State Laughter

First heard about O'Shea from an excellent Wire biography that my friend Aaron from Cottaging/Albert Demuth gave me. Its enough for me just to have Wire involved with something, but even the minimal paragraphs written about O'Shea had my mind running. Reading the liners on this reissue brought another layer of depth to O'Shea. From the Wire bio i took away that he was a drunken transient (maybe partially true?) that would pop in and out of the landscape. O'Shea's music was seemingly much more worldly and calculated then i had first understood it, not that i would enjoy it any more or less. O'Shea plays a sort of dulcimer that he hand built to his own design (out of a door, chopsticks, and 17 strings) that is equipped with pickups and electronics for him to further manipulate its sound in the guise of eastern instruments like the sitar that he was fascinated with. He even played with Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry among others. This one album was recorded by Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis after an invitation that seemingly would never be redeemed until O'Shea showed up on the doorsteps one day and they recorded what you hear here.