LOS ANGELES (Top40 Charts/ Fall Records) - Fall Records has released Shelly Blake's 'Drug Warriors' as a digital download available on iTunes, Rhapsody, and other major online music sites. The album – originally released in limited edition in 2001 – is a musical narrative about a trio of small-time hoodlums trying to get by in the lonely expanse of Arizona, New Mexico, and West Texas. The music is wildly eclectic and touches on aspects of indie- pop, free improvisation, avant-folk, noise rock, and contemporary new music.
The recording – twenty-nine tracks in length – had been Blake's first attempt at what he referred to as a 'sound-movie'. The music followed a narrative thrust, but rather than simply employ songs to advance plot, Blake arranged free improvisations and studio-as- instrument treatments to hint at characters and settings while alternating between several different points-of-view in his lyrical structure. The experimental nature of this album laid the groundwork for Blake's current project: 'The Violencestring'.
A musical narrative whose structure was painstakingly laid out but whose actual performance is completely freely improvised with no written music at all, 'The Violencestring' is Blake's attempt to bring an obscure 19th century ghost story to life in music. Blake calls the story – which follows the troubles of a young Victorian miscreant through a series of awful circumstances – a love-song to the power of free music. The new album is slated for release in the late autumn of 2007. Among the collaborators on the album are double bassist Joel Grip, reedman John Dierker, Stockholm trumpet sensation Niklas Barno, Nautical Almanac's Carly Ptak and Twig Harper, violinist Ryan Dorsey, pedal steel mystic Susan Alcorn, Human Host alum Jessica Riefler, NYC guitarist Lawrence Lanahan, Baltimore drummer Lyle Kissack, Parisian improvisational phenom Eve Risser, Human Host itself, and NYC drummer Ben McDonald.
