Cassette-only releases available via mail order from companies known only through zine advertisements... there's something so wonderfully quaint about the whole notion. What was it like to search so hard to find music during this time, when economy of scale meant investing in a dual-well deck and dubbing a run of tapes in your spare time? It really wasn't so long ago that such tapes were a path to a genuine underground, but it feels like another lifetime. I was there, I guess, but somehow it seems like something my parents told me about.
In this marginal world of indie cassette releases, a world that has never registered even the slightest blip on the radar of the average pop culture consumer, Lou Barlow was king. Barlow first released cheaply recorded and mastered four-track material as Sebadoh, chose the name Sentridoh for his solo material once Sebadoh became a proper band, and also dabbled under his given name. All told, Barlow released a lot of material on cassettes and singles in the late 80s and early 90s, during the time before he obtained any kind of profile with The Folk Implosion or Sebadoh after it became a proper indie rock band.
I'm only now starting to get a handle on how prolific Barlow was. I consider myself a fan, but after listening to Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93, a collection of stray tracks and the previously released Wasted Pieces cassette, I realize I don't know the half of it. I was amazed to find zero overlap with either The Original Losing Losers or Lou Barlow and His Sentridoh, two long albums that have something like 55 songs between them. All this Sentridoh material is in addition to the four-track stuff Lou released as the pre-rock Sebadoh-- and to think that there are at least two other full-length Sentridoh CDs out there somewhere.
How did Barlow do it? Well, the trick was, most of what he released wasn't very good. A significant portion of the songs that found release during this time were either unformed, one-take songs, or dippy tape experiments. The usual method for putting together records, this idea of combing through a stack of recordings, working to find the quality tracks, and mulling how they might best be presented, was of no interest to Barlow whatsoever with Sentridoh. His four-track aesthetic during this time was the musical equivalent of automatic writing: just fling every last scrap out into zineland and let the listener do the work of making sense of it.
It might sound careless and indulgent, but it was an aesthetic that happened to yield some oddly arresting artifacts. There's a "1 + 1 = 3" kind of thing happening with Lou Barlow's home recorded music, and I've always enjoyed this stuff more than I should. Part of it is the powerful melancholy mood that floats through the recordings. No matter what sort of songs Barlow is doing-- joke tracks, misguided attempts at avant-garde sound manipulation, heartfelt confessional ballads-- they wind up sounding like the work of a lonely, depressive guy who smokes entirely too much weed. Barlow was obsessed with bodily fluids and disgusted with himself, and the records tended to have the dank, poorly lit atmosphere of a lived-in room in need of care. If you've ever spent a sad evening alone and thought to yourself, "Maybe I'll feel better if I take a hit and put on some music," you can understand the world of Lou Barlow.
Lou B's Wasted Pieces '87-'93 has the cotton-mouthed, blunted folk vibe that Barlow essentially perfected, but the ratio of memorable songs to failed experiments is even lower than usual. There are 31 tracks here, but you would have to live with this CD for a hell of a long time before you could pick more than a couple out of a lineup. "Nitemare" is a great little song, the kind of simple acoustic pop that shows Barlow really did listen closely to Joni Mitchell's Blue. And I honestly think the shockingly effective "Organ", which later found release on the Kids soundtrack as "Raise the Bells" (there is a different song here with the same title), is a brilliant piece of drone music as dreamy and potent as any Boards of Canada instrumental. There are a few other highlights, but mixed between are too many mangled tape collages, too many spoken word interludes, and too many songs that don't so much go nowhere as not "go" period. Lou B's Wasted Pieces is an interesting time capsule, perhaps, but it's well down the list of Barlow's four-track product.
