The March

Posted on April 2, 2013 by pulse

Finally. Hello again.

No excuses. JukeboxHeart.com has been inactive for far too long. We’ve been barely breathing in the background, maintaining the FM program and little by little redesigning the site to be a bit more user friendly. But you don’t care about that. Herewith is our first music entry in many, many months.

I’ve also been cleaning house at home and have come up with a few choice things to post here in the relaunch of JukeboxHeart.com. I’ve had numerous requests for the material from this band, so I decided this would be the music to re-open JukeboxHeart.com

The band is The March, and they were active in the mid 1980s in Providence, Rhode Island. They gigged a lot in town at places like The Rocket, The Living Room and AS220. They were dark, decidedly postpunk, and definitely fans of Joy Division with songs patterned after Atrocity Exhibition and Interzone.

The March – “Otherself” cassette, plus three live performances
[audio:http://www.jukeboxheart.com/TheMarch/TheMarch_OtherselfAndLive.mp3]

The March – Ten Song Demo
[audio:http://www.jukeboxheart.com/TheMarch/TheMarch_10SongDemo.mp3]

I was friends with Eric Moffat, lead guitarist, until he left Providence for San Francisco in search of better musical tidings.

There is little, if any, information remaining about the band. They officially released one cassette, Otherself. But their impact on the live scene cannot be overstated. At the time, I was doing radio at WCUW in Worcester, and Eric ran off a special copy of Otherself for me, which included three live tracks, and that cassette is presented here in its entirety.

Additionally, Eric gave me the 10 Song Demo as shown in the photo, including studio versions of songs they played live. I believe these songs remain unreleased to this day, and even many who saw the band live and knew them in the local scene have never heard these studio versions. The track listing, if it ever existed at all, is long lost.

The mp3’s you will listen to have been culled from cassette tapes that are over 25 years old, and as such, have suffered some age degradation. I’ve restored them as much as possible, but they are still not perfect.

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Cassettera: MUUDO

Posted on July 30, 2010 by pulse

[audio:http://www.paulcollegio.net/juke/juke0508/k7.mp3]

One of the most mysterious artists ever, I received these cassettes anonymously over a period of a year. No return address, no information, just the cassette packaging you see in the image. I loved the whole 80’s cassette counterculture for precisely this reason. Madmen and geniuses lurking in their bedrooms producing passionate, urgent music. While the fidelity here is low, and the execution is less than, shall we say, produced, the notion of producing menacing choral music from cheap synth banks was captivating – especially given that there are apparently many, many hours of this in this artist’s archive.

Each tape consists of two 30-minute plus sidelong compositions of eerie, ethereal and even frightening music, with no title information other than a three-digit code. The track presented here is excerpted from “69M”.

(P.S. “Cassettera” rhymes with “et cetera”…)

As Recorded Live: A Certain Ratio

Posted on June 10, 2010 by pulse

As Recorded Live, another new category for Jukebox Heart, brings you legendary live tracks. We kick off the category with A Certain Ratio, from the concert released on their cassette, “The Graveyard and The Ballroom”, released January 1980.

[audio:http://paulcollegio.net/juke/juke0706/live.mp3]

Click the above arrow to hear A Certain Ratio perform All Night Party, Oceans and The Choir.

Released during Factory Records’ formative years. One side studio (Produced by Martin Hannett in September 1979) and one side live (recorded live by Jeff Hooper and Tony Wilson). The live tracks are taken from the legendary performance at the Electric Ballroom, London, October 1979, opening for Talking Heads. From an early cassette edition of this concert, originally released by Factory in a very limited edition, this has subsequently been released on CD, but the original format is a must have: a cassette housed in a transparent “evening bag”. The first 400 copies were in an orange pouch with insert. Later copies in blue, green, brown, red, and grey pouches. Collect them all for every outfit and season…

Cassettera: Sensationnel

Posted on May 31, 2010 by pulse

Almost from its commercial introduction followed by cheap home recording technology, the modest cassette has been the champion of the underground music scene. The underground cassette network was just flourishing globally throughout the late 70s and 80s, as reported in a slew of independent music journals and fanzines. It seemed as if all you had to do was write to a handful of individuals expressing some interest, and your name would get attached to mailing lists all over the world and cassettes would come rolling in from *everywhere*.

When the CD-R and mini-disc appeared, the urgency behind cassettes seemed to evaporate, with the expected bastions remaining to proliferate the cassette culture. But now, as the collectibility of those old cassettes skyrockets, and renewed interest in the medium surfaces, Jukebox Heart launches “Cassettera” to celebrate those inconvenient little boxes of music.

Starting this series is a track from one of the releases in the highly sought after series “Sensationnel,” a “cassette-magazine,” as the genre became known for its included graphic components, based in France in the early 1980s.

The above image is a large wraparound cover that housed a thick magazine, the cassette
and several other graphic inserts.

[audio:http://www.paulcollegio.net/juke/current/k7.mp3]

The Sensationnel cassette-magazine series was a much lauded publication produced by the French label Illusion Production, home of the band DDAA. They were issued in very limited quantities, and are priceless. I’ve just got the one edition, Issue number 2, and it is a wonderful collection of the European underground of the time, circa 1982. There were five issues in the series, each with specially designed packaging and of very limited quantity, all including xerox artwork from every artist participating in the project. The track presented here is from a performer known as Lady June, where she tells an allegorical story of meeting a talking turd and all of the hazards that go along with that. I’ve also included her graphic contribution to the packaging as well. Click on the arrow above to hear the track.

The tape itself is somewhat in poor repair and tends to drag against the motors of any cassette player it is inserted into, but I managed to get a reasonable, if somewhat warbly, play-through for you.

Image of the original cassette