Wiki
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Release Date
1 January 1992
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Length
11 tracks
Blonder Tongue Audio Baton (sometimes spelled Blondertongueaudiobaton) is the second studio album by American indie rock band, Swirlies, following their 1992 mini-album “What To Do About Them”. It was released on CD, LP and cassette in 1993. The band recorded the majority of the album in the summer of 1992 at Q Division Studios, Boston with engineer/co-producer Rich Costey. It is possibly their best-known and most critically praised work, with many critics citing it as a “lo-fi” answer to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. AllMusic would later call it “a mainstay of early-’90s indie music,” and in 2016 Pitchfork ranked the album at number 11 on its list of the 50 best shoegaze albums of all time.
The album takes its name from an obscure and expensive audio graphic equalizer, made by Blonder Tongue Labs from 1959–61, which was used extensively while tracking the album. Taang! Records released the album in February 1993 and the band toured to support it.
The five-song Brokedick Car EP was released later in 1993 on vinyl, CD, and cassette tape as a follow-up to Blonder Tongue Audio Baton, and featured different mixes of “Wrong Tube” and “Pancake” from the album. The EP’s final track was “House of Pancake”, an electronica remix of “Pancake” by Rich Costey and NYC electronic musician Gomi. The track comprised Swirlies’ first foray into electronic music. Two more experimental tracks, the atonal instrumental “Labrea Tarpit” and the Pavementesque art punk song “You’re Just Jealous”, rounded out Brokedick Car. These were the last songs recorded by the band’s original lineup, as Drucker and Carmody soon left the group.
Blonder Tongue Audio Baton was co-lead singer Seana Carmody’s last full album with the group before she formed the Farfisa-driven and somewhat more pop-oriented Syrup USA. In 2015 most of Swirlies’ original line up reunited to perform the entirety of Blonder Tongue Audio Baton as a live set in Brooklyn on the 4th of July as part of the band’s 25th anniversary tour. Taang! Records reissued the album on LP in 2016.
In addition to the standard track listing, two session out-takes exist and are in unofficial circulation. The first is an unfinished rerecording of “Park the Car by the Side of the Road” and the second is the original recording of “Trudy.” The version of “Park the Car by the Side of the Road” that appears on the record is not actually from the BTAB sessions. Rather, it is a remix (with some re-recorded vocals) of a track released as part of the “Error” single in 1991. A later 8-track version of Trudy was eventually released as part of the Simple Machines Working Holiday 7” series. Neither out-take has seen official release.
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