Mike Rep and The Quotas - Stupor Hiatus

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Customer reviews
Press release

5...according to our Business Lady on Fri 18 Jun, 2010.

Man, i hate it when someone's entire career seems to have passed me by, especially when it's someone as crazy as lo-fi pioneer and mad ranty man Mike Rep. I know fuck all about this guy but he sounds like a genius. I guess he may have come to prominence for his production work with Guided By Voices, Strapping Fieldhands and Times New Viking but this guys been kicking it since way back when. Stupor Hiatus is a re-working/re-packaging of Siltbreeze's previous comp of Mike Rep stuff but improves on the artwork and audio quality to present a better overall product. Oh, and you get six previously unreleased tracks...Bonus. The music here dates from '74 to the early 90's and charts the rise of Mike Rep and with it the culture of ultra lo-fi home recording. Mike hits upon the basics of punk, pop and psychedelic rock and drops his own spin on it with pure style. Obvious influences are The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Kim Fowley, 13th Floor Elevators and a host of bands from the first wave of post punk as well the MC5 and The Stooges. Infact, the majority of this record sounds like the MC5 jamming hard in someone's basement recorded badly on one microphone....in the dark. Totally awesome and full of boozy, drugged out Ohio humour. A treat for you lo-fi hoarders.

LP INCLUDES FREE DOWNLOAD COUPON!!! Stupor Hiatus culls the complete recorded works of the original Mike Rep and the Quotas, dating back to 1974 and moving forward into the early 1990s. Essentially a reworking of the Stupor Hiatus Vol. 2 LP released by Siltbreeze in 1992 (minus the questionable original artwork and mysterious French-language insert), this definitive collection is that record in its entirety plus six additional tracks, four of which have never before been released.
This double-LP includes the legendary "Rocket to Nowhere," a lovely instrumental interpretation of the 13th Floor Elevators' "She Lives in a Time of Her Own," a cover of Roky Erickson's "Creature with the Atom Brain," a shout-out to the Strapping Fieldhands ("In the Pineys") and fifteen other immortal tracks. Those who already know, know. But if you're only familiar with the name Mike Rep as a producer for such acts as Guided By Voices, Strapping Fieldhands and Times New Viking, here's your chance to get caught up with a back catalog of extraordinary capacity. Before there were peckerwoods buzzing about lo-fi, Mike Rep--fed by a love for B-grade horror flicks, (the aforementioned) 13 Floor Elevators, Velvet Undergound, Kim Fowley and (blech!) The Doors--was concocting a mash of home-recorded punk, pop and psychedelia for a few fortunate ears. This isn't the Sunset Strip or Lower East Side, folks, it's Grove City, Ohio, a scene ruled by codeine, cannabis and Carling. So be prepared to hunker down with a fuzzy, furry and fried collection of 20-plus years of sound from the vaults of one of America's most important legends in the flesh. The Creeping Flesh, that is.

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