The Trip and the High-Water Mark of ‘67
- Dominic Pillai
DAIISTAR — Fuzz Club Session LP Review
DAIISTAR — Fuzz Club Session LP Review
DAIISTAR: Fuzz Club Sessions #21
Historically, lightships were engineless vessels towed out to hazardous shoals, reefs or sandbars and anchored there for years to provide a beacon for larger ships to navigate safely through dangerous waters. Unwavering crew members served lengthy tours aboard these vessels for months at a time. Very dark, very quiet, and very lonely. Probably very boring! Lightship 95 was once anchored at Goodwin Sands off the coast of Kent in England up until 2003. This treacherous region saw its share of shipwrecks- around 2000! But Lightship 95 has since found its new home. It’s now docked at Trinity Buoy Wharf along the Thames in London. Purchased in privately in 2008, the ship was purchased to become the home to Soup Studios. It was reconfigured and outfitted with top of the line sound isolation, echo chambers and a Nieve console.
Lightship 95 now operates “independently” of Soup Studios. More recently, this unique studio has hosted numerous music outfits aboard to record and participate in the studio’s featured Fuzz Club Sessions! For this out of commission vessel, this is a far cry from that lonely old sandbar!
Austin-based DAIISTAR took time to record their very own Fuzz Club Session at Lightship 95 in September of last year while in London. They had been busy touring North America and Europe opening for big-name neo-psychedelic shoegazer outfits (Dandy Warhol, Brian Jonestown Massacre but probably on separate occasions, because don’t they all dislike each other?) It is certain they were in ripened condition to record amidst a grand tour.
DAIISTAR has that MadChester sound well plotted out. However, their BPMs tend to surpass those of The Verve and Primal Scream. DAIISTAR’s live performance is tight. It’s dynamic. It’s fast-paced. This was exemplified in their KEXP appearance last year. You see each member working hard in their respective corners running on all pistons. They’re a well-oiled machine, or just name another industrial or mechanical image that denotes sweat and hard work. Watching this, you’re stepping onto their careening technicolor train. You won’t be able to get off, but you’ll just know to trust the journey. With a band like DAIISTAR, you can easily envision them performing on the UK’s Channel 4 outrageous program The Word! If you want this sensation of careening about through chroma key duo-tones and volcanic b-roll film, then stand-by for transmission of their Fuzz Club Session LP, which drops today.
DAIISTAR
The album features DAIISTAR heavy hitters like ‘Tracemaker’, ‘Parallel’, and ‘Repeater’ from their 2023 album Good Time. You can also catch a preview of their Fuzz Club Sessions’ live recording of Good Times’ opener ‘Star Starter’ which is most definitely what put the image of a swerving bullet train in my head! Vocalist and guitarist Alex Capistran sports dark glasses and drives a seemingly rare yellow Fender custom looking Journeyman “wammy-caster”! (Don’t quote me on that if you decide to look for one on Reverb, please). Nick Cornetti keeps the high-speed tempo steady on the rails. Derek Strahan provides the warmth and insulates the tracks with Moogtastic Mellotronic padding. Bassist Misti Hamrick maintains the ballast with her uptempo thrumming.
There is a fifth member exuberantly playing percussion. In the video (shot by Sergio Angot and Barry Hoffman), the band doesn’t have to look at each other. Moreover, they take their music cues osmatically from the psychedelic molecular atmosphere that they have created, only they are locked into and it is all kept safely intact within the walls of the old lightship.
Lightship 95 studio control room
Today, September 26th, is the big day for the release of DAIISTAR’s Fuzzclub Sessions LP. You can order it on vinyl at Fuzz Club’s website https://fuzzclub.com/products/daiistar-fuzz-club-session , with vinyl and digital download also available on Bandcamp.
Incidentally, they are #21 in a long line of other wildly talented acts who have recorded in this docked lightship. DAIISTAR’s session will surely keep you afloat if you feel like existing ten feet off the ground!
(Sidebar: shout out to my pal DJ Sue, another Austin-based institution – she used to host the wildest psychedelic freakout dance parties at various bars around town when I lived there in the 90s. She continues to spin licorice pizzas at various iterations of her Fuzz Club. If you haven’t met already, I hope you all unite one day on a paisley-laden molecular A-TEX plane. DAIISTAR meet DJ Sue! DJ Sue, meet DAIISTAR.)
– Riffindots
DAIISTAR
If you find yourself across the pond, don’t miss out on any of these tour dates:
Oct 15 – London – The Shacklewell Arms
Oct 17 – Blackpool – Bootleg Social
Oct 18 – Bristol – Down Stokes Fest
Oct 19 – Brighton – The Prince Albert
Oct 21 – Nantes – Feu
Oct 22 – Bordeaux – La Maison Allez Les Filles
Oct 23 – Zaragoza – Lata de Bombillas
Oct 26 – Barcelona – Sala Upload
Oct 28 – Toulouse – Le Labo Des Arts
Oct 29 – Bourges – Le Nadir
Oct 31 – Paris – Supersonic
Nov 1 – Le Havre – Piednu
Nov 5 – Glasgow – The Old Hairdresser’s
Nov 6 – Edinburgh – Sneaky Pete’s
Nov 7 – Manchester – Yes (Pink Room)
DAIISTAR official website: https://www.daiistar.com
DAIISTAR Fuzz Club Sessions on YouTube
Riffindots is Britta Pejic. Britta is a musician. Songwriter. Artist. Foreign Language Teacher. Grew up in Maine. Lived in France (The Basque Country). Now back in New England. Enjoys getting lost. Makes a lot of songs at home, puts them into a canister, then into a hatch and then through her own pneumatic tube system under the Atlantic. The songs are vacuumed out the other end, dusted off and polished by Console Lole, her loyal sound engineer back in Basque Country. It’s a system that works well for her. Follow @riffindots for cartoonish fun and visual mayhem or simply enjoy her music at https://brittapejic.bandcamp.com
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