HUGO RACE - PRESS

HUGO RACE - PRESS


www.helixed.net
www.myspace.com/hugorace
www.myspace.com/hugoraceandthetruespirit



Hugo Race: 53rd State - Michael Tolland in The Big Takeover – Texas, USA 2009
http://www.bigtakeover.com/reviews/hugo-race-true-spirit-53rd-state-spookyhelixed

“Though probably best know to Yanks as a Nick Cave associate (especially in the Bad Seeds’ early days), Australia-to-Europe transplant HUGO RACE has issued a steady stream of his own records for two decades, both on his own (often joined by his backing band TRUE SPIRIT) and with his former group the WRECKERY. 53rd State is Race’s 16th solo album, and it’s a damned good one. Race lets his smoky, Mark Lanegan-like baritone slide across brooding tracks that draw elements from the blues, country & western, jazz balladry, minimalist soundtrack music and electronic weirdness like a sidewinder skimming the desert sand. There’s a menace underwriting the moody romanticism, making tunes like the atmospheric “Coming Clean,” the stomping “Girl Called Sunset” and even the desire-soaked “Sorcery” enigmatic and unsettling, yet almost irresistibly attractive and appealing, like a knife wrapped in silk. It’s no perfectly appropriate that the band and guest vocalist Violetta Del Conte Race cover the dark LEE HAZLEWOOD mini-masterpiece “Sand.” “I love to see you smile,” Race asserts in the loping “When Midnight Comes,” but it sounds as much like a threat as a promise. By the time of the floating “Sodium Rum” and the clanging “Mystery World,” the music becomes downright ghostly. The closing “I Wonder” features a skeletal guitar/trumpet track over which Larry Walsh mutters like a late night call-in radio show host with dead phone lines. It’s the perfect dissolute ending to an emotional rollercoaster of a record. Brilliant work, this.”




BETWEEN HEMISPHERES

In 2009, Hugo released a solo album, ‘Between Hemispheres’, for the Polish electronica label Gusstaff Records (distributed by Baked Goods, UK).

UNCUT (UK) January 2010, 4 stars
Hugo Race: Between Hemispheres

Remarkable ambient excursion from ex-Bad Seed.

This is the culmination of a long and strange journey for Race, who started musical life in the Melbourne post-punk scene. This entirely instrumental album is at once pan-global in its influence, using African instruments like the ngoni, while also reflecting the duality of both sides of the brain – hence the punning title. What’s so arresting about Between Hemispheres is its physicality. The ambience reminds of Eno and Harold Budd but elements of distortion suggest a man not afraid to get his shoes dirty. There’s a soiled intensity about this album – both sweeping beauty and true grit.
- David Stubbs


DE:BUG ELEKTRONISCHE LEBENSASPEKTE (Germany)
http://de-bug.de/reviews/38882.html

Hugo Race - Between Hemispheres (Gusstaff / GRAM0905)

The Australian Hugo Race, with Berlin, Prague and Italy in his history, is ultimately a Blues Man. But – and this makes it relevant for this review – he has always experimented with electronics, ambient sound, psychedelics and the oblique. So, whereas morbid bohemians like Cave, Howard, Johnson and Harvey at the end of the day remain underground with their swamp blues guitars, Race – and his main project the True Spirit – is always one step further ahead. Acid sounds and above all loops and samples have always made the True Spirit albums exciting listening. And now comes this third instrumental album (Between Hemispheres), following “Wet Dream” and “Ambuscado” (mailorder releases only on Glitterhouse Records). Here, the guitar and the blues are barely heard, Race’s dark voice is also removed, and surprisingly African instruments resound (kora, ngone). What’s left behind is Ry Cooder, Giant Sand and Calexico in a very dark space.
- cj


DIRTMUSIC – ‘BKO’

In 2010, Hugo’s parallel project Dirtmusic - with US artists Chris Eckman and Christopher Brokaw- will release ‘BKO’, the album they recorded with Tuareg band Tamikrest, in Mali, Africa.

Dirtmusic and Tamikrest will tour Europe together May-August 2010

(BKO release date 19th April 2010 on Glitterhouse)

www.myspace.com/dirtmusicband




Debaser, Italy, 2005
“Urban dreamscapes… elegant trip-hop… ambient noise psychedelia… raw cosmic blues… live garage rock… cinematic melancholia, new wave nostalgia, essential songwriting, post-rock minimalism…” – all these descriptions have been applied to Hugo’s work, best summarised as:
“Hugo Race is a psychedelic prophet, a 360 degree artist who makes compromises with nobody.”

KGB, Germany
“Both alone with a guitar or with his True Spirit, Hugo has toured Europe repeatedly, performing on a vast trajectory from the UK to Greece and was literally one of the first western “underground” acts performing inside the ex- eastern bloc European territories after the fall of the Wall. He has followed a personal musical vision in a series of mutating line-ups that have fused the boundaries between the "primal" (roots) blues and raw electronica - described by London Sounds as "night music of the soul", and by Melody Maker as "industrial-trance-blues". “
- Ludger Kord

Mucchio Selvaggi
“The stripped to the bone sound of the True Spirit exercises a fascination not exactly reassuring, yet magnetic in its evocation of obscure dangers. Music from the wild side of the street – or better, like walking blind in a war-zone…” - Gianluca Testani

MAG Australia
“Hugo Race remains one of the great unsung talents of Australian music, and with ‘The Gold Street Sessions’, the leathery old wolf of the nightmare psycho blues returns… The Gold Street Sessions requires a darkened room and an open bottle. Doubt not – this is a dangerous little record from a songwriter who is only ever the real deal”
- Jonathon Alley

Mescalina, Italy 2005
“With “Dark Summer”, the sublime Sepiatone render another of the innumerable blues mutations already lovingly explored by Race in the arc of his hyperactive discography, deepened by fragile evocations emanting from a couple in extreme symbiosis, traversing a long dark night full of phantoms and desires… that only the charismatic mind of Hugo Race could have invented.”
- Andrea Salvi

THE WIRE, London, UK, September 2005
BY KEITH MOLINé
Of all the musicians to have emerged from Nick Cave’s orbit in the mid-1980s, Hugo Race is perhaps the most overlooked. While his former boss has steadily retreated from the experimental manoeuvres that made his first few albums so arresting, Race has developed a highly original hybrid of raw blues and improvised electronica far removed from the Triffids/Moodists-style Australian Gothic that might be expected.
Ambuscado is the only one of these current albums that bears any obvious trace of Race’s previous history as a Bad Seed… Race’s haunted arrangements make him sound as if he’s literally looking lost in the song, stumbling around blindly looking for a way out, or at least safe passage through. Elsewhere it’s adventurously loose and full of rich, slow-burning incident.
With Race now based in southern Italy, these other two albums bear the mark of his new cultural surroundings and see him forging fruitful relationships with local musicians. The Merola Matrix is an evocative collage of loops drawn from tapes of 70s Neapolitan crooner Mario Merola, mixed with field recordings, electronics and live processing.
Dark Summer, a collaboration with vocalist Marta Collica, is a collection of langorously downtempo, sleepily sexy pop songs, underpinned by warped samples and radiant electronic textures.
Three very different albums, then, but united by Race’s commitment to spontaneity and experiment, and deserving of the closest attention and the highest praise.

High Bias – Austin, Texas 2005
Hugo Race is a major figure in the Australian music scene, but known in the States, if at all, for his frequent guest appearances on Nick Cave records. A shame, that, since The Goldstreet Sessions shows an artist with a distinct vision worthy of more attention. Sedate full band arrangements and a languid pace frame Race's atmospheric guitar swells and startlingly Leonard Cohenesque vocals. The songs dig deep into the subconscious musings of a wide variety of folks, both misfits and everyday people. Haunted, gorgeous tunes like "Hush Money," "LSD is Dead" and the towering epic "Is Your Love Strong" exude not so much doomed romanticism as a sort of sublime stoicism, letting emotions wash over the protagonists but not through them. That's not to say this music is cold—far from it, in fact—but Race's characters roll with the punches and keep on keeping on, rather than succumb to fatalism or despair. A unique, challenging and stimulating record.
- Michael Toland

Frankfurter Rundschau 2004
"Goldstreet Sessions" is Race's latest blues-mutation, defining a sound between triphop, ambient and rock - the toughest and most intense record of his career. These trips are difficult - listen to the opener "LSD is Dead" or "Makes Me Mean". Race and his colleagues are way badder than Calexico, much more distorted and twisted than today's Bad Seeds, and bluesier than any electronica/triphop project you care to mention. We take this ambient-electro-blues-trip rolling a cigarette with our eyes closed and shaking up the next gin-tonic…"

Goldstreet Sessions Rockarilla (Rome) March 04
"The double retrospective "Long Time Ago" saw Race transformed into a high-profile cult artist. "The Goldstreet Sessions", then, is the first chapter in a new cycle. Leaving aside the ecstatic "Premonition" and the desert feel of "A.M.Radio", the atmosphere that surrounds "Goldstreet" is claustrophic and pressurised. A dreamlike blues laced with industrial experimentation, glacial digital beats, distant trombones and a voice cavernous as the recent Leonard Cohen. Music for besieged cities, beaten by incessant rain and populated by souls lost in the dark…."

Raveweb, Australia, 2004
HUGO RACE & TRUE SPIRIT – The Goldstreet Sessions
Former Wreckery frontman and one-time Bad Seed gets mean and moody.
While long-time followers of Race’s work won’t be surprised that the music on this new album inhabits a typically grimy netherworld of dark shadows and sickly foreboding, what may come as a surprise is the seamless way he’s added electronic and sampled textures to the mix. It’s all about subtlety, as the track Makes Me Mean showsA.M. Radio, meanwhile, marries echoedntwangs to a blackly funny Race monologue: My life flashed before my eyes/I blew the film up to American size. The album’s centrepiece though is undoubtedly the sprawling nine minutes of Is Your Love Strong, which reeks of humid jungle heat amid disorienting samples, sick, slow-building horn lines and Race’s carnal nastiness. Scary. But very cool.

Liverock, Italy – “Ambuscado” 2005
“It’s more than twenty years that Hugo Race has been adventuring through the shadowy territory of an infected blues streaked with a poisoned restlessness, through desolate, dimly lit scenarios and melodies gone bad. Experimentation, obscurity and minimalist atmospheres have characterised all or nearly all of the works signed by the True Spirit, a changing ensemble that has accompanied the artist since 1988, the year of Rue Morgue Blues, but maybe never like this time has the journey been so lunatic and visionary. Even if Hugo Race has never shyed away from making difficult records – it’s enough to remember Wet Dream from 1997 and Chemical Wedding from 1998.
To think that the Ambuscado project was conceived as an attempt to get closer to the gospel and spiritual tradition can only make you smile given that the final result is totally detached from any kind of Christian aesthetic. In fact, Glitterhouse Recorcds present Ambuscado as “a trip into the viscera of a psychedelic sixth dimension”.
The rest is splinters of far away worlds, skeletal visions, petrified deconstructions… songs full of yearning if they weren’t cut off before their time, their nakedness swallowed up in a desert landscape. In this fury of decomposition fragments of melody like Ducados and Surfing the Alpha can only be considered songs of the siren, particularly Surfing, constructed like a portal to the infinite, liberating and interstellar….
-Pierluigi Lucadei,

Chronique Foutraque, Paris 2006 - "TAOIST PRIESTS"
Former member of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, Hugo Race and his group True Spirit have made a record remarkable in every sense. With a deep serious voice somewhere between Mark Lanegan, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave and Stuart Staples (happy company!), the pieces on Taoist Priests are simply captivating. The listener is taken by surprise right from the start of the album, and doesn't touch the ground again until the finish of the last track. This miracle is made possible by the presence of smokey atmospheres saturated with avant-guard psychedelics which give an original dimension to the blues-folk-rock distilled by Hugo Race and his musical collective. The strange and familiar universe of Mr. Race is equally fascinating for its adventurous compositions, written with talent and produced with a sure touch. Which constitutes the ideal environment for the admirable profundity of a voice to be discovered without delay....
- Pierre Andrieu

Losing Today, Italy/UK 2006
For ex-Bad Seed Hugo Race, the last three years have been an extremely prolific record: two albums recorded in the studio with the True Spirit ("Goldstreet Sessions" and "Ambuscado"), and the official live recording in Monaco added to the work of Sepiatone and the expperimental projects Transfargo and Merola Matrix. A life lived intensely, with more than a few ties to Italy, and this "Taoist Priests" is somehow the sum of this experience; recorded between Catania and Melbourne, marked by a return to structure and songwriting, without letting go of more freeform tangents. To speak of the blues is reductive: there's psychedelia, desert rock, also modest amounts of electronica, an album that sounds fresh and modern but has the aftertaste of a classic. The emphasis, however, is on the lyrics, oscillating between vision and reality, between mysticism and social criticism, between yin and yang: a man of our times, Hugo Race has succeeded in adding to his brilliant career yet another excellent chapter.
- Fabio Cagnetti

Pennyblack, UK, April 2006
There have been a good number of releases by Melbourne raised Hugo Race over the last three or so years. They have covered a diverse range of sounds and it’s often been hard to try to pin down the work of Race, which at various times has been described as garage rock, pop and cosmic blues. Race never makes it easy when it comes to describing the music he makes. It many ways it’s not music in the traditional sense. A Race album is more a collage of soundscapes; portraits in sound where his dark baritone inhibits places we don’t want to visit too often. Where Race excels is that although this album is best taken in one listen the twelve tracks are separate songs. They don’t all mesh into one giant indestructible wall of sound as many more experimental albums do. Race also has a good sense of melody too, something else that many albums of this type lack. Rather than just producing an album which we would turn to in those dark 3 a.m. moments, Race has added melody and enough strange instrumentation to make this set of songs more accessible and the type of album which could be appreciated at any time. Obviously given the Bad Seeds connection there are traces of Nick Cave’s darker moments scattered throughout these songs and the sounds of Ry Cooder and Tom Waits can be heard through the album. Looking further back the work of Captain Beefheart is obviously also an influence here. But regardless of these influences Race does have a sound which is all his own and this could just be his most accessible and best selling album to date.
This is not an album for playing in the background. It’s an album which, as all experimental music does,must be listened to. It requires the listener's attention for it to be appreciated and the best way to listen to this music is on headphones; shut the rest of the world out and let Race and the True Spirit take you on an eerie and unsettling journey. It’s also the best way to appreciate the strange sounds weaving in and out of these songs.
With this album Race has produced an album which will appeal to more than his usual fan base. Race has said that on this album he is dealing with his own demons and that he wanted to write music that not only entertains but challenges and disturbs, and he has certainly accomplished that.
Followers of Race will welcome this latest collection with open arms. For those yet to take the step into the darkened corridors of Race’s mind they would do well to start here and make the final song on the album ‘Pray On’ your first introduction to this mysterious music. It’s all that is good about these modern-day blues. It’s the most accessible song on the album and the eeriness is replaced with a tenderness which is breath-taking. Stay with the album ! There is then an un-credited song which, although reverting back to electro-blues is simply stunning, with the ghostly vocals leaving you wanting more of the same.
- Malcolm Carter

HUGO RACE – taoist priests
http://www.monochrom.at/cracked/reviews/reviews01.htm Austria 2006

For the first decade or so Hugo Race was interested in laying bare the bones of the blues, first with his legendary band The Wreckery, and up to his new formation, True Spirit, circa to the album “Revelator”. For the lonely visitor, these records left no handle and no grip to hold on to. Like freeform rock-climbing or climbing up frozen waterfalls at night – a deadly dangerous trap. I saw him play live back then and his version of “River Of Nowhere” started a two hour trip that seemed like stepping out of everyday life into another dimension where time has no meaning. I don’t remember a lot of that evening, but I still know that it was one of the best concerts I ever saw.
Next Hugo Race started filling up the gaps in his bare-bone, bare-knuckle songs with layers of sounds, drifting into almost ambient landscapes, building up enormously energetic and irritating walls of sound, in which any unprepared listener was doomed to lose himself, never to find out again. A jungle of sound, full of unknown voices and drones. That led to records such as “Chemical Wedding” or “Last Frontier”, excursions into sound and drone and even trip hop in some ways, more than into song and songwriting, though all songs still retain that basic skeleton. Somewhere deep underneath the slowly dragging river of sounds that washes over them.
Now it is 2006 and Hugo Race has released his about twelfth record and it is called “taoist priest”, and even though this might be his most easily accessible record to date, it is still awash with sounds, hints, ideas and structures from far far away. Melodies still wind themselves along for minutes, needing the listener to go along with them for quite a long time to realize what the song is about. As in the glisteningly beautiful “I know you” with the sparking female vocals of Daniela Ardito. The tempo is still a slow drag for most of the time, sometimes getting even slower. When things speed up, the melodies seem to slow down. Guitars and Organs waver between psychedelia and the blues and nothing seems to hold on for longer than a few seconds, which makes the true miracle of his records the big question about why his music still seems as solid as a rock.
“Ready to go” might be the most rockish, straightforward song Race has ever recorded, with a melody and a beat that would make audiences pump their fists and shout along in other circumstances or when being recorded and played by other bands. And I am not even talking about Nickleback or some such bullshit, but think about the last album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Cave has always been cropping up when Hugo Race has been discussed), for instance, where Cave has left his traditional introvertedness and enigmatic presence for more straightforward and direct measures. On “Taoist Priest” the songs are still filled with sounds and layers that seem to only irritate listeners at first, their full meaning only becoming clear when diving into them.
In commercial terms, all of this is a big mistake, but then again, as I have noted, Hugo Race doesn’t seem to be thinking in commercial terms. All through his long career Race has kept his unique voice, and I am referring both to how he brings his artistic vision onto tape and his real singing voice. This warm yet distanced timbre and his unconcerned yet still emotional tonality and wording. The last musical genre he might have been referring to as such and with serious intent might be the swamp blues. Though it could have been Massive Attack as well. Other than that there is a vast sparkling complex of religious connotations and its promise of revelation contrasted by the everlasting dark despair of the blues.
This is still dark music, best heard in the night, at nightfall or at least when it is greyish dark outside from the rain or the sleet driving through the streets. Hugo Race’s records make people lonely and enjoy it. Open ears feel the depth and unique spirituality in these songs right away and stand in awe before the grand architecture that seems to open up underneath the sparkling surface of the vast waters that is the vision of Hugo Race. And of course, he himself is the taoist priest mentioned in the title, framing the world and time for his coming and leading away all followers in true saviour fashion. “We all join hands / and step into the void / high ever after / high on the joy” (from “Into the Void”).