Full Service Station

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2019

Label: Flower Room

Limited to 50 Home-dubbed music-grade Type I c30 in ivory-colored shell, with hand-painted labels and hand-stamped B-side. Double-sided full-color tip-on cover on clear polybox with autographed front, hand-numbered to 50

Full Service Station documents the first (and, to-date, only) public live solo guitar performance by Matt LaJoie following the release of his acclaimed debut LP The Center and the Fringe at the top of this calendar year. In a set captured live at Academy Records Annex in Brooklyn by noted taper and underground archivist Jesse DeRosa, LaJoie weaves bowed, fingerstyle, plucked, and strummed notes on the same instruments and live-looping setup used on Center & Fringe into all new tapestries of sound.

The opening title track begins with layers of harmonically rich bowed drone, and as individualized notes gradually color the space in freestyle strokes, a subtle arrangement coalesces around spontaneous motifs and the invisible meter created by each loop's return to the top. The motion of ecstatic dance is suggested by the playful and joyful rhythms that accumulate one note at a time, these foundations eventually slowed, reversed, or sped up to align to an all-new field of possibility every few minutes. On the B-side, "Return Trip" incorporates a distant memory of Center & Fringe's "Plane of Return" at its onset; like a mirage, the seemingly familiar notes and rhythmic patterns spread, smear, and fade as they approach peak sun-stroked clarity. Once perception of the sound disperses back... more
credits
released July 29, 2019

Matt LaJoie: 10-string acoustic guitar, 6-string electric guitar, loops.
Recorded live at Academy Records Annex (Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY), February 8, 2019.
Live recording by Jesse DeRosa; mixed by Matt LaJoie.
Photo of ML by Ash Brooks.
Special thanks to Jeff Conklin & Academy, Jesse DeRosa, Danny Arakaki, and Tom Malach