Lights in a Fat City - Somewhere (These Records,1988)

"Somewhere" es un disco bizarro, tribal y atmosférico. Esta definición podría asociarse a Dead Can Dance,This Heat,Liquid Liquid,Zoviet*France,23 Skidoo,... incluso Can. El trio capitaneado por Stephen Kent, adquiere un sonido mántrico debido a la utilización del didgeridú y en este punto, me parece un grupo interesante para seguidores de Blackest Ever Black o Demdike Stare, por citar algunos ejemplos notables de oscurantismo bien entendido. Gran artefacto. La historia de como surge el disco la dejo en palabras de Stephen Kent:

Drummer and percussionist extraordinaire Eddy Sayer and I began to play together socially and in public in 1984. In time out from other creative pursuits [I was in the circus then – Ra Ra Zoo] we’d go down to Camden Lock Market in north London and set up our instruments on a magic carpet, lent to us by the Afghan & Persian carpet salesman, Graham.

Eddy would put a bunch of hand percussion and a couple of small drums and I would have my didj and a selection of rattles, cymbals and sticks. We’d play, sometimes all day, for fun and put out the hat. In 1985 we hung out with Kenneth Newby [who would later join LIAFC and also become a founding member of Trance Mission in San Francisco in 1992] and recorded our market jams and, in 1986, after I’d done a trip touring around the world with Ra Ra Zoo we created a tape from some of those jams mixed with a series of 4 track recordings, calling ourselves Mandorla Mu and naming the tape “Lights in a Fat City” - a phrase I’d taken from a Hunter S. Thompson book, “The Great Shark Hunt”. It seemed to speak to the feelings we had about our music, and our direction on the streets of London.


We applied and were accepted onto the bill of the WOMAD Festival, then in the UK alone. Mistakenly, they billed us as Lights in a Fat City and the name stuck. The Tape became the demo for our first real recording, “Somewhere”, which we recorded and mixed in a 5 day lockout marathon with Simon Tassano as the 3rd wheel in Elephant Studios in Wapping, East London. It was December 1987. This intensive creative burst cemented Lights in a Fat City - Eddy, Simon and I - as a trio, mixing the ancient acoustic with contemporary technology. I still see it as a ground breaking recording project in a genre that, at that time, had virtually no identity in the wider music world.

stephenkent.net