CONVERTIBLE – HOLST GATE
$22.40
Hans Platzgumer was playing a show in his hometown of Innsbruck, Austria – the one he left 30 years earlier to become a rockstar in the USA. That evening, while talking with bass player Chris Laine in the Hotel, he concluded this was a good place for such an ending. He had played nearly 2000 gigs all around the world, starting out as HP Zinker, 1987, in NYC, recording on the newly formed labels Matador and Thrill Jockey; playing out with luminaries with Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., and Nirvana. But now Hans was almost 50 and a successful novelist. His last book, a bestseller. It’s enough, he said. No more gigs. Maybe even stop recording. Suddenly the burden was gone. And into the spot of this profound illumination, stepped a figure. A musician from a fishing town in Norway (Kongsberg to be exact), Colin Holst, named after the dead-end street where, in obscurity, he wrote and recorded songs that reflected the breadth and beauty of his home with the skepticism of a hermit and the deep understanding of a half-century of Rock and Pop. So, as Colin Holst, Hans sat down at his piano, possessed. Long time collaborator Hannah MacKenna delivered words, Chris Laine channeled some Phil Spector. Half a year later the album had been written and recorded. The result is Convertible’s sixth album, Holst Gate. An unusual collaboration between Vienna, Cambridge and LA, that nevertheless manages to inhabit the endless sub-polar expanse of the Norwegian Northlands. ‘It was the perfect sort of night’, as the album begins. A true triumph of the imagination.
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