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Steven Brown \ Searching For Contact [LTMCD 2362]

Searching for Contact is Brown's second solo album, recorded in 1987 for PIAS with collaborator Nikolas Klau and inspired by the works of Jean Genet and William S. Burroughs. The original 11 tracks include Habit, Voxcon 1 and Tuxedomoon live staple This Land, plus the whole of the 1986 mini-album Me and You and the Licorice Stick, never before available on CD. In addition this remastered CD and download finds space for rare tracks Tori and A Sprit Ditty, plus the 7" single edit of Last Rendezvous.

Tracklist:

1. Habit
2. Audiences + Stages
3. Doe's Day
4. In Praise of Money
5. Manner of Means
6. This Land
7. Scene 1 - The Street
8. Scene 2 - The Bar (Last Rendezvous)
9. Scene 3 - The Ship
10. De Hamburger Veermaster
11. Voxcon 1
12. Am I Home Yet?
13. Gone With The Winds
14. Besides All That
15. A Gift
16. A Spirit Ditty
17. Tori
18. Last Rendezvous (7" version)

Artwork by Patrick Roques.

Searching For Contact [LTMCD 2362]

Reviews:

"Out of immediate contact with with its time and place, and all the better for it. Perhaps the contemporaneous work of Foetus and Marc Almond are the nearest parallels, mashing a slew of ideas - big band blasts, industrial-crawl beats, dark arrangements, and singing with brooding passion - into an often striking combination" (All Music Guide, 06/2004)

"Another meticulously documented collection of solo material, and it is beautiful. 'What's it like out in the audience?' he sings, Lou Reed style, almost absent mindedly, to his own soulful clarinet responses in Audiences + Stages. He sets up Zappa-like band pieces and scenarios from an inferno of cultural nightmares, and he does folkloric sound experiments, and exquisite piano melodies with harp" (Whisperin' and Hollerin', 05/2004)

"The mood is suitably edgy and bleak. Last Rendezvous has soul to spare and is the clearest sign of the feelings of loneliness inherent in the tone of the album" (Leonard's Lair, 07/2004)

"Combines ethereal keyboards, exotic vocals, echoic saxophones and volumes of amorphous, whirring mechanical noise" (The Big Takeover, 09/2004)