Lost 80s art-funk: Savant
Now here is a genuine lost masterpiece from 1981, Seattle group Savant's sole 12" single, "Stationary Dance." And by lost I mean that bandleader and Palace of Lights label owner Kerry Leimer, who has reissued everything else he's done on CD and as digital downloads, has inexplicably skipped it. Savant is Leimer and friends; the credit list on the back cover made this impossible to pass up back in 1982:
K. LEIMER: SYNTHESIZERS, TAPES,
VOICE, GUITAR. DAVID KELLER: FRET-
LESS BASS, GUITARS, PERCUSSION.
JAMES KELLER DRUMKIT, GUITARS,
PERCUSSION. MARC BARRECA: SYN-
THESIZERS, TAPES. ROBERT CARL-
BERG: PERCUSSION, ENGINEERING.
How cool is that? Totally cool! Here's what it sounds like:
Savant's only album, The Neo-Realist (At Risk), released in 1983, features a mostly different lineup around Leimer. The music is in the same vein as "Stationary Dance," but doesn't come close to the viscerality of SD's rhythm. Savant is invariably compared to David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, but I find them only superficially similar. Leimer seems interested in rhythm more as mathematical pattern than anything else, while Byrne and Eno (and most everyone else) use it to encourage dancing. For a more detailed description of the The Neo-Realist, Leimer, and his Palace of Lights label, see Dennis Rea Music and Writings on Amazon; for a track list and full credits see Discogs.com. Leimer's other albums, as K. Leimer, are more ambient and experimental, and I don't remember enough about them to describe them any further. If you're interested, you can download a track from each album here.
Leimer disappeared from the music scene for most of the 90s. During that time he and his wife, Dorothy Cross (credited with Management on "Stationary Dance") were busy with their Leimer Cross Design Corporation, designing corporate annual reports, and quite successfully. But now he's back, making his early albums available in digital format and putting out new music (by himself and others) as well. If you can figure out how to navigate the Palace of Lights website you will find several tracks, some quite long, available for free downloading. You might even want to buy something...
