- Typical signifiers of music-nerd cool fly out the window when it comes to Balearic music, at least the version pioneered by innovators like Alfredo. Cuts like Chris Rea's "Josephine" and Laid Back's "Fly Away / Walking In The Sunshine" are as cheesy as they are beautiful. Workdub, the virtually unknown St. Louis duo comprising Virgil Work Jr. and Nicholas Georgieff, wrote some of the music on their self-titled Music From Memory 12-inch in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1989, parallel to the second summer of love. Workdub didn't have ecstasy-addled Ibizan vacationers on their minds when they made these four tracks, but their sound possesses a telltale "B word" drift.
While Workdub's music was technically private press, that doesn't mean the same thing as with, say, obscure acid-folk or one-off boogie records. Work's recent music, which includes MIDI covers of "Auld Syng Lang" and preset-sounding tunes like "Smooth Funk," sounds like something a talented, out-of-touch older guy would play outside the mall. In unearthing the duo's late-'80s and early-'90s material, though, Music From Memory has struck gold.
Work and Georgieff played their rhythms by hand, and as opening song "Island Breeze" gets moving, ambitious fills and glassy cowbells dip in and out the mix. It sounds like an excited, mechanical drum circle. The music possesses the charming not-quite-finished quality of other obscure synth funk, like New World Music's "Intellectual Thinking." When they explore dub, the duo hits on some deeply psychedelic moments. The appropriately plodding "Caravan" breaks down into a celestial harp solo not far from Iasos's headspace. It's tough to determine whether such wormholes were beginners luck, as Work's later music has an off-putting algorithmic sheen. On Workdub, however, they turn a post-Industrial city on the Mississippi into a Mediterranean island paradise.
TracklistA1 Island Breeze
A2 Caravan
B1 The Odyssey
B2 Caravan Revisited