Altered Zones

With 2,175 posts in 16 months, you're bound to miss something. We've gone ahead and gathered some of our favorite tracks from now and yesteryear that didn't get much play, but deserved it.

20 Tracks You Might've Missed

If you dig heavily on Garys of both the Wilson and Numan variety, you may find British outsider electro-psych artisan nick nicely to your liking, as he fits somewhere between the two extremes. Born Nickolas Laurien, the enigmatic and always lowercased nick nicely doesn't transmit the volatility of the former, nor the new wave dance floor standards of the latter. Instead, he marries minimal disco and post-punk analog washes with the type of quirky melodic structures reminiscent of Skip Spence. Surely Sir Ariel Pink has borrowed some of his vocal inflections from this deep space banger. Captured Tracks has chronicled some of nicely's most important work with Elegant Daze: Songs from 1979-1986, a 13-song compilation that captures nick nicely's knack for cold futurism and hummable hooks. Killer stocking stuffer. -- Kenny Bloggins, The Decibel Tolls

MP3: nick nicely: "Treeline"

Grab it November 29th Captured Tracks

[image by themegoman]

Imagine you are walking down Wrottersley Road in South London, sometime in the late '70s, early '80s. Obscured by a row of trees, there looms a large 19th century Victorian house with a slightly Gothic exterior. Enter the house where English psych-cult oddball nick nicely spent his years as a student, and you can begin to understand the sonic inspirations for "Wrottersley Road," a track from his new release, Lysergia. nick writes, in his own words and punctuation:

Back in the 19th Century when it was built , they put ornamental coloured glass in the doors and round the window edges and these remained ..they could lend a room a particular atmosphere when Victorian colours moved slowly across interiors as the sun moved round . Different shades , but there was this one particular blue..

The track captures this mystery and enchantendess, with nicely's voice barely breaking though the haze of churning guitars and the slow drag of the organ. The track is sprawling but contained, like the grand Victorian house and the shifting colours on its old wooden walls. --Daniel Gottlieb, Altered Zones

MP3: nick nicely: "Wrottersley Road"

Lysergia drops in May 2011 as a limited cassette release on Burger Records. Also this May, Captured Tracks is releasing Elegant Daze, a selection of earlier nick nicely stuff, on vinyl