J.D. Hangover

Dealing with the comedown following the recording and touring of Stiv Cantarelli & The Silent Strangers’ Banks Of The Lea, Stiv and Roberto Villa followed different paths. Roberto, he built by scratch L’Amor Mio Non Muore, an all analogue studio in his Italian hometown. Stiv, he sat in a room with an old friend, his ’72 Roland TR77 electronic drummer and a 4-track cassette recorder, playing music, listening to Alan Vega and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Realising each had something the other could use, they got to talking…

«We wanted to recreate the same atmosphere of being in one room with all the gear and play live. So we put a 50s RCA microphone in between us and the tube amps that we used to amplify the instruments and the drum machine. That mic recorded the reverbs, the noises, the sights, the moving feet, the crackling chairs in the room. We mixed it with guitar feedback, tape delay and the organ fuzz tone. We played it back and we knew we’d nailed it.»

After a string of floorshakin’ gigs across Europe and the UK with such likeminded souls as Boss Hog, The Scientists, PIL and Alejandro Escovedo, they blipped on the radar of Hound Gawd! Records. The upshot of all this is that the «J.D. Hangover EP» will now be available on good hard honest vinyl, how it was meant to be heard. And that’s the truth.