Friend of Truth & Lies and undisputed heavyweight champ of Humberside, Steve Cobby has dug deep into his past to share a glistening collection of known and previously unheard tracks created under his Solid Doctor alias back in the early 90s. With a sharp knife, a clean cloth and sensitive mastering skills, he has breathed life back into tunes that stand comfortably alongside his best.
Steve's recent output on his own Déclassé Recordings imprint (LPs 'Saudade' and 'Everliving') really don’t seem so far away from what he was doing as the Solid Doctor twenty odd years ago. As any Miles Davis record will be instantly recognisable as Miles no matter how stylistically different, so Cobby’s personality and colour palette always shines through - an avant-garde cinematic warmth in both production and atmosphere, playful hypnotic melodies and use of discordance, stargazing funk rhythms and a wily British humour with his trickster vocal samples and preposterous track titles (Oily Tooth, Pickyparkdickbods?).
The remastered originals sound as fresh and clean as the day they were released, containing an analogue strangeness and a simplicity that so much music doesn’t dare to possess but it’s the two CDs of unreleased music that really makes this release worth it. Soundtracks to underground films that don‘t exist ('Hippolyte'), post-punk-synth-funk ('Motherlode') and plenty of the balearic-ish vibes and mid-tempo beats that you would expect from the man behind Pork Recordings, Heights Of Abraham and Fila Brazillia...he brings heat to Hull…
“To celebrate the 21st anniversary of How About Some Ether I had initially intended to just remaster the original tunes. In order to locate them a trawl through an inordinate amount of DAT tapes was in order. My labelling skills have never been above mediocre and so it proved to be a laborious task. It was whilst performing this search that I discovered a substantial amount of unreleased work. Not having listened to it for the better part of two decades I was surprised by how many songs had stood the test of time. With this in mind I decided to include much of the new trove in the form of bonus discs.
Disk 1 & 2 contain the original tracks in the same running order, but without segues and re-mastered. Disk 3 and 4 is the bulk of the recently unearthed work.
Ten of the selections on the 95 release were in fact culled from considerably longer versions. Disk 5 contains six of the unadulterated ‘mother’ tracks unabridged.
The debut Solid Doctor releases were in fact four 12”’s entitled Losing Patients Vol 1 to 4 with a total of ten songs thereon, four of which were eventually included on HASE. The re-mastered omissions constitute Disk 6.”
Steve Cobby - 8/2/17
Released on March 17th, buy it direct from Steve here! (or from a shop)
http://stevecobby.co.uk/album/how-about-some-more-ether
Words by Ex-Friendly