Maara
Drama On

Seance Centre: ...Plus or Minus Two compiles 4 songs from Kansas City wave pioneers Short-Term Memory’s first cassette album, Every Head Needs Cleaning, with with a song each from their last cassette release Cinema Mind, and their digital retrospective, Flub Dub and Other Love Songs. This EP focuses on the group’s prescient dance-floor DIN-sync workouts which share sensibilities with contemporaneous early Detroit experiments by Juan Atkin’s Cybotron, Ron Hardy’s visionary Kikrokos tape edit, Shoc Corridor’s extended 808 exercises, and 90s Techno Pop by Haruomi Hosono. Rounding off the EP is the existential electronic soul ballad Words. Remastered from the original reels, 45rpm DMM pressing. Kansas City, 1983: a band formed, wires connected and synapses fired. Three friends, tired of guitar/bass/drums rock started jamming with newly acquired synths and Roland TR 606. They called themselves Short-Term Memory. Thanks to the vanguard technology of the time, these electronic instruments spoke to each other, and Jim Skeel, Kevin Dooley & Jon Paul could program their instruments and ride the DIN-sync wave. Weekly jams became more ambitious, and in 1983 they released their first album Every Head Needs Cleaning on their own Silly Poodle Music label. Over the 80s members drifted in and out of the group, and they released 2 cassettes, an LP and a 7” EP. By the 90s Jim Skeel was at the helm, the only original member, and joined by Tim Higgins he continued to record in MIDI mode for a few years before pulling the plug, leaving recordings and memories that resisted the great fade-out of time, and today sound vibrant and more visionary than ever.

Efficient Space: ...For the first time since its inception 36 years ago, Steve Hiett’s elusive 'Down On The Road By The Beach' is finally made available outside of Japan. Most recognized in the fashion sphere as an English photographer and graphic designer, Hiett's transportive audio portraits amplify his serpentine guitar to the infinite blue, recorded across Paris, Tokyo and New York with no coastline in sight. Now widely celebrated as a desert island disc, very little is actually known of its unfathomable genesis.Produced in coordination between Be With, Efficient Space and the artist, this definitive reissue is restored from original masters with vivid reproductions of the 'Down On The Road By The Beach' exhibition catalogue, intended to accompany its original release, and extensive liner notes penned by fellow Steve Hiett obsessive Mikey IQ Jones.