Ron Morelli – ‘Spit’ LP [Hospital Productions]

Recently I went through a massive refile of records, and as well as pulling out forgotten plates and classics that needed rescuing it also increased my anger levels at cash wasted on hype releases. To be brutally honest, Hospital Productions caused the majority of this self-deprecating temper change. The discovery that so much of their vinyl catalogue that I own sounds dangerously similar, and has rarely made it in to the radio shows or ever been played out by me, made me re-examine my record purchase patterns for the fifty or sixtieth time.

Here’s an epic exception.

Almost as if this was a big practical joke and Prurient was watching my swear off his label for life, they came along and dropped the one artist who’s LP I’ve been hanging for, and of which I’d probably wear out even if it came on sheet music. 

L.I.E.S. boss Ron Morelli has curated the most consistently good label around since 2010, injecting experimental back in to house music with what’s good instead of what’s safe. We play a LOT of L.I.E.S. records, as many as we can afford really. So what did we expect from a solo LP on Hospital Productions? Not anything too far from his collaborative work as Two Dogs In A House or Bad News, which in themselves are each stand-out plates.

What we get instead was proper raw jack-noise (yep, still trying to get that one to catch on), fashioned half for the club and half to see where the experiments will go. To use some recent examples he’s sitting somewhere between Rashad Becker and Perc, though elevated above the sum of the two.

Eight cuts across a single red plate, there’s nothing to fault. The rough sound gives a field-recording vibe, not so much as a step towards darkness as an open form of destruction or broken-down street music. Anxiety may kick in at some points but the relief is even stronger, proper therapeutic listening this.

Grab a copy of this on wax while you can…big record. Preview a track off of youtube below, press release underneath that.

via Hospital Productions

Debut album from Ron Morelli, founder of the influential L.I.E.S. label

‘Spit’ is the first in a trio of related releases from Morelli due on Hospital Productions in the coming months

The album features 8 electronic variants; from House and industrial tape experiments to saturated metallic beat tracks…

Mastered and Cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy

“I’m a regular guy, enjoy a good steak, drinking beer, and occasionally a game of pro basketball, Republican talk radio… you know…all the good stuff…..”

“The music on this record is about immediacy, pressure, monotony and stress. A great deal of the feelings conveyed within come from the fear and repulsion of basic human interaction….like if someone sitting behind you on the plane sneezes on you or being forced to shake the clamy hand of a stranger and the intimate paranoias of the mind and dealing with it or not. Not to make some deep intellectual fuck show of this, as it is not…it’s just stress music…jammed out quick and recorded.”

“Last year, I was staying in an area where all the hookers did their work…all they would do is smoke cigarettes, read the paper, talk on their cell phones, and spit. They would spit…A LOT. I would step in that hooker spit on the way home, often tracking it into the apartment building as I entered. This is where the title of the record comes from.”