For the past seven years Sic Alps have shredded up the outer limits of garage rock on a slew of out-of-print 7″s, impossible to find cassette tapes/cd-rs, as well as full-lengths on labels like Animal Disguise, Silt Breeze, and Drag City. We caught up with the band in Seattle at The Funhouse for a stripped down set of Sic Alps songs sung and performed by the band’s founder, Mike Donovan. Stream the videos below, and while you are at it join our podcast…iTunes, Podcast.com, and Podcast Alley. CONTINUE READING
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VIDEO: Sic Alps “Occult Display” Drag City Records [mov + 35mb]
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VIDEO: Sic Alps “Who Has Time To Protest” Animal Disguise Recordings [mov + 39.3mb]
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VIDEO: Sic Alps “The First White Man to Touch California Soil” Drag City Records [mov + 48mb]
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Sic Alps are part of the prolific Bay-area post-punk and garage scene that includes bands (past and present) like Erase Eratta, Coach Whips, Thee Ohsees, Ty Segall, etc. The band was started by long time veteran of the SF music scene Mike Donovan, who has played with bands like The Ropers and Big Techno Weerwolves, as well as owning the labels Dial Records and Folding Cassettes. Early incarnations of the band included big-time music wrecker Adam Stonehouse of The Hospitals, as well as Erase Errata’s Bianca Sparta, and the band put out a split-single with California Lightning while recording the formerly unrealesed full-length, Pleasures and Treasures, before falling apart. It was at that point, that Mike Donovan’s long time friend, drummer Matt Hartman (Henry’s Dress, Catpower, Coachwhips), who had attended one of the few early Sic Alps shows and loved their skewed approach, contacted him via email saying, “Dude, I’m in your band.” Since then, the band has also been filled out by Bay-area mainstay Noel VonHarmonson (Comets on Fire), who also contributed work to the band’s most recent full-length, January’s Napa Asylum, out on Drag City. This newest work is a twenty-two song, double LP, and like the bands earlier output continues to mine riches from the simplest of home recorded means. The band records on a classic Tascam 388 multi-track recorder, and building their compositions often begins with Mike Donovan laying down vocals and acoustic guitar before the band rewinds the tape adding layers until the proper mood and feel has been achieved. The result, often mixed to make the most of stereophonic tom foolery can be boozy and disorienting, with the song’s baked sonics reverberating around Donovan’s sweetly stoned and hazy vocals. Like the early, more experimental recordings of Sebadoh, Pavement, Royal Trux, and Guided by Voices, Sic Alps uses the lo-fi recording process as a catalyst for true creative exploration.
This video podcast was recorded live in Seattle at The Funhouse, and this recent performance saw Mike Donovan strip down the Sic Alps songs to their bare bones, performing them solo with acoustic guitar. The performance allowed fans to see, in a most intimate way, that first step, the first layer of acoustics and vocals that underlie most of the bands recent output; and what was revealed, belied at times by the recordings’ unrelenting sonic deconstruction, is rooted in American folk, lyrics at once American-Western and Romantic, but often wrapping, ever so deceptively, poetically coded social commentary with an after-bite.
