SV Stop 266: FL (www.focisleft.bandcamp.com) - Grains Of Sand, Pinches Of Salt LP (Unsigned, Unreleased, 2020) - First previews

https://soundcloud.com/subversion-2/sets/focis-left-grains-of-sand-pinches-of-salt# On this link, dear reader, you will find full ten-track audio for the heavily-trimmed LP newsie by FL, a 41 minute exploration into the connection between what makes sand grainy, and what makes salt salty. Ultimately it's about two different types of flavour, coterminously working together as one. Throughout the album, there are nods to some of I Michael's favourite acts, including Zelienople and Nils Frahm as actual tributes to those artists. While the mood is gentile, the flow is pastoral, ebbing from one wild river into smaller estuaries and back out into a cosmic lake moat mouth. Unlike the motorik, motor-mouthed pull of 70s kosmiche and faux-Neu! and Can, the music is polarised by being firmly connected to Muttley's library music roots: music, quite literally, that is as interesting, alternately, as it is ignorable. The polarisation aspect speaks to the queer identity of the artist, the weirdness of the current contemporary sonic landscape, and the fact that music does not sell these days, only the experience does. If you would like to join in this experience, I ask you not to donate copious amounts of money to me - spend that with viable charities or your mates in pubs and venues instead. No, what I would ask you to do is simply talk about releases like this, and spread the word. Word of mouth goes a hell of a long way if it is positive word of mouth. Support your local record shops too, before they experience only liquidation. It really happens, all the time. We just have to blot out the misgivings of time and space and focus on the pleasantries of the artform. My local record shops, for instance, are The Original Animal Sanctuary Shop in Carterton, as one music charity shop of several selling implausible titles; there are also local supermarkets for the big stuff, of course. But the real jewel in the crown I have to shout out, and all the staff is Rapture, Witney in their Woolgate Centre for visitors and tourists. According to many sources only Rapture and it's base Truck Store remain, Truck in Oxford, while there is a shop called River Man Records in Jericho, Oxford on the outskirts of the main city. I am talking for the outskirts of the Cotswolds; I literally live in the middle of nowhere. It has hence been ancillary and auxiliary minded to book artists for gigs in Oxford since moving here in 2006; more often than not, I am just contributing the same amount of participation as an extra audience member, a signed tour CD or mug/tee and the odd magazine reviews and concert photos. Anyway, enjoy the relationship, as ever, between musical entropy and musical anhedonia.