Bob Drake - Planets & Animals (CD)

Release Date: 04/09/21

Short, dense, twisty, jaw-dropping & unusual songs by cult multi-instrumentalist Bob Drake in an impressive package.

A pandemic is just an opportunity for some people to spend even more time in the studio.

Bob is a minor cult, and this new CD – exquisitely recorded (in a previous life he was an L.A. studio engineer) is a compact suite of short, dense, twisty, jaw-dropping – and highly unusual – songs; a whirlwind for the uninitiated but still surprisingly accessible.

It”s his 10th release for ReR, each exploring some new aspect of songwriting, arrangement or production. This time he”s added a small menagerie of newly invented instruments to augment his already extensive acoustic and electronic instrumentarium – and the band of Bob that plays them has seldom been larger or tighter. Beautifully packaged with impressive fold-out artwork by the incomparable Joe Mruk.

Biographical: From 1978-1989 Bob played a key role in Denver”s underground music scene and was a founding member of both Thinking Plague and Hail. In Los Angeles, in the early 1990s, he engineered sessions with just about everybody…from Ice Cube to Shirley MacLaine, joined the 5UU”s, and began to write and record his mindstretching solo albums.

He has lived in his home studio in Southern France since 1994 where he has played on, recorded, or mixed hundreds of albums. A member of the Peter Blegvad Quintet, The Science Group and Vril, he is also celebrated for his definitive re-masterings of classic albums by Art Bears, Henry Cow, ZNR, Cassiber and others.