Chvad SB

Chvad SB has been performing and recording music since 1991 and has played with a wide range of innovative and envelope-pushing bands. His experiments focus on finding new sounds and textures, but always with a human edge. Using a wide variety of instruments including modular synthesizers, found objects, hand-built instruments, guitars, and voice, Chvad SB builds soundscapes that are as unsettling as they are familiar. Chvad SB has just completed his first collection of dark-ambient solo recordings titled Crickets were the Compass.

www.chvad.com

www.facebook.com/chvadsb

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1. Ministry - Jesus Built My Hotrod (Redline/Whiteline Version) (single, 1991)

This song changed everything for me. I was DJing at my college radio station and the single for Jesus Built My Hotrod was sitting on a stack of discs that needed to be played that night. The next morning I sold everything I had of value to a pawn shop and bought a my first keyboard, distortion pedal, microphone and tape deck. This song re-ignited my creative ambitions that, at the time, had been squelched by a flaccid public school system lacking anything in the way of creative nourishment.

2. DEVO - Race of Doom (from New Traditionalists, 1981)

My Oma introduced me to DEVO with this album. This record saved me from religion.

3. New Order - Your Silent Face (from Power, Corruption & Lies, 1983)

Every set I played at my college radio station ended with this song. This song exists in some other space. I'm still not sure what to make of it. So dry and barren and sad and still lush and pretty. After buying Power, Corruption & Lies I didn't buy another New Order record for at least a decade. I couldn't stop listening to it. I didn't want anything else from them.

4. Howard Shore - Crash (from Crash, 1996)

The opening chord from the first track sucked me in forever. This soundtrack opened up a place in my mind I've been trying to keep filled ever since hearing it. Perfect moods. Perfect tones.

5. Einsturzende Neubauten - Haus Der Lüge (from Strategies Against Architecture II Disc 2, 1991)

The raw pounding of this song live is unstoppable. Like Jesus Built My Hotrod, this song manages to tap into the nastiest visceral place in my heart.

6. Faith No More - Epic (from The Real Thing, 1989)

I was working in a Pizza Hut when I first heard this playing in the background on the radio and loved it immediately. I had no idea when that door was opening what kind of eclectic impact Faith No More would have on my creative endeavors later in life.

7. The Kinks - Destroyer (from Give the People What They Want, 1981)

When I was eight years old I would sit on the floor in the dining room by myself listening to my dad's radio when the rest of the family was watching TV in the next room. When I first heard this song it terrified me. It was so raw and hard. Decades later it still scares me. For years I wanted to do a version of this but I just don't think I could do anything cooler with it. I just want to steal its crazy energy and run away with it but that wouldn't be fair to the song.

Dan West / LoveyDove

Dan West is a California based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He sings and plays bass in the psych powerpop trio Sidewalk Society, and sings and plays guitar in a band called LoveyDove with Azalia Snail. Between 2012 and 2014 he has also released two lo-fi garage pop albums under his own name.

danwest.bandcamp.com

loveydove.bandcamp.com

sidewalksociety.wordpress.com

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1. Jimmy Webb, Dusty Springfield - Magic Garden (EP, 1968)

One of Jimmy Webb's best in my opinion. Although this song was performed by The Fifth Dimension on the album of the same title in 1967, it is Dusty's version that I just love.

Her voice gives a melancholy lilt to the lyric as if to say that the magic garden really is a fantasy and ultimately, one must live in reality and only go to the magic garden when feeling down.

2. The Who - Pictures Of Lily (Single, 1967)

A brilliant, quirky masterpiece from Pete Townshend and the first recording by the Who to truly capture their raucous, careening sound as a band. Keith Moon's drumming is breathtaking, the lyric content sublime, especially as I heard this song for the first time during the early throes of puberty.

3. Elliott Smith - A Fond Farewell (From A Basement On A Hill, 2004)

A terrific example of Elliott Smith's haunting way with a melody and a lyric. What seems like a simple folk/pop song has an underpinning of wistful sadness and loss.

4. Nirvana - Serve The Servants (In Utero 1993)

Kurt Cobain says everything that needs to be said about his rapid rise to fame, his unhappy childhood and his tortured, unfulfilling relationship with Courtney Love in just 3 minutes. The lyrics to this song are in my opinion, among his best: 'Teenage angst has paid off well, now I'm bored and old, self appointed judges judge, more than they have sold.' Brilliant.

5. The Kinks - Phenominal Cat (The Village Green Preservation Society, 1968)

A lovely caricature of the type Ray Davies built a career on, this time about a cheshire-like cat that sits in a tree and eats contentedly after having traveled the farthest reaches of the world.

6. Azalia Snail - Honeysuckle (Avec Amor, 2005)

Sexy, intelligent, and rockin' to its core, this honest look at the dilemma of loving someone who is sucking the life out of you is a classic. 'Honey don't suck me dry, honeypie I'm stuck in drive.'

7. Bob Dylan / The Byrds - All I Really Want To Do (Another Side Of Bob Dylan, 1964 / Mr. Tambourine Man, 1965)

Whether it's the Bob Dylan version or the Byrds version, this song always brings a tear to my eye. Another example of Dylan's limitless ability to say what few others know how to say....'All I really want to do is baby, be friends with you.' Absolutely beautiful.