Eric Copeland Al Anon twelve-inch

By the time you are reading this, Al Anon will be available for free online to those of you clever enough to google and download. The Alien encourages this. Get it. Get it all. Don’t stop. Digest all the music, all the film, food, friends, fun that you can. All the melodies and flavors, make them your ingredients. Build on ruins, new condos of sod and slate, redwood and ice. See the Buddha in Christ and the Christ in you. Take it all in folks, and love it, it’s here, feel it and use it. What can you do but play play play all day all day. Don’t be sacred, no matter what you were taught—Maybe you didn’t need instructions after all? Don’t hold heroes for too long. Make them food for your fodder. Make your own connections. Advance on and on. Al Anon.

Al Anon concludes Eric Copeland’s two part album entitled Alien In A Garbage Dump (available on CD from Paw Tracks). Where the first half offered a discombobulated collection of radio cross-signaling, here the alien finds its groove for a minute and tidies up the frequencies. There is still something outsiderish here, but with more of an effort to get inside, to play by the rules even? Or maybe the motivation is to sneak something subversive into the norms’ hideout?

Since Al Anon was recorded at the same time as two Black Dice albums, there are obvious parallels in the results; an uncompromised sonic landscape. But outside the group setting, Copeland has found places one can only find alone: small inner dialogues and isolated mind caves where an idea may only last a moment. He captures and tweaks these ideas into fragments of many memories; a déjà vu record déjà vu record. Funny characters drop in and out. Songs come and go. Al Anon proves to be a strangely curated time capsule of OUR time right NOW; music where birds beat-box with car-stereo subwoofers and the neighbors’ Espanol sings on top the Sabbath siren. With all this going on, Copeland sometimes disappears into the anonymity, playing a ‘behind-the-scenes’ role, pushing cords and pulling buttons, laughing because the batteries are dying. Here the familiar becomes mysterious and the unknown feels normal and we can listen to this one all day trying to make those distinctions.

Edition of 500 copies with jaw-droppingly amazing black and white collage artwork by Copeland, screenprinted by VG Kids.

Relevant Links
Black Dice
Black Myspace