‘Summerteeth’ Turns 25, Pye Corner Audio Worship, And Faex Optim Filling A BOC-Size Hole

25 years ago this past Saturday I was sitting in a mildly dumpy hotel room in Fresno, California wondering what the hell I was going to do with myself. I’d flown into town for work. I was Distributor Inventory Auditor for a Midwestern orthopedic company in the late 90s. In simple terms, I traveled to distributors of our product and would count the parts they had in their inventory that were on consignment with them. Hospitals, strip mall offices, some guy’s basement,…wherever they had the parts I went with my trusty scanner and would scan them. Afterwards I’d load the info into a laptop and compare what I counted with what they show they have. If things were missing we’d bill them, if they had stuff they weren’t supposed to have we’d add it to their inventory.

Pretty simple.

The job itself wasn’t bad, but the down time for some of these trips were excruciating. Billings, Montana was nice, as was Denver and New York City. But places like Lubbock, TX, Baltimore, and Detroit were not. You can add Fresno to that list. It was to my recollection a dirty little town with not much going for it. No real good restaurants, or people for that matter. Everyone just seemed generally agitated and pissed off, and didn’t have time to answer your damn questions.

So on an evening where I was done early I decided to just start driving and looking for something to do besides sit in my hotel room and stare at the brown walls and crappy pay-per-view. No cell phones or Google Maps back then, so it was just jump in the car and hope for the best. I came across a Borders Book Store so I went in(but not before some guy flashed a pistol at me as I was trying to walk in front of his car), as I loved books and music(still do) and it felt like a slice of home far, far away from it. One of the little island displays of new releases I saw an odd album cover that looked like a mouth and moon together, but with a name I recognized well. Wilco’s Summerteeth had been released, much to my surprise. I was expecting this gem to drop but wasn’t sure of the date.

I’d been waiting for this record ever since I’d first discovered Wilco in early 1997 with their masterpiece Being There. Summerteeth was the follow-up, and to say it hit me hard is the understatement of all understatements. After grabbing some brown bag dinner I went back to my shitty hotel room and listened to Summerteeth on the Sony Discman I brought along with me. I was floored. You’ve heard all the comparisons and yes they’re correct. But there was also a kind of poetic darkness to it that wasn’t there on Being There and their debut A.M. Jeff Tweedy had quickly become my favorite songwriter, having kicked me in the grey matter with songs like “Misunderstood”, “Outtasite Outtamind”, “Sunken Treasure”, and “Red-Eyed and Blue”. I loved his way of writing lyrics that came across as poetry, but the kind of poetry that could be unlocked into some serious personal truths. On Summerteeth he went all in, with songs like “She’s A Jar”, “Shot In The Arm”, “I’m Always In Love”, and “Via Chicago” revealing the cracks in the veneer of personal relationships and his own mental state. It was dark, Midwestern noir framed out with Brian Wilson-esque sun-kissed melodies.

Summerteeth remained an absolute constant(having dubbed the album onto Mini-Disc having received a portable player the previous Christmas for just the purpose of my work trips.) I spread the gospel of Tweedy to all that would listen(and even the ones that wouldn’t.) Of course the next two years were filled with the excitement and drama regarding the making, unmaking, then re-making of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Summerteeth has remained a singular and integral record in my world. It was the record where I went from being smitten with a band to being fully, head over heals in love with them. They also felt like the kind of band that could break my heart as both Tweedy and his partner-in-crime Jay Bennett were both knocking back painkillers and chainsmoking like fiends, laying the groundwork for a possible tragic overdose.

Of course history had something else in mind as by the time Yankee arrived in April of 2002 Bennett had gotten the boot by Tweedy and a unilateral agreement with the rest of the band. Tweedy did go into rehab for his painkiller addiction a mere two weeks prior to their next album, A Ghost Is Born, dropping in 2004. Thankfully that stuck as he’s been clean ever since. Bennett sadly succumbed to a fatal overdose of fentanyl due to a faulty pain patch in 2009.

I hate being that fan, but there was a four-album run by Wilco that will stand as bulletproof and perfect in every way. They have put records out after this run that I love(Sky Blue Sky, Star Wars, Ode To Joy), but for me Being There through A Ghost Is Born is a discography that can stand up to any other you put up to it(from any era in the existence of what we call “rock n roll”.) Every song, every note, every lyric rings of dark truths, true artistic poeticism, and a yearning to spread artistic wings and expand creative palates. Summerteeth, in my personal opinion, was the jumping off point into the abyss. To drop the country-isms and to fold them into a new sound and new artistic highs. It was Jeff Tweedy saying goodbye to what he was known for up to that point and letting his and Jay Bennett’s mad scientist run free in the laboratory to make a beast like nothing they’d ever built.

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It’s been close to ten years since I discovered Pye Corner Audio, the downtempo, haunted disco music project of UK producer Martin Jenkins. His world is built around fuzzy tape hiss, subtle techno beats, and haunted melodies created on keyboards. His sound feels like music lost to another time(or possibly dimension) where every looming woods has a crumbling, disjointed estate sitting in the middle of it waiting for naive roamers to step in and look around. Of course, never to be seen again.

Jenkins has built an impressive discography over the last 10+ years, releasing the at first cassette-only Black Mills Tapes collection(which was collected into a 5-LP set back in 2020.) But then other albums dropped like Prowler, EPs like The Spiral, Where Things Are Hollow, Stars Shine Like Eyes, as well as his excellent trilogy of Sleep Games, Stasis, and Hollowed Earth. Ooh, and Entangled Routes! Can’t forget that one.

There’s just something about his work that elicits such a visceral feeling of nostalgia and slight unease that I can’t get enough of.

It’s the same feeling I’d get as a kid sitting up watching the late movie on Channel 55 on Friday nights. It didn’t matter if the movie that was on was good or stupid, sitting in the darkness of my childhood living room watching Motel Hell or Blood Beach there was something about the quiet in-between the noise that amplified the fear. The feeling of going back in time while seeing these things transpire on my parents picture tube Zenith console made a permanent mark on my psyche.

That’s the same feeling I get from a Pye Corner Audio album.

In April Pye Corner Audio drops their new album, The Endless Echo. I have heard the album several times already and I’m so excited for this thing to drop. It’s classic PCA. It’s got all the ghostly melodies, subtle dance rhythms, and that feeling of sitting alone in the dark with just the light of an old picture tube TV lighting your face in the black of night. It’s enchanting and haunting and evocative. Might be one of my favorite albums of the year.

I recently purchased Pye Corner Audio’s last album, Let’s Emerge! from 2022. For some reason I never really delved into it because I thought it was a collaborative record with Ride and Oasis’ Andy Bell. Not that I have anything against Andy Bell, it’s just that everything I’d seen made it sound to be some upbeat, happy record. I’ve nothing against upbeat and happy, but dammit when I’m listening to Pye Corner Audio I don’t want either of those things. I want slightly dark and mysterious.

Well after picking up the album and listening it definitely has a different vibe than previous PCA records, but it still has that undercurrent of hauntology. It’s like those stairwells of sunshine that shine through dark, overcast skies on chilly October afternoons. You’re still covered in the grey, but a moment of sunshine cuts through to remind you of better days. That’s what Let’s Emerge! sounds like to me. More optimistic melodies and the warmth of a sunshine day to remind you that things will get better. But don’t get too optimistic, because you’re sure to be disappointed.

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The whole reason I started this site was so I could come on here and talk about music. It’s been the whole point since day one. Of course it’s expanded and evolved since December of 2011, but the basic idea is still the same. Talk about music and nerd out over albums. My hope was to also connect to other like-minded folks along the way. Find fellow music guys and gals and wax ecstatic over our mutual love for the long player and how it’s affected our lives in a good way. One such connection happened last Friday.

Last Friday I posted about wanting a new Boards of Canada album. It’s been almost 11 years since their last full-length, the excellent and underapppreciated Tomorrow’s Harvest. I’d found this video on Youtube that is apparently early singles from the Scottish bros called A Few Good Tunes. I was pretty impressed with it, as it was over an hour of mostly songs I’d never heard from one of my favorite bands. It was both exciting and also kind of sad, as I’m still not any closer to a new Boards of Canada record.

Well early Saturday morning I get up to a comment on that post asking if I’d ever heard Faex Optim, a British eletronic artist that hits those downtempo BoC vibes really well. So at 6am while I was waiting for my dog to take a shit or piss I squinted at my phone(didn’t have my glasses on yet) and found Faex Optim’s Bandcamp page. Look Around You was the album the commentor mentioned so I hit play on song 1 and was kind of floored. I know the guy isn’t Boards of Canada, but what he was doing came as close as something like Ulrich Schnauss’ A Strangely Isolated Place.

Look Around You is pretty brilliant, and gives you that strange, dreamy feeling that BoC pretty much created from scratch. But this one man electronic project does things in his own way, adding even touches of DJ Shadow and Tycho into the mix. It’s less haunted than BoC, but still very much dusty memories from the late 70s/early 80s put to music. Of course I ordered a copy of the CD from their Bandcamp page, and I will be exploring the discography much, much further. So thanks commentor for hipping me to this brilliant record(which I found out was mastered by my Danish friend and all around musical wizard Jonas Munk of Causa Si and Manual fame.)

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Okay guys, thanks for offering up your eyes and ears. It was a lot I know, but the music has been doing it’s magic upon me lately. What have you been listening to?