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Like a Grimms fairy tale Lisa Germano’s music pulls you in to a magical, mysterious place where stories that feel beautiful can have an underlying message for the soul that may not be as it seems… No Elephants is Lisa Germano’s new album. No Elephants was produced, recorded and mixed by Jamie Candiloro at Banana Chicken Studios. It was written and played by Lisa Germano, some bees, cell phones, a bunch of animals; Candiloro created drum loops and unearthly sounds, and Sebastian Steinberg played acoustic bass. Executive producers: Rocco and Betty Germano. Like her other nine albums, no elephants is made like a book to read to the end. There is foreshadowing from melodies and ideas that weave the record’s story together, and it takes time and imagination from the reader/listener. Unfortunately, few people these days take the time to make or listen to an album created as a whole piece, but no elephants is short and worthy of the attention paid. “Making a record any other way doesn’t work for me,” she says. no elephants is being released by Badman Recording Co. February 12, 2013.
This is a deeply felt, simply and beautifully orchestrated music whose dulcet charms, when scratched, reveal an ineffable glow. While Lisa’s lyrics can be forcefully literal, they’re also gratifyingly figurative; as pure music, her songs offer a resonantly oblique time and place. Such a feeling resounds on the opening track, “Ruminants,” a pensive lullabye that has, Lisa says, something to do with the natural order to this world that the human race has messed up, especially in how we treat animals and the earth itself. “My communication with myself, the earth and its beings is getting weirder every day,” comments Germano. “If I could replace all the shit in my head, my troubles relating to humans and the earth’s beings’ troubles relating back to me…I think that’s what this record is about.”
Lisa is known to a worldwide fan cult for a series of savagely honest and musically intrepid solo albums that commenced in the early ’90s for the 4AD label, including the cynical debut Happiness in 1994 and the sexual-warfare-running-amok Geek the Girl, also from ’94 (which was included in Spin’s top 100 records of the 1990s). A series of follow-up records found her exploring with widening musical palettes some of the farther reaches of the scary rock-as-catharsis world. Also known as a multi-instrumentalist with such diverse artists as Eels, David Bowie, Crowded House, Philip Selway (Radiohead), Indigo Girls, John Mellencamp and Giant Sand, Lisa plays most of the instruments and music on her records, giving them even more direct emotion from the storyteller.