"Grannykart’s Own Thing" is the debut album by Studio City, California electronic musician Grannykart.
Founding member Jody Beth Rosen (sound design, synthesizers, voice) had once joked that she was ready to create her "early Cabaret Voltaire meets the BBC Radiophonic Workshop" record. Before long, she found herself making that record, with the help of esteemed guitarist Andre LaFosse. Jody does not necessarily consider "Grannykart’s Own Thing" post-rock or electronic dance — beats are scarce here — but it shares reference points with many such artists, especially influences along the spectrum of progressive rock, musique concrète, drone, gamelan, Japanese noise, and 20th century analog-synthesizer pioneers.
Grannykart is willing but slightly reticent to use the overused "experimental" signifier, although she sees it as positive and non-oppositional: "My goal was to make these often ugly sounds musical and somewhat consonant, and that's her part of the ongoing experiment of this bigger art form I'm part of. It helps my case that I wasn't going for absolute authenticity—I can't afford a vintage VCS 3, but these days you can oscillate your heart out on a shoestring budget." She takes inspiration from an old Desperate Bicycles lyric that seems especially resonant today: "It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it."
Andre LaFosse - mastering, additional production, guitars on "Minor Antarctic Island" and "The Equalizer"
Source material for Grannykart’s Own Thing includes portions of Billy Murray’s “Which switch is the switch, Miss, for Ipswich?” (Public Domain), files from the website Free Samples and Loops (available under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License), train whistle samples from the Horns Inc. site, and material from the Philharmonia Orchestra (The Sound Exchange) site’s free sample library.
Cover Art: “At The Hospice of the Great St. Bernard” and “Canine Help for Holland’s Pretty Milkmaids” (both licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 3.0 United States License).
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