Blues Control - Valley Tangents LP

Even though there’s what seems to be a flood of new music at the moment, sometimes you’ve gotta go take a step back and revisit the overlooked all timers.

Gimme one of those desert island disc or bakers dozen selection columns to fill out and I guarantee Blues Control’s Valley Tangents will be on there somewhere. I can’t say exactly when I first heard it, but I’m pretty sure I can blame Nic for showing me this about a decade ago and it has been a total beacon in my listening ever since; a kind of (albeit anachronistic) reference point for delving back into Krautrock, “post-rock,” various edge-of-experimental scenes, or the mercurial approaches of groups like This Heat or Talk Talk and the label outputs of Siltbreeze and Holy Mountain among others.

The duo of Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho wove together keys, guitars, tape loops and percussion into ambitious, hypnotic, and sometimes humorous instrumental compositions that dragged rock  music into new age, jazz, kraut, etc directions. More than anything to me, Blue Control are the prime example of the exciting and open-ended possibilities of DIY music in the late 00s into the early 2010s. Maybe that’s misled nostalgia for a time just before I could go to gigs, or maybe it’s because they were some of the finest to ever do it, who knows!

The best new LP under the $20 in the shop at the moment I reckon!
-Mitch