Recording: Flood & Pass

Artist: Flood & Pass

Songs: Turing's Farewell + You Were Good (I Was Good For a While)

Recorded at Holy Oak Café, March 30, 2014.

Flood & Pass - Turing's Farewell

Flood & Pass - You Were Good (I Was Good For a While)

Full review to follow. Although Simone Schmidt's idiom is somewhere in the vast terrain that includes "country" and "singer-songwriter", her m.o. and approach to collaboration is akin to improvisers and experimentalists, nimbly shifting from project to project to reflect the different dynamics that come with different musical partners. So here, then, we have one to add to the pile, with Schmidt trying out some new material alongside Phillips, whose solo project is called Stripmall Ballads. There's some obvious affinities here, including a lyrical worldview that gets inside the stories of the disenfranchised — Phillips presented one song called "Woman With A Black Eye". In town to record an album together, the pair also shared the stage at the Holy Oak, tossing back and forth the new collaborative songs as well as a few of their own tunes. Schmidt brought this requiem for Alan Turing, whose code-breaking heroics were swept aside in the condemnation of his queerness, while Philips' "You Were Good" was dedicated to Confederacy of Dunces author John Kennedy Toole.