records.
