Jeffrey Foucault - Cold Satellite (2011) CD Rip

COLD SATELLITE is the first of two full band recordings centered on the collaboration between Jeffrey Foucault and contemporary American poet Lisa Olstein (author of the collections Radio Crackling Radio Gone, Lost Alphabet, Little Stranger, and Late Empire, published by Copper Canyon Press), setting her language against his music to find a new, unanticipated emotional resonance.

Rising stars in their respective fields and longtime friends, Foucault and Olstein began their collaboration at a distance, with Foucault coming cold to the poems and lyric fragments, creating songs by elision and arrangement, relying on his immediate impressions to inform the music, and leaving the listener to unify the intentions of the two writers in a single experience (an idea referenced in the superimposed triangles of Renee Fernandez's delightful album cover). The result is an expansion of the notion of authorship, and an experiment in the invention of meaning.

Pairing Olstein's visceral language with the rawboned authority of a rock 'n' roll band, Cold Satellite's stripped down, dynamic sound hearkens back to records by Crazy Horse and the Faces: menacing electric guitar countervailed by delicate lines of pedal steel in short sketches and extended improvisations, Santo & Johnny-style ballads, Appalachian folk, even R&B. Featuring a lineup that includes Billy Conway (Morphine) on drums; Jeremy Moses Curtis (Booker T) on bass; David Goodrich (Chris Smither) on electric guitars; and Nashville's Alex Mccollough on pedal steel, COLD SATELLITE weaves together strands of primitive rock, blues, R&B and Country.