Shelley, Pete / Sky Yen

Drag City

Drag City presents reissues of the avant-garde DIY label Groovy founded by PETE SHELLEY (BUZZCOCKS) and FRANCIS COOKSON. The second of the Groovys was actually the first to be recorded, back in 1974. Sky Yen dated back to Pete Shelley’s college days, where he chaired an Electronic Music Society, playing records over the intercom during lunch hour. After he’d made the recordings that became Sky Yen six years later, he added them to his playlist—and his schoolmates’ consternation. The material wasn’t exactly easy listening/ambient style—it was raw waves of oscillator tones, wildly leaping up and down and stretching out into a pair of twenty-minute pieces., Thirty years of electronics-saturated music culture lends perspective to the appeal of Sky Yen—the album’s edges are still jagged and sharp.

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