brandx@ihlpl.UUCP (H. D. Weisberg) (08/19/85)
Does anyone know what Laswell is up to now (as a musician, not a producer)? "Omaha" is considered old news. I heard something about a band called Deadline that he formed as a successor to Material. Any similar news? Thanks.
gtaylor@astroatc.UUCP (09/04/85)
> Does anyone know what Laswell is up to now (as a musician, > not a producer)? "Omaha" is considered old news. > I heard something about a band called Deadline that he formed > as a successor to Material. Any similar news? > > Thanks. If anything. Laswell has spread himself entirely TOO thin. From my point of view, the real mistake was splitting up with Michael Beinhorn (although it became clear by about midway through the first side of Baselines that Laswell wasn't making any real use of his talents. His bass/production work is plastered all over nearly anything that moves these days: He did all the remix and some of the overdubs on Fela Anikulapo Kuti's post0incarceration album FELA, shows up on the most recent Mandingo Griot Society's Watto Sitta, the new Manu Dibango album Electric Africa, and figures prominently in a project called either "Cairo" or B-Sides (one of them is the album title, one the band name. The work on Deadline will probably remind yu fairly strongly of his dancefloor stuff (like the Shango stuff, but with a little less hamboning around) with a bit of the jazz flavour that you find occasionally thrown in on "Memory Serves". Oh yeah.....there's another Golden Palominos due out this fall. As you might guess, production tends to pay more steadily if you can get the work, and Bill is piling up the bucks. It's not entirely bad, though.... I am really pleased to see that Celluloid Records (his label) is doing some thing about exposing the rest of us to a little "coffee-coloured" African stuff (no whining from you African Pop purists about crossbreeding, okay? I'm a good PostModernist.)