Tipsy

Combining two trendy musical forms that would seem to resist collaboration, Tipsy released the ultimate party album in 1997. Trip Tease uses kitschy space-age bachelor pad music as its source and cuts and splices these sonic oddities together in intricate and inventive ways, using up-to-the-minute trip hop studio techniques. The results, which could very easily be only academically interesting, are surprisingly smooth and effective.

Tipsy (brilliant name) is a collaborative project between two San Francisco noise artists. Being cutting edge in a number of ways, San Francisco has a vibrant experimental music scene, with much important and interesting (and unlistenable) work released on local label Asphodel (it is worth noting that Asphodel, besides being a plant, is also the rough Greek equivalent to limbo – bad souls went to Tartarus, where they were punished, good souls went to the Elysium Fields, where they were rewarded (not the LA nudist colony, there your rewards are of a considerably more earthy nature), and the vast majority of mediocre souls (i.e. you and me) spent their eternity in Asphodel Fields, where they were neither punished nor rewarded, sort of like living in Bakersfield). Tim Digulla and David Gardner met each other through their interest in and performances at bay-area experimental noise events and thought it might be swell to do something with their other interest, the old lounge-era thrift store recordings, which were enjoying a boom of popularity amongst the hip/ironic set.

Taking bits and pieces of these recordings and combining them together in unusual ways yields a stunning set of pieces that are all over the mood map and celebrate both the kitschy ‘50s and ‘60s and the post-modern ‘90s at the same time, without taking anything away from either camp. So smooth are their edits and juxtapositions that it almost seems like the music was originally recorded that way, although that would certainly be impossible. “Biting” a sample or two to use as a basic track is fairly easy, but gathering hundreds of samples and pushing and pulling them together in such a seamless way is something else entirely, and takes quite a bit of skill and imagination. The only record I’ve heard that comes close to this level of seamless integration of wildly disparate sources is the first Beats International album (Let Them Eat Bingo), which is what Norman Cook was after he left The Housemartins and before he became Fatboy Slim.

Trip Tease (another brilliant name), is joyful and bouncy – perfect for cocktail parties – but there’s something slightly sinister about it. I leant it to a born-again Christian raver friend of mine (an unusual combination, if ever there was one) and he handed it back the next morning saying it was great and he never wanted to hear it again – that it was far too evil. It’s the kind of music, he opined, that they’d play at a mixer in hell, and he wanted nothing to do with it.

Like Norman Cook’s Beats International, Tipsy was unable to sustain that level of intense sampladelic fusion, and, in both cases, their second album (Beats International’s Excursion on the Version and Tipsy’s Uh-Oh) utilizes a far looser weave and sprinkles their samples about in a much sparser, more traditional manner. Beats International fell apart after that album, and Tipsy’s been quiet since Uh-Oh, so that may have been it for them as well. And, true, as an aesthetic, it would be hard to produce a large body of work using just interwoven lounge samples, and Trip Tease is such a delightful collection of odd and endearing collages and so brilliantly created that it becomes both the first and last word in that style. Anybody who would be inspired by their techniques would probably also throw the towel in immediately, painfully aware that Tipsy’s model could not be improved upon. Is it fun? Indubitably. Is it evil? Who cares? Pour me a highball, Beelzebub, and let’s get this party started!