Rehearsing My Choir

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Amazon.co.uk For Rehearsing My Choir, Illinois siblings Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger have recruited a new member for their band – their 83 year old grandmother. This isn’t a mercenary ploy to make the olds pay their way after retirement, mind: the venerable, 83-year old Olga Sarantos used to work as choir director at a Greek Orthodox church, and it’s her croaked reminiscences that form the backbone to this peculiar, piecemeal storybook of an album. "The Wayward Grandaughter" is about as conventional as this record gets, Eleanor’s hushed spoken-word tales set to a St Etienne-style disco pulse. However, the deeper you get, the weirder and more abstract things become. "A Candymaker’s Knife In My Handbag" drifts through passages of baroque piano, warped electronics, ramshackle drumming, Eleanor and Olga reciting dream-like poetry about zombies, meringues, and other surrealistic weirdness. Indeed, what could be a truly bewildering sixty minutes is rescued by the pair’s clear family chemistry and intriguing vocal interplay: "Sometimes, memories are better off sung," decides Olga, before joining her granddaughter in a gentle vocal waltz. --Louis Pattison Product Description Dear Listener, Tracks 3 and 4 take place in the 40's; tracks 5 and 6 in the 20's and 30's; track 7 in the later 50's; track 8 starts in the very early 40's; track 9 goes back and forth; track 10 takes place in the early 60's; the final track takes place in the early 90's. Track 2 takes place a few years ago; track 1 took place when it was recorded. The action depicted in "The Wayward Granddaughter" and "Slavin' Away" does not include the character Olga Sarantos plays on the rest of the record. "Slavin' Away" imagines that character--the main character-- fantasizing, a bit remotely, about the hard lot of other women. Now, I wouldn't guess that the Main Character actually thought the woman concerned was riding around in a Norton side-car and operating her own cottage industry trinket assembly/sweatshop: but it might have pleased her to picture it so. "The Wayward Granddaughter" is about a different Greek-American grandmother and her popular granddaughter ("Connie"). They're from Chicago's south suburbs and don't figure in the rest of the record; I wanted to have another (slightly younger) grandmother and family in there for perspective or comparison's sake, so to speak. Thank you for your time, Matthew Friedberger