Label: Alien Transistor – N 56 Format: Vinyl, LP Country: Germany Released: Nov 26, 2016 Genre: Rock Style: Lo-Fi
Jam Money is the shared musical vision of Kevin Cormack and Mathew Fowler. Mathew (Bons) and Kevin (Half Cousin, Harry Deerness) first began collaborating as part of the Blank Tape Spillage Fete, an ongoing collective project of art and music which focuses on the creation and perpetuation of small DIY exhibitions, related events and limited releases that celebrates the hobbyist nature of home recording.
Jam Money revolves around a passion for the simple and sometimes restrictive nature of four-track cassette recording. Using old half-broken guitars, clarinets, charity shop keyboards, toys, family heirlooms, zithers, home-made percussion, and household objects a shared dialogue appears, involving both mark making and musical mishaps, allowing the makers to be carried along as the music finds its own way.
Genre definitions melt away in Jam Money's music as ambient dissolves into lo-fi rock, noise into fragile, naive classroom melodies. Creativity beyond easy categorisation. The first recordings titled 'Blowing Stones' were self-released in 2014. The cover and insert artwork for this record featured abstract paintings by the artist Aime´e Henderson whose work and process is a greatinfluence on their music.
Having played gigs alongside kindred spirits National Bedtime and Plinth, the tail end of 2015 saw the the band travel to Germany to play with the Notwist and Le Millipede for a series of 'Alien Disko' nights organised by Alien Transistor, a label with a shared kinship of both the weird and wonderful.
'A Gathering Kind' is the second album by Jam Money: a journey of sound and colour, subliminal images and narrative. The roots of this collection found Fowler and Cormack using an earthier, more instinctive language, making it a rougher-edged sibling to their other recordings, with parallels to the home-spun worlds of Flaming Tunes, Pumice, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and World Standard.
Aimée's artwork features again, both paintings and music forming a collective language of dream-like adventure. Poignant and exploratory. Melting together acoustic and electronic elements, the narrative throughout is one of a ghostly world heading for winter.
A firm fan favourite Stephen Pastel (The Pastels & Monorail Music) on Blowing Stones: "Created in question and answer form, their songs exist like little sculptures - wayward and peaceful, sometimes whirring into automatic life under the pair's combined attention."
Tracklist A1 Away Inside A2 Thimble Theatre A3 Games of Go A4 Hail's Roof A5 A Gathering Kind A6 Bubbled Other A7 Konkapot A8 Nutheran Reed A9 Solar Broom B1 Sounds Around B2 Whorl & Spike B3 Petaloid B4 Comet Friends B5 Milk River B6 Magnus B7 Hark's Gate B8 Turnstone Walk B9 A Make Believe B10 The Air Is A Root
