SIN ROPAS
Tim Hurley: vocals, guitars, accordian, trumpet, korg, keyboards, assorted
manipulations
Danni Iosello: drums, percussion, howlings, organ, korg, harmonium, rocks,
jangles.
Look down when you meet Tim Hurley and you'll see him wearing his worked-in
black leather shoes-all cracked at the seams and screwed together at the heel.
He'll sway over you silently, commentlessly noticing them too, but never replacing
them, only just adding things to the integral structure to keep them working,
and to him, favorite. It's fitting then that Hurley met up with Danni Iosello
over years of multi-band playing. She too had grammer-school-loved shoes,
duct-taped and straps-stapled to the walk-worn heels.
Sin Ropas' music is like this also: substantial bits of essential form, the
gaps and cracks filled, but never quite covered, with new, and necessarily-changing
materials. This might explain why Sin Ropas' records are featured on Top 10
Alt-Country lists at the same time as they appear on "Best of Rock"
lists and psychedelic music websites. Elements of all music are there, lovingly,
if not permanently, stitched-together fragments that slip on and cross each
other. Sin Ropas' first CD, Three Cherries (Perishable Records 2000) was received
in this way:
"It's easy to imagine each of this records' eight juggernauts as a deconstructed
and slightly decayed version of a conventional pop song, falling apart at
the seams and unraveled at both ends...If this sounds to you like words of
highest praise, you heard right" [Puncture].
"Three Cherries is unique in that it sounds both old-fashioned (in a
sittin' on the porch watching the dust bowl fill itself to the brim kind of
way) and new-fangled (all the parts that sound like snake charmers playing
plastic horns while on mesculine) all at once" [Faster Than Sheep].
After releasing Three Cherries, Sin Ropas moved to the former-East Germany.
This presented them with new bits and scraps to paste on, finally recording
their second CD "Trickboxes on the Pony Line" (Sad Robot Records
2003, Konkurrent Records 2004) mostly in their apartment and The Lone Star
Studio in Germany. This new CD was different, of course, from the first one:
living on the raw Baltic coast changes your stamina and color, Trickboxes
being heartier somehow, but still amorphous and sinewy.
"Trickboxes' abstract song-movies rely heavily on a series of unfixed,
user-provided images--pictures replace sounds, sensations supplant rationalizations,
everything goes a little blurry...It's hard to establish a stanch reference
point for any of its cagey tracks: the perpetual puzzle is part of what makes
this record so endlessly intriguing...It has far less to do with mechanically
processing a series of notes than with establishing abstract, pre-linguistic
relationships with art" [Pitchfork].
"There are razors inside these tumbleweeds...f---ing country My Bloody
Valentine or Spacemen 3 reincarnated as The Carter Family" [Ink 19].
"Red Red Meat alumni Sin Ropas create mesmerizing sound on their second
album. This collection of beautiful, interweaving off-the-cuff riffs and slow-motion
observations suggests a futuristic Appalachia" [Rolling Stone].
Now Sin Ropas makes their home in Marshall, North Carolina. They moved into
the town's abandoned library building where they wrote and recorded their
new CD "Fire Prizes" (Konkurrent/Zeal Records 2005). The week they
started recording, the French Broad River, which divides Marshall along the
rail lines, jumped its banks and threatened the town. A dark and slow chaos
ensued: people scattered languidly, trains sneaked along their tracks lowing
tentatively, smaller, and then larger, pieces of people's lives floated past
the back doors of the library to the lost-sound accompaniment of the landlady's
dish collection clanking and ringing at the watertop below.
There is a feeling of helpless desperation in a flood. On Fire Prizes, this
manifested itself in a higher pitch of growl for Sin Ropas. There is an audible
fret and worried celebration in these songs as if dejected fierceness would
be the only salvation in the deluge.
Fire Prizes is a kind of slow-chunk rock that totters along old spiritual
lines while slipping under the burden of redemption. The kind of record that,
if you find yourself lost and longing, will burn you clean.
Fire Prizes will be released in Europe October 3, 2005 on Konkurrent/Zeal
Records (www.konkurrent.nl).
Fire Prizes was recorded at Daddy's Lamp, Marshall, NC in August 2004 (www.sinropas.com)The
artwork for Fire Prizes is by Nervous Films' filmmaker and Creative Capital
grant recipient, Brent Green, whose frightening and lovely animated films
sometimes feature live improvised music by Sin Ropas. (www.nervousfilms.com)