Containing the best elements of Rock, vintage Americana and electronic cut and paste sonic pastiches, "i need you.", ill lit's second full length release on Badman, finds songwriter D. Ahearn continuing to explore the borders of country, pop and electronic music. Forging forward from the lo-fi junkyard electronics of ill lit's debut WACMusic, i need you. takes musical detours in every direction.
Combining infectious keyboard riffs, 808 beats and a lachrymose acoustic finger picking style, ill lit tap into an edgy, dark layer of earth just beneath the freeways of an urban, beat-driven Los Angeles.
Joined by a diverse cast of musicians from the LA, San Francisco and Brooklyn music scenes, ill lit construct harrowing, pop songs with concern for sound rather than style. Full of beauty, obsession and regret, i need you.. is above all a meditation on Los Angeles, a place of wonder, dread, love, death, and finally hope.
"ill lit gives us songs that are elegies of American lostness, road music for a new breed of pioneers. Any person who is no longer young, and not yet old: rootless human beings of scattered family, no land, and only a home away from no-home. Who are nonetheless burdened with lustful urges to build something, somewhere; to say something, to someone: to call out of the ruins of all this glorious fucked-up American freedom we own." -Sound Collector
i need you. was co-produced by Dylan Magierek (Mark Kozelek, Erlend Oye, Call and Response), Michael Rozon and ill lit in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
ill lit played Noise Pop 2003, headlined Badman's 2003 CMJ showcase and have shared stages with Josh Rouse, Young People, Clem Snide, and Lou Barlow.
The ill lit story:
ill lit
One night during the summer of 1997, Daniel, Jens and I sat on a porch in Los Angeles and talked about starting a collective. We wanted to pull together the efforts and energies of the artists and writers we were surrounded by at the time. I said, "We are country music," and it stuck. That summer we started by making a film called Stars about death and the communication that follows.
Jens and I made more films, including one Jens and Daniel conceived of, called Dos Caballeros, a mock-Western, slapstick revision of Don Quixote on lowrider bikes, complete with fake mustaches and coffee-sack ponchos. Over the next few years, Daniel and I carried on an evolving dialogue through the poems and typings we exchanged as we drove back and forth, every six months or so between LA and New York.
Jens and Daniel, who first met in elementary school, started making music together in college. They continued to do so through many relocations from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, Bronxville, Prague and San Pedro, which is it's own separate state of grace and bewilderment. Jens composed lo-fi, abstract song structures using borrowed instruments, a junkbox full of effects, and an old 8 track, and Daniel sang, twisting in samples and cut-up pieces of documentary field recordings and microcassetted conversations.
In 2000, Jens and Daniel found an independent record label in New York that was interested in putting out a collection of their songs (recorded with the inflexibly brilliant Travis Petterson of Moog and Cherubino). The label, Scientific Records, released Early Mourning, under the band name Burakumin. It was a gorgeous, unique, and critically acclaimed group of songs, deeply personal and aesthetically ambitious. After a successful debut show at a dance club in the meat packing district of New York, and a couple of ill-fated attempts at putting together a touring band, Jens left Burakumin to play drums with New York instrumental-rock wonders The Big Sleep. Daniel retreated to his basement.
In the following months, me and my bride-to-be moved from California back to Brooklyn, where everyone else in the world seemed to be living. With the help of several new friends and a couple old ones, Jens and I started an art and literary journal called The Like, which folded after only one issue. Jens decided it was time for a change, so he quit his job and moved to Peru. I went to work in the studio of New York artist George Condo.
Daniel was selling fruit in the farmer's markets around New York City and fell in with a whole hidden scene of Brooklyn musicians employed by Rich Rossmassler of Red Jacket Orchards. Daniel began writing and recording songs in Rich's home studio, Hermit Port. That was when the idea of ill lit first started to take shape, the name taken from a book of poetry by Franz Wright.
Over the next 2 and a half years Daniel had the honor of playing with a long list of wonderful people, most notably Melanie Mosher. When they met, she was singing and playing guitar with the Brooklyn country-rock band Crazee and Heaven, but in 2001 the two of them moved to Los Angeles and began working with Badman Recording Co. After recording several songs in San Francisco with Badman's Dylan Magierek, they put together an album incorporating some of the old recordings from Brooklyn and released it under the name WACMusic, an explicit shout out and throwback to that summer night on the porch in 1997.
The sound still contained elements of Burakumin's deconstructed, junkyard sonics, but the heart of the band was pure country. They played shows around LA, assisted by Julie Fowells (The Geraldine Fibbers) and her husband Bernard Elsnere (Double Horizontal).
In September of 2002, Daniel pulled together a band to tour in support of WACMusic, which included photographer Shane Carpenter on drums, and myself (recently-returned-from-New York) on bass. We toured the US extensively and returned to LA ready to take the next step, whatever that turned out to be. At this point, Melanie and Daniel parted ways, and Shane moved back to Seattle to be with his girl. Daniel and I reformed the group, and continued playing around LA, calling in local friends to fill out the sound for recordings and shows. In the spring of 2003, Jens returned from Peru and ill lit became what it is now.
The roundabout way we formed the band took over 5 years and is a testament to the strength of the love the three of us share for each other. It's still "We are country music." Even if it has nothing to do with country music, per se, it's about simple and sincere attempt to create new American narratives through song. It doesn't get more country than that.
Read more...