Today we welcome Fredrick Arnold, the face behind Future Oak Records, a producer of some of the most careful, well-crafted releases you’ll ever care to see. As the ‘About’ page on their website reads: “Future Oak is wood panelled, it smells like a dry attic. The world is a brief and unfathomable experience and thus is our music. Swaddled in art, printed by hand and born of a moment. Limited releases, lathecuts, and hand printed ephemera”.

In addition, and while we only get to see it via intermittent guest post, Fredrick also has a way with words and an array of stories to tell. I think you’ll agree he has taken the Mystery Mix to a whole new level, not least thanks to the fantastic artwork.

A L L   I S   L O S T

by Fredrick Arnold

Song you’d play during the apocalypse

Califone – 3 Legged Animals

December 20th, 2012. We had just recently moved to Pittsburgh, a brand new city with zero ties, zero history. It’s late, I’m walking to the 24 hour Sunoco gas station to buy a candy bar, contemplating the listless trajectory of my life. I pay the cashier, he says, from behind a sheet of plexiglass, “Call your mom when you get home, the world is going to end tonight”. You believe that, and this is where you’re spending your last hours? I think, curious as to why he even charged me for the King-Sized Nutrageous. The thought of surviving an apocalypse is the most horrifying thought; what a cruel joke — to toil around in the ruins of humanity with a bunch of gun-toting survivalists or mutated what-nots. No thanks. If I wake up to end days then I’m going to put on this Califone track and see to my end.

Song with an animal in the title

Bonnie Prince Billy – The Signifying Wolf

You know, when you look at an animal and they’re looking back at you with those primitive eyes that seem to look through your flesh and into your soul? I think Will Oldham sees the world with those eyes. The eyes of a wolf. He’s got some sort of primal wisdom that he croons to us, unenlightened civilization. There’s so much to be said for batting your paws in the dirt, burying your snout in wet leaves. You can see someone so much clearer when you see through them.

Song that reminds you of school

Blur – Caravan

School was essentially several long lifetimes ago. I’m old now, some sort of man. School wasn’t a good time for me, I don’t like thinking about it. Maybe it’s because I was a tortured and sensitive boy, or maybe because thinking back puts into clear focus the reality that I have failed, as an adult, to outgrow the faults of my youth. The best thing about school, though, is that Dave Quackenbush used to let me pick the music in homeroom. I would not have graduated if it wasn’t for him, for what it’s work I owe him for that piece of paper. At the time we were both really into this Blur record, so it was on heavy rotation.

Song with the most startling lyric(s)

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – Loverman

I’ve listened to Let Love In countless times, it’s a brilliant record. Maybe the best from an artist with a catalog of bests. From one end to the next it is a tangled mess of raw emotion. There are moments of tenderness and extended periods of rage, anger and lust. As a whole, it’s hard to pick apart any moment as being more deranged than any other, however, I was driving home the other day and Loveman came on over the eternal shuffle and it hit me like a poison dagger.

It doesn’t hurt that Cave’s voice could make a Madonna song sound sinister, or that it comes after the record’s most gentle track, Nobody’s Baby Now, but the unfettered evil of Loverman stands even when stripped of context and voice. It’s easy to read the lyrics of this song like a ransom note; a threat of impending sexual aggression. Demons, monsters — the most troubling aspect is that this song is unrelentingly human.

Song that reminds you of someone special

Mississippi John Hurt – You are my Sunshine

My little sister took guitar lessons with Arthur Elliot; an old man she befriended in the Corning Dunkin’ Donuts. In an instant he became a part of our family. He died before she learned the one song he was trying to teach her, but she was really just taking the lessons as an excuse to be near him. There was a moment right before he died when all of us were together. He asked for his guitar with a voice so faint he could have been a ghost and weakly picked out a couple of verses of You are my Sunshine. My sister cried in his kitchen afterwards; he never got to play that song at my mother’s wedding.

For those of you who would prefer to listen to the mix in its entirety, here’s just the thing:

Follow Future Oak Records on Facebook and Twitter, and keep an eye on their website for news. You can find all of the entries so far in the Mystery Mini Mix series here, and be sure to check back next week for the next instalment.

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The album opens with ‘I (Isabelle)’, a short but intense vocal prologue, before ‘Addi’ unfolds, its twangy Americana sound and layered vocals threatening towards some crescendo that never quite arrives. Jessie Hoffman’s viola gives ‘Civil War Bride’ a quaint, wistful feel, telling of a grieving wife trying to place her loss within the legends of history, and ‘House & Home’ is similarly consumed by lost love, another trauma so great it came to define the narrator’s life. Here we find them asking questions into the dark, voicing small hopes and praying for mercy, taking refuge in things bigger than themselves.

“O’er the mountains out past the trees
where the grasslands, meet the sky
you’ll find me singin’ my songs
with my lover in my mind”

‘Wolves’ is a dark and slow-burning war song, violence creeping forward with an ominous energy like some far off thunderhead, like drums in the hills, while ‘Portraits’ is born of the kind of bright white hope only a desperate man could conjure, the threat of departure jolting words from his mouth. His goals are possibly more romantic and idealistic than practical, with even the character himself seeming unsure whether he’s pleading or praying or painting a picture of the past for prosperity’s sake. ‘Wake Up’ is probably the most uptempo track on the record, a song of sparkling kinship against the grey which skips along with gusto between the mournful chorus. The closing lines dream of company, of loyalty, of glorious connection to insulate against the dark. “If I hold your hand take a stand,” Manchester sings. “And we’ll both go down together.”

‘Signs’ tells of a love unacknowledged and unsure, a relationship loaded on one side and all too aware of time ticking by, while ‘Sleep’ is a delicate, heartbreaking track in which grief is tempered by imagined beauty and peace (“Sleep, my little one / Sleep ‘till the moon is done / And the ghosts up in the sky / they dance to all your baby cries”). Closer ‘Sway to Swing’ is another slow-burning epic, again sad and tender and full of sincere details. Here we find death approaching, as is its way, the characters reacting strongly, vibrantly, burning with life to spite the shadow.

“So hold strong
I’ll wade this river with you all night long
just to keep you (me) moving along
till we find the end of your song

They’re only some words
for a song that don’t know all the chords
but the harmonies
will carry you to the end”

The record closes out with the same powerful harmony with which it began, so that the end is in fact no end at all. Second time around ‘Addi’ feels miraculous rather than ominous, the fact that the crescendo never arrives rendered joyous. But even the songs set after the climax are imbued with a sense of wonder, every grieving thought still bemused and amazed that we are ever alive at all. The fact is, hypothetical baby Arlo and death-centric Aldo are really two ends of the same string, a cord which Manchester and Co. have spun into forms so complex you can no longer decipher where it begins and ends. Here every love story is a ghost story, every loss a concentration of life.

You can buy House & Home now from Future Oak Record Co., including a vinyl run limited to 300. As we stated in our preview, there’s a release show tomorrow (27th February) at Commonwealth Press Warehouse with special guests Mariage Blanc, a DJ set by tOTAL TRASH and on-site t-shirt printing. You can find all the details here,

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“O’er the mountains, Out past the trees
where the deer don’t dare to lie
You’ll find me, singin’ my own
soft, sweet, lullaby”

House & Home will be released by Future Oak Records on the 26th February. If you find yourself near Pittsburgh then the band are playing a release show at Commonwealth Press Warehouse on the 27th Feb. You can find all the details here, but it sounds like it will be an exciting night, an extravaganza of local creativity with special guests Mariage Blanc, a DJ set by tOTAL TRASH and on-site t-shirt printing.

The post Song Premiere: Arlo Aldo – House & Home appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The record opens with ‘Over Under’, a wistful folk song in the vein of Small Sur, summed up by the recurring line, “In New York, I’ll never be yours”. From here the album takes a country rock turn, with the title track’s Americana jangle. ‘Back Tonight’ and ‘Wandering’ are reminiscent of Hip Hatchet’s lovelorn folk-rock, while ‘Another Way To Go’ and ‘Oh, Still’ show off a moody, bluesy side with oodles of swagger and impressive guitar solos.

‘For You Enough (I’m Told)’ is another country rock song in the traditional sense of doomed love and tough goodbyes (“I was never good enough at saying goodbyes”) before ‘Dangerous to Know’ slows things down with a finger-picked opening and gentle country yearning. This leads well into ‘Anna’, my current favourite. A long, wide slow-burner in the style of the older Phosphorescent material, the song swells as guitar and various other instruments loop and swirl with the eight short lines of lyrics:

“I, if only
Anna, I would
Disguise your lonely
And lighten your burden

Even when you
Blew the last fuse
I held true
Burned in the white Monmouth blaze”

In December, Adeline Hotel also released a stand-alone single ‘Disarray’ (complete with a B-side cover of ‘Seven’ by Mt. Egypt). Simpler in arrangement than many of the album tracks, the single again shows that Knishkowy is equally adept at the sparse folk sound as he is with folk rock.

You can buy Leave The Lights and ‘Disarray’ now via the Adeline Hotel Bandcamp page. Future Oak Records have also put out some vinyl and you can grab them here.

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