After going down the Francisca Griffin rabbit hole a little while back, I remembered that she had a track (as Kathy Bull) on the Flying Nun compilation Shrew'd back in the day. I had never actually bought that CD - Flying Nun CDs were expensive in the 90s and blank tapes were relatively cheap - but then I checked and someone had it on bleebay for pretty cheap.
It's great. I think everyone from Look Blue Go Purple appears in some way or another, so in addition to basically being the fourth Look Blue Go Purple album (sort of like the fourth season of Arrested Development where they were never in the same room at the same time?), there are some pretty great rarities:
- Sooty and Sweep (who overlapped with the much fiercer Queen Meanie Puss)
- Alice Bulmer (great, well-written song that sounds like a better version of Dribbling Darts, for whom she played violin)
- Piki Riwai, who were three women with Anglo/Nordic names who sang in Maori. I would love to hear more of their gentle lilting music, since it's such a weird and great cul-de-sac, but Dwiskwogs only lists one unobtainium two-song tape for which some Austrian maniac is asking an insane four figures (!!!)
I mentioned in my previous post that I was interested in upgrading my turntable cartridge/needle situation. Someone on bleebay was selling some NOS Audio-Technica cartridges - holy moley! Night and day! The curtain has been lifted! The problem with having a job and working from home in the middle of a pandemic is that I find reasons to spend money on stuff like this...
...since for years I was OK with this piece of absolute garbage, which ruined probably half the records in the Washington County library system as well as any tapes that I made from those records. Man, the low quality vibes just leap off that picture. I can feel how wobbly and insubstantial that "FUNCTION" knob is, the jiggly and unnecessarily duplicated sliders above it, the tape control buttons that don't quite line up. Sigh. That said, pretty sweet A and B indicators for the tape deck.
