Artist.......: Hugo Race + True Spirit
Album........: Taoist Priests
Label........: GLitterhouse
Genre........: Blues
Catnr........: n/a
source.......: CDDA
rip.date.....: Feb-22-2006
str.date.....: 000-00-0000
quality......: VBR/44,1Hz/Joint-Stereo
Url..........: n/a
track title time
01. Taoist Priest 05:33
02. Ready to Go 04:48
03. I Know You 04:14
04. On the Bright Side 03:30
05. Into the Void 04:00
06. Unknown 04 03:19
07. Beyond Babylon 04:26
08. Cold Mother 05:40
09. Don't Mess Around 04:44
10. Walker 04:55
11. Daytura 06:28
12. Pray On / [silence] 07:49
13. [untitled] 02:32
Runtime 61:58 min
Size 81,8 MB
Release Notes:
In the last 3 years Hugo Race has released a stream
of albums: the urban dreamscapes of the True
SpiritÆs "Goldstreet Sessions": the elegant
trip-pop of Sepiatone's "Dark Summer": the ambient
soundtrack-style noise psychedelia of TransfargoÆs
"Mil Transit": the Italian montage of "Merola
Matrix": the raw cosmic blues of the SpiritÆs
"Ambuscado": and the live garage rock of the
SpiritÆs "Live in Monaco".
Hugo explains in an interview during the Australian
Ambuscado Tour, Brisbane, December 2005:
ôFor me, those six albums have been a journey of
exploration through my creative psyche where I've
let tangents unfold and the music thatÆs in me
emerge without judgement or self-consciousness. In
a way, all this has been leading up to the new
studio album from myself and the True Spirit,
ôTAOIST PRIESTö. ItÆs pretty much a songwriting
album with the emphasis on the lyrics and voices,
but weÆve combined this classical approach with the
kind of soundtrack-style abstraction we focussed on
for the ôAmbuscadoö record. In a way, all the
sounds and moods of the previous six albums have
been fused into one total vision that is a kind of
multi-layered self-portrait. I had to deconstruct
everything to find out what I'm about and how far
this band can go with it. Here I'm dealing with my
own demons and also with the demons unleashed in
our epoch. The album has a beautiful lush sound
that aims to seduce, which is good because as a
concept, ôTaoist Priestsö is all about what it
means living and loving in a world poised on the
edge of self-destruction, and this political
background to it is even more present than on
ôGoldstreet Sessionsö.
Its difficult to write anything today without
including the devastating changes this planet is
going through because everything we know and do is
conditioned by a global awareness. So Taoist
Priests explores this concept without mincing words
because we all have to stare down the enemy within.
And its about rock music, feeling how good that
stuff is when you really mean what you play on a
gut level. Theres too many records today with no
soul and just a lot of heavy marketing. What I
wanted to do with Taoist Priests was write an album
thatÆs totally about content, about having
something to say then setting it in a context of
music that not only entertains but challenges and
disturbs, and does all that with a lot of love.
Because none of us have infinite time left, and to
me the music is tremendously important as
communication and as a bond between us. We called
this project the True Spirit because I believe in
the spiritual power of music as a way to uplift and
empower, not only as a form of light entertainment.
WeÆll be touring in Europe on and off from March
until June with the core True Spirit line-up of
Chris Hughes, Michelangelo Russo, Marta Collica and
Giovani Ferrario. Looking forward to it.ô
A prolific and visionary artist, originally from
Melbourne, singer/guitarist, producer, performer
and songwriter Hugo Race was introduced to the
international stage as a teenage founding member
and powerful transient element of Nick CaveÆs Bad
Seeds (1983) - (he appears on six cds of the SeedÆs
catalogue ). He left that band to found the
Wreckery (1985), who went on to become one of
AustraliaÆs seminal garage-blues cult bands of the
æ80s, releasing with the White, Rampant and Citadel
labels.
In 1988 Normal Records, Germany, released the final
Wreckery album, Laying Down Law. In early 1989 Hugo
moved base to Berlin and Normal released his debut
solo album, Rue Morgue Blues. For the following ten
years Hugo released a series of albums with his
musical collective True Spirit, a period recounted
in the Long Time Ago Double-CD retrospective,
released in 2001 by Glitterhouse Records, Germany,
with whom Race has been working since 1995.
Both alone with a guitar or with his True Spirit,
Hugo has toured Europe repeatedly, performing on a
vast trajectory from the UK to Greece and was
literally one of the first western ôundergroundö
acts performing inside the ex- Eastern Bloc
European territories after the fall of the Berlin
Wall. He has followed a personal musical vision in
a series of mutating line-ups that have fused the
boundaries between the "primal" (roots) blues and
raw electronica - described by London Sounds as
"night music of the soul", and by Melody Maker as
"industrial-trance-blues".
However, critics and fans of Hugo and his True
Spirit have always been forced to go beyond these
limited definitions to describe the nature of his
music: rock, psychedelia, industrial, experimental
or simply eclectic. In reality, each new chapter in
the story has only added to the confusion regarding
how to catalogue Hugo and True Spirit, the result
being that Hugo is perceived as a cult figure,
unpredictable, brilliant and inspired û with a
music that is real, honest and perfectly realised.