pure sound - yukon press

pure sound yukon home press radio

What they're saying about Yukon across Europe:

BBC Radio 3 Mixing It (UK): ‘A distinctive English voice. I like what they've done throughout.'

Rockerilla (Italy): 'The sound of history, which sometimes seem to have no head or tail.'

Rumore (Italy): 'Solemn audio passages and ingenuous sounds, with echoes of Old America.'

Octopus (France): 'A quite beautiful mental journey of great spaces, made magic and mystic, which offers to the listener a meditative incursion in a musical territory similar to the vastness of the large plains.'

Luneberg Town Guide (Germany): 'Poems come poured like the sun as gold over the mountains.'

Vital Weekly (Holland): '...evokes a mid-western US prairie feeling of lonesomeness and tranquility. Quite nice indeed.'

Gaz Eta (Poland): Yukon is a first in a series of albums that has a goal of exploring music, words, noise and atmospherics [Acts of New Noise and Submarine are up next.] Hunt takes the listener on a journey through poetry of the Goldrush era, Texan prisoners and other events along the backwoods. All of this is accompanied with Hunt's self-serving bass playing, various tapes, de-tuned guitars and his own vocals. Texas prison songs are revived on "Happy Birthday from Texas", which features source materials recorded by John and Alan Lomax back in 1933.

A couple of Canadian poems by Robert Service are read throughout the record - "The Legend of Sam Magee" and "The Men Who Don't Fit In". The latter is more or less a straight reading taken from an old record, while the former is an eight minute trek through the cold tundra, full of tape loops, sampled crackles of an old vinyl and howling winds. I've never heard a better, more life-like presentation of this classic poem [that all of us were forced to read over and over back in grade school].

In between the poems and life-changing audio samples, Hunt goes out and explores his ideas of what Yukon would've sounded like around the Goldrush era. Evidence of freight trains, rattling chains and various voices are heard throughout. His take on a freight train on "Square Thing" - where his guitar appropriates the sound of train wheels hitting the steel track - is absolutely stunning. Fantastic audio document from beginning to end. - Tom Sekowski

Bad Alchemy (Germany): An unusual trip into the Wild West by two veterans of the English Manchester alternative scene. Vince Hunt played bass with A Witness: Harry Stafford was front man with the Inca Babies in Manchester. Their musical journey through words, noise, people and atmosphere generates a nostalgia of a completely unexpected kind – the adventures of the Gold Rush: "A sudden rush/A rush of blood, to the head. There's gold." From the Wilderness they send curses ("and you may drop dead") or birthday greetings ("The sky is not big enough to hold the kisses/ for your lips").

In addition there are spoken word versions of the Robert Service poems 'The Men Who Don't Fit In' and 'The Legend of Sam Magee' - known to every school child in Canada. Underline the spirit of the west and of hard times still with samples of John Lomax's 1933 Texas field recordings of prisoners and you're getting there, but that's only one aspect. Add the sounds of tape samples, organ drones, de-tuned guitar, Stafford on backwards vinyl and sonic slide guitar and the specialist howling rushing noise guitar of Colin Grimshaw and this is beyond being bound to the West and the Old Times.