Founded by Bruce Licher, Independent Project Records has been one of the more consistent labels in both sound and design over the last 50 years. For evidence, please look no further than the new 2CD compilation The Well, which offers 41 tracks ranging from well-known acts to deep obscurities. It’s available now.
Although difficult to pin down stylistically, Independent Project Records benefited from a focused sensibility. The Well bears this out. Opening the set is Afterimage, a band formed in early ’80s Los Angeles who garnered the description of their home burg’s Joy Division. Their collected early works validate that connection, but the eponymous track here is, frankly, more (if mildly) reminiscent of early Public Image Ltd.
Afterimage’s Barry Craig also recorded and was indeed quite prolific under the moniker A Produce, a project featured here with two instrumentals, “Tunnels” and “Jimbe,” that cavort in the atmospheric soundscape zone and wander toward trance-adjacent dance rhythms. Also included is “I Woke Up Screaming,” a very intriguing Craig solo track that exudes psych-folk vibes with a loner undercurrent.
As one of IPR’s bigger acts, San Francisco’s The Ophelias are represented here with the echoey flute-laden psych bombast of “Sleepy Hamlet.” Ophelias founder Leslie Medford also makes the cut with the thump-pulse post-Detroit vaguely-Velvets druggy-punk haze of “Leslie’s Dream.”
Shiva Burlesque was founded by vocalist Jeffrey Clark and guitarist Grant Lee Phillips (later of Grant Lee Buffalo) in the mid-’80s. The piano-driven “Midnight Chapel” is a reunion recording that reinforces a frequently cited influence in John Cale and additionally Nick Cave, as David J of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets fame plays bass on the track. David J gets two entries of his own on The Well, the balladic “Punishment by Roses” and the scaled-back and folky “No One Looks Like Christopher Walken.”
No less stimulating is the decidedly more rocking but still appropriately moody solo Jeffrey Clark track on disc two, “Sacred.” But the drum-box art-punk Clark and Phillips belched out in early ‘80s Northern California as Torn Boys is even more interesting. The Torn Boys’ work has been posthumously collected on LP by IPR; “Mystery” from that record is heard here, and it’s a gas.
Camper Van Beethoven, whose debut Telephone Free Landslide Victory was released by IPR, is included here via the stripped-down, scrappy 1983 demo “Vegetables.” Flashing forward significantly, Camper’s Greg Lisher’s instrumental “Zen and the Art of Long Distance Driving” has a distinctly soundtrack-y quality and is in fact quite neo-noirish in mood.
Expanding beyond California, The Well features Springhouse of New York City doing that early ’90s soft-loud-soft thing with “Sea and Rain,” and then jumping across the pond, there is some home-recorded goodness from the UK sibling duo Woo, “The One that Got Away” and “Tibetan Trains.”
Swinging back into the USA, the comp offers the dreamy lushness of New Yorker Alison Clancy’s “The Valley,” the post-punky dream-pop ambiance of “Heretofore” by the late For Against singer-bassist Jeffrey Runnings, and the similarly focused guitar-layering of “Honeycut” by the Arizona-based shoegazers Half String.
IPR began as an avenue for the music of Bruce Licher, so it’s unsurprising that he’s the most heavily represented artist here. The Well serves up the dark and dense spaciousness of “Archetype” from Savage Republic, two slices of prime ’90s instrumental drift, “Raintree Road” and the brief “Film Music #6,” by Scenic, the echo-laden solo Licher guitar workout “Tundra,” and even the experimental sound-scaping of “Radiant Transfer to Non-Grey Walls” by Licher’s first band, Neef.
There’s also the pure punk blast of “Politic (Body and Soul)” from the Middle Class, the fidgety art-punk of “Persecution, That’s My Song” from BPeople, the raw goth-punk of “Anti Pop” from Kommunity FK, and a whole lot more. In brief, The Well is a thematically and historically cohesive deep dive.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A-
