Post by Lauren Curtis on Dec 16, 2006 4:19:19 GMT -5
Kristin Hersh spent more than a decade previously playing with Throwing Muses, releasing several solo albums as well. Her solo tours in the late 1990s and early 2000s focused on acoustic guitar playing. In late summer and early fall 2003, longing for a return to playing electric guitar-oriented, hard rock songs before a live audience, she launched the 50 Foot Wave project. While the spring 2003 Throwing Muses reunion tour and self-titled album had portended a raw and powerful new direction for her work, 50 Foot Wave moved ahead into an even more frenetic, punk-influenced rock style with a more direct lyrical approach, pounding rhythms, and sometimes quirky song structures.
The band was designed as a hard-hitting power trio, with a lineup including drummer Rob Ahlers and Throwing Muses bassist Bernard Georges. Hersh contributes energetic guitarwork and a frantic, manic lyrical and vocal style to this project. The band's first live performance was recorded in Burbank in October 2003 and released on a very limited basis as an official bootleg in 2004. Among other live appearances internationally in 2004, 50 Foot Wave performed a month-long residency of shows in January that year at the Silverlake Lounge, while the group was based in the Los Angeles area. The group's self-titled studio mini-album, containing six songs, was co-released in March 2004 by the band's ThrowingMusic label and 4AD Records.
Hersh has described 50 Foot Wave's music as "having a lot of math in it," while also calling it less emotionally and musically "tangled" than some of her past Throwing Muses work. Others have described some of the new songs as having "confrontational" lyrics. Hersh describes the music as being "just about release" -- "fun" music that has what the band calls a "blitzkrieg" rhythmic attack as opposed to the complexity and fragility expressed in her Throwing Muses project.
Live in Seattle, February 2004
Photo: Mike BaehrThe band opened for punk legends X in San Francisco in January 2005.
In March 2005, the group released its long-planned, full-length album, Golden Ocean, on its own ThrowingMusic label in partnership with 4AD. One writer described the new album's style as "metal" and "visceral trash rock," comparing the title track to a surreal painting, "brimming with irony." Another journalist, characterizing Hersh's new vocal sound as an "abrasive, parched, and husky growl," called the songs "emotionally and musically torrential" while describing a few of Hersh's longtime songwriting themes continued in the band as "thick metaphors about dysfunction, anger and confusion."
The group announced plans to tour across Europe and the United States throughout 2005 in support of the full-length album release, while Hersh simultaneously continued her solo concerts in alternating parts of the year. Hersh also stated that having the thunderous 50 Foot Wave material as a "foil" allows her to get her noise-loving side out of her system, with the result that her solo material sounds less like material for a band and more an atmospheric work reflecting "fluid timing and spaciousness."
In December 2005, the band announced on their official Throwingmusic.com website the release of a new EP called Free Music! available via free FLAC and mp3 downloads at their website and several download partner sites instead of released through retail distribution of physical compact discs. The downloads reserved some rights though Creative Commons licenses. The press release said that the decision to use free recording downloads as an innovative promotional tool was arrived at because the costs of distributing retail CDs, promoting the band through touring, and marketing through traditional methods had become "prohibitively expensive".
The web press release requested that listeners downloading the music spread news of the group's work by making copies for friends in exchange for receiving the music free of charge. The official website's music download page also provided a link for fans who preferred to donate "tips" at the music download page to support the group's work. In the press release, Hersh explained the free download distribution concept as stemming from an urge "to divorce money from recorded music" after she had encountered resistance "caused by little other than money" in getting information out about the band through "standard 'industry' channels".
50 Foot Wave also allows audience members to record their concerts and share the recordings, again under a Creative Commons license. They have allowed the Internet Archive to serve as a host for copies of these fan-made live recordings.
[edit] Personnel