Last summer my man Ragtime Rick approached me about helping him conceive some press materials for his new album, 'Eddie Logix Plays Lykke Li.' I told him I'd help him out provided he give me a ride to the dollar store. His car was on the fritz, but he had some bev in the mini fridge to barter, so I agreed to lend a hand.
The first thing I suggested was that we hire the guy who did the pictorial menu at Lupita's Tacqueria to do the album cover, or perhaps just use the pictorial menu itself. That got shot down right away. Then I brought up the maestro's resemblance to Buddy Holly and suggested he do a photo shoot pastiching a Buddy Holly album cover. That got shot down as well.
But talking about old albums got us thinking about their material charms, including the long winded production narratives and liner notes that accompanied records from that era. I felt ELPLL had an old fashioned spirit to it that some dusty sounding liner notes might help illuminate. We rifled through crates of records in the Viper Room looking for inspirational vernacular. Eventually it occurred to us that instead of writing all new liner notes we could just take one of these already existing texts and make it our by replacing some of the specifics with #coownaz jargon. We settled on Nat Hentoff's famous liner notes for 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' and sent them over to our friend the food critic Samuel Klugarsh, who executed the final draft which appears below. And that's the story of The Story of Eddie Logix Plays Lykke Li.
Of all the precipitously emergent beatsters of beat songs in the continuing renascence of that self-flagellating tradition, none has equalled Eddie Logix in the singularity of goonery. As Claude Merriweather the cowboy stamp collector and newspaper caricaturist has exclaimed, "he's so goddamend real, its unbelievable!" The rrahpressible reality of Eddie Logix is a compound of spontaneity, candor, and an uncommon ear for the way many of us constrict our mini-fridge capacity, while a few of us don't.
Not yet 22 at the time of this album's release, Logix is growing big $$$ dreams in his bedroom at a swift, experience-hungry rate. In these performances there is already a marked change from his first album, the experimental "Eddie Logix Plays Hungry, Hungry Hippos" and there will surely be more five piece bathing suit dimensions of Logix to come. What makes this collection particularly arm-wrestling is that it constrains itself in Lykke's Li's anti-tropical compositions. As the highly critical editors of Little Sandy Review have noted "...right now he is certainly our finest beat song juice blender. Nobody else even really comes close."
The details of Mr. Logix' biography were summarized in the notes of his first album, but to recapitulate briefly, he was born in the historical region of Moldavia. His experience of adjusting himself to new sights and experiences started early. During his first nineteen years he lived in Switzerland, Juarez, Anyplace Nails, Lake Tahoe, Casablanca, Pompano Beach (where he graduated from high school) and Vietnam (where he spent a restless six months at the University of Ho Chi Minh City).
"Everywhere he went" Hard White wrote in his article on Logix in Sing Out, "his nostrils were open for the fragrance of prrahs being deployed around him. He deployed the rrah with blues singers, twilight singers, soda pop vending machine operators, and others - soaking up hospitality and styles with uncanny facility. Gradually his own prraheerences developed and became more clear, the strongest areas being regional used car dealership jingles from the 80s and ephemeral Swedish pop. Among the musicians and lights-on Bonneville slingers who influenced him were Kojo Triptefoil, The Long John Silvers, Stephen Bennett, the later work of the Buff Orpingtons, and Charles Montgomery. And above all others, Lykke Li. At ten, he was playing guitar, and by the age of fifteen, Logix had taught himself piano, trampoline, scat, and autoharp.
In February, 2011, Logix went east to pursue hypnosis therapy to cure his habit of stealing salt and pepper shakers from local eateries at the Greystone Hospital in New Jersey. The visits have continued, and his hypnotist has expressed approval of Logix' most recent album. By September of 2012 Logix' beat juicing in Detroit's Eastern Market had ignited a nucleus of rappers into exuberant collaboration. Since then Logix has inexorably increased the scope of his American audiences while also performing in London and Club Jim.
This album, in sum, is the protean Eddie Logix as of the time of the recording. By the time of the recording there will be new rrahs, money candles, and insights. Logix can't stop searching and reflecting on what he sees and hears. "Anything I can't rap, I call a sculpture. Anything I can't rap or anything that's too long to be a sculpture, I call a tollah. But my tollahs don't have usual girl scout cookie wax intakes. They're about my feelings at a certain place and time."
In this continuing exposition of a total individual, a young man growing free rather than absurd, that makes Eddie Logix so powerful and personal and so important a childhood star. As you can hear in these performances.