Michael Fremer

Jay Fisher, in his mid-forties is Apple Rabbits. He writes and arranges, sings, plays guitar, bass, piano, keyboards and percussion. He also likes to experiment with electronica. The strings and flutes on this record are real though, and very convincingly recorded .

Since the mid-sixties, producer Joe Boyd's name has been synonymous with the British folk/rock scene. Through his Witchseason productions, Boyd produced the classic albums of The Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, Richard and Linda Thompson, Nick Drake, Martin Carthy, and Sandy Denny among others. During that fertile musical period, the Witchseason logo on an album was an ironclad guaranty of good music- and fine sound.

Producer Rick Rubin born in Long Beach, Long Island, New York in 1963, graduated high school in 1981. Johnny Cash, born in Kingsland, Arkansas in 1932, graduated high school in 1950. Yet these two, separated in time by more than thirty years, and by an even wider socio-cultural gap, will forever be linked by the music they created together during Cash’s last decade of life. Rubin’s resurrection of Cash’s career with the release of American Music in 1994 is but one fascinating facet of this enigmatic figure’s twenty year career in music.

In 1984, while a film and video student at N.Y.U., Rubin met Russell Simmons at Danceteria—a New York club where downtown hardcore rockers and uptown rappers mixed comfortably—and the two immediately hit it off, sharing a common musical vision of hard beats and hard rhymes, with Simmons drawing from R&B roots and Rubin from hard rock. Rubin had a vision of melding the two seemingly disparate musical forms and though he’d never produced a record, he sought out the duo of T. La Rock and Jazzy Jay, and out of that came a 12” vinyl single, “It’s Yours,” which was released on Partytime/Streetwise records. It featured rhyming raps set to a loud, hardcore beat with metal overtones. Though the track went on to sell around 100,000 copies—an impressive number for the newly emerging musical genre—Rubin was never paid for his work.

The Nels Cline Singers doesn’t have a singer. The free jazz ensemble doesn’t even have a sewing machine. There you have it! Two! Two! Two jokes in one! A novelty name, yes, but the septet’s eclectic, shape-shifting music is serious musical business, though also as much fun as you might expect if you know bassist Trevor Dunn’s old group Mr. Bungle, which in 1990 started out as a death metal band, then a pseudo ska band and by 1991 into one sufficiently eclectic to draw the attention of John Zorn who produced its debut album.