JAZZ | Peter Margasak
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Glasses and Variations on a Blue Line/’Round Midnight, which McPhee recorded for Swiss label Hat Hut in 1977 and released in 1979, have both been out of print for decades. Last year Corbett negotiated with label owner Werner X. Uehlinger to reissue titles from the Hat Hut catalog, the McPhee albums among them, and it catalyzed his desire to give Corbett vs. Dempsey the label a mission in sync with Corbett vs. Dempsey the gallery: “A strong devotion to things we think are fantastic but for one reason or another have fallen under the radar,” he says. The Unheard Music Series hasn’t released anything since late 2008, and as Corbett explains, “These are projects that I want to be closer to home.”
METAL | Miles Raymer
The “Shimby” who engineered the record is otherwise known as Anthony McCreery, an architectural acoustician by day who moonlights as a member of Bird Talk and as a recording engineer at his in-home studio in Pilsen. McCreery’s Bandcamp site, emptybottle.bandcamp.com, hosts the impressive-sounding Live at the Empty Bottle in full (downloadable for five bucks) as well as more than 40 of his live recordings—among them sets from Thee Oh Sees, Cave, Eddy Current Suppression Ring, and the Reigning Sound. McCreery characterizes his collaboration with the Bottle as a personal project. “I have a multichannel recording rig permanently set up in their equipment racks, and I basically can record any time I go to see a show,” he explains in an e-mail from Madagascar, where he’s visiting a friend. “I chose some of my favorite songs from shows I had gathered up to about eight months ago. I’ve spent the time in between securing consent, refining mixing, mastering, and getting the record pressed.”
