Staubitz & Waterhouse - Out and About LP (Gertrude Tapes, 2023)
"Get ready, get ready - Staubitz and Waterhouse are back with a new record!
Following 2022's full-length debut Common Metals, a mini-album for Regional Bears, and a collaborative EP with Seamus Williams for Chocolate Monk, the Luc and Brunhild Ferrari of the Ocean State have returned to Gertrude Tapes with Out and About, their most engaging and kaleidoscopic album to date. Based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution and Wendy Carlos, Staubitz and Waterhouse continue to document their lives with diligence, sensitivity, and humor.
Side A, recorded over two years, distills dozens of discrete sites into an imaginary "average day" for the duo. The album begins at dawn on their stoop, proceeds to an early morning stroll at an outdoor antique market, makes a pit stop at a James Turrell Skyspace and a hotel
pool - all before a chaotic lunch at a woefully beleaguered charter school. Moving on, through, and out of the halls of education, "Hot Stamper" is a montage of the many sources of technophony we encounter every day: while grocery shopping, at a car wash, inside mill buildings, or in the bathroom at a furniture store. Later that evening our intrepid aural explorers find themselves at a lively "Pitbull" concert at "Great Woods," where the two nearly met three decades prior. Par for the course, they stop in for a nightcap at the Lafayette on their way home, where they overhear a scintillating conversation about all things jazz. The night concludes with blissful slumber, despite the berimbau-esque protestations of a furious bug trapped under a bucket.
Side B is a travelogue recorded over one weekend in early 2022, which documents their journey to the Hudson Valley in New York to play on the patio of the legendary Tubby's. The tone of this side is more loose and sprawling, and demonstrates that for Staubitz and Waterhouse there is no difference between living and performing - it exists on a continuum. You can hear it in the sounds of Kingston that bleed in around the edges, and in the tapes of insane birds that run
throughout their set, muddying the boundaries between what is real and what is artifice. The album concludes with a trip to the cavernous confines of Dia Beacon, where ghostly apparitions flicker in and out of focus and float throughout the space.
Let me tell you, these guys are always out looking for action." - Barrett Clark