27 March 2008

Three Cherries


SIN ROPAS

Tim Hurley: vocals, guitars, accordian, trumpet, korg, keyboards, assorted manipulations
Danni Iosello: drums, percussion, howlings, organ, korg, harmonium, rocks, jangles.

Look down when you meet Tim Hurley and you'll see him wearing his worked-in black leather shoes-all cracked at the seams and screwed together at the heel. He'll sway over you silently, commentlessly noticing them too, but never replacing them, only just adding things to the integral structure to keep them working, and to him, favorite. It's fitting then that Hurley met up with Danni Iosello over years of multi-band playing. She too had grammer-school-loved shoes, duct-taped and straps-stapled to the walk-worn heels.

Sin Ropas' music is like this also: substantial bits of essential form, the gaps and cracks filled, but never quite covered, with new, and necessarily-changing materials. This might explain why Sin Ropas' records are featured on Top 10 Alt-Country lists at the same time as they appear on "Best of Rock" lists and psychedelic music websites. Elements of all music are there, lovingly, if not permanently, stitched-together fragments that slip on and cross each other. Sin Ropas' first CD, Three Cherries (Perishable Records 2000) was received in this way:

"It's easy to imagine each of this records' eight juggernauts as a deconstructed and slightly decayed version of a conventional pop song, falling apart at the seams and unraveled at both ends...If this sounds to you like words of highest praise, you heard right" [Puncture].

"Three Cherries is unique in that it sounds both old-fashioned (in a sittin' on the porch watching the dust bowl fill itself to the brim kind of way) and new-fangled (all the parts that sound like snake charmers playing plastic horns while on mesculine) all at once" [Faster Than Sheep].

After releasing Three Cherries, Sin Ropas moved to the former-East Germany. This presented them with new bits and scraps to paste on, finally recording their second CD "Trickboxes on the Pony Line" (Sad Robot Records 2003, Konkurrent Records 2004) mostly in their apartment and The Lone Star Studio in Germany. This new CD was different, of course, from the first one: living on the raw Baltic coast changes your stamina and color, Trickboxes being heartier somehow, but still amorphous and sinewy.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/gkllxh