Upgrade & Afterlife
Upgrade & Afterlife is the third album by Gastr del Sol.
Track listing
| Title | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | A. | Our Exquisite Replica of "Eternity" | 8:26 |
| 2. | B1. | Rebecca Sylvester | 3:53 |
| 3. | B2. | The Sea Incertain | 6:12 |
| 4. | C1. | Hello Spiral | 10:40 |
| 5. | C2. | The Relay | 5:49 |
| 6. | D1. | Crappie Tactics | 1:48 |
| 7. | D2. | Dry Bones in the Valley | 12:27 |
Personnel
Cover art
The cover photo is "Wasser Stiefel" (1986) by Roman Signer.
See also: Signer's fountain in Munich, "Zwei Paar Stiefel" (2004)
Retrospectives
I would say that each [Gastr del Sol] album was really considered as a distinct project. So, for instance, Upgrade and Afterlife, we knew that there would be this firewall at the beginning of it [the dissonant, discomforting "Our Exquisite Replica of 'Eternity'"], that people had to decide whether they were going to scale, or wade through.
Reviews
The Wire
August 1996
Simon Hopkins
The mercifully prolific guitarist-inventor Jim O'Rourke continues his one-man mission to save the reputation of the world's most overplayed instrument. Lip service is paid elsewhere to the curious intersections of American folk musics and experimental/art music, but O'Rourke has a rare talent for actually making music from their congruence. He can summon up what Peter Guralnick has identified as the absolute sense of wonder at first hearing, say, Robert Johnson's recording as a college kind in the 60s—a sense of the music (now horribly ubiquitous, and horribly watered down) as somehow unspeakably alien.
Upgrade And Afterlife contines O'Rourke's ongoing project with David Grubbs. In common with the best US post-rock, this music wears its influences on its sleeve yet remains impossible to pin down. Grubbs' beautifully skewed, minimal acoustic guitar and voice pieces—Kurt Weill as played by a train-hopping hobo with an Arto Lindsay hang-up—pop up between the LaMonte Young organ droning of "Our Exquisite Replica of Eternity" and the Faust-ish radio mangling of "The Sea Incertain". Elsewhere, "Hello Spiral" nods to both Slint, with its math rock electric guitar comping (and no one records guitar quite as viscerally as O'Rourke) and John McEntire's compelling jazz snare rhythms, then suddenly collapses into cacophonous feedback.
The album somehow crystallizes all this with the closing track, John Fahey's "Dry Bones in the Valley". Fahey's folk-brutalism has rightly been namechecked by the likes of McEntire of late, but here the despair behind the pretty guitar melody is thrown into relief by Tony Conrad's scraping violin lines. It's in the very best tradition of maverick American low/high-brow distinction-scrapping, and worth the price of the CD alone.
The Sound Projector
1997[2]
Wonderful stuff this - though it wasn't an immediate grabber, I now deem it a highly crafted recording exhibiting consummate studio skill, very listenable, and a pleasingly deft combination of the story (songs) with the abstract (instrumentals). Jim O'Rourke is one half of this duo, which is why I decided to investigate - on the strength of his work with Faust. People can sometimes spout nonsense about 'imaginary movie soundtracks'. More apposite to a record like this is the phrase 'Movie for your Ears', coined by Frank Zappa for his 1969 LP Hot Rats. Zappa's proposal for making records this way should have been followed by more musicians, I feel. (Notwithstanding the 'Cinema of the Ear' series of music concrète minidiscs issued by Metam Kine in France; O'Rourke did one called Rules of Reduction, MKCD 009.) This Gastr record seems to having a shot at it. More than simply suggesting suitable cinematic images to accompany itself, it (like Hot Rats) pays close attention to light and shade, tonal colour balance, textures, and a highly developed feel for the linear progression of the whole recording - it's edited and ordered like a cinematic event, not just a loose affiliation of episodes (which isn't to say it's like a 1970s concept album in any way!). This is helped by the brilliant move of playing a John Fahey composition as the final track, played with loving care by O'Rourke and overlaid with lusciously managed sounds including the great Tony Conrad playing a slightly more approachable version of his minimal violin drones. Elsewhere the bizarre fragmentary songs delivered with a hesitant breathy vocal over a close-miked acoustic classical guitar evoke The Red Krayola. And the first track starts with a tasty chandelier-shattering organ chord, which edits into a sample of that brilliant melancholy trumpet solo from The Incredible Shrinking Man. This CD is undeniably precious and fragile, but so what?
Rough Guide to Rock
2003[3]
[...] In the wake of this profusion of activity, Gastr Del Sol struck gold with their next album, Upgrade & Afterlife (1996). With string contributions from Conrad, horns from Mats Gustafsson and Gene Coleman, plus O'Rourke's tape cut-ups and white noise squeals, the record offered a cinematic amalgam of layered textures and atmospheric mood swings. This particularly held true for the album's lengthy bookends: the opener, "Our Exquisite Replica of 'Eternity'", wheezes, cackles and, ultimately, bursts into a grand cry of horns; at the end of the set "Dry Bones In The Valley (I Saw The Light Come Shining 'Round And 'Round)" beautifully reworks a Fahey song and concludes with a hypnotic coda replete with a Conrad violin drone. Upgrade & Afterlife presented challenging musical concepts and juxtapositions in a fashion that was never overwhelming, rarely dull, and too darn lovely to be considered pretentious. [...] Considered by many to be Gastr's finest moment, Upgrade & Afterlife opens with an ominous, cackling drone and closes with a smooth, lulling drone. It also contains the duo's most beautiful song - a cover of John Fahey's "Dry Bones In The Valley" - and finest album cover: a striking photograph of water exploding forth from a pair of Wellington boots.