Solex Vs. the Hitmeister ~ Solex  (2)  £7.99

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1. Pick Up

2. Randy Costanza

3. Dark At 12 O'clock

4. That's What You Get With People Like That On Cruises Like Th

5. Oh Blimey

6. Burglars Are Coming

7. Superfluity

8. Snappy And Cocky

9. Five Star Shamberg

10. Chris The Birthday Boy

11. Athens Ohio

12. Escargot

13. Another Tune Like Not Fade Away

14. That'll Be $22.95

Amazon.co.uk Review
The way that Elisabeth Esselink, aka Solex, creates her très moderne dance music is both disarmingly simple and ingenuous. ForPick Up, her second album, the songstress holed out underneath a second-hand record store in Amsterdam for three months, venturing out only to bootleg live concerts (classical, jazz, pop) on her hand-held tape recorder. To these samples--cut-up and cleverly dispersed--were added live drum pattens and a curiously disembodied female voice, plus a few off-kilter atmospheric noises. The result is bewitching and genuinely disorientating. Tracks like the chunky "Dork At 12 O'Clock" and bewildering "That'll Be $22.95" sound like a disco-fied, stilted take on Japanese high-voiced pop, with the surface gloss and sheen amplified to the nth degree. You could call Elisabeth the female Beck ... only she's way too original for easy comparisons. Excellent. --Everett True

Description
The music of Solex couldn't have originated anywhere else but in the basement of a secondhand record shop, what with its mish-mash of musical styles, sounds, and samples from the farthest reaches of time and musical space. PICK UP seems tofollow no discernible pattern as it creates a musical pastiche of various beats, bleats, and instrumental colourings that range from everything from a calliope to power tools.
Elisabeth Esselink did indeed get the spark for Solex by experimenting with an 8-track machine in the bowels of her Dutch store. Furthermore, her music exhibits the sheer energy and joy of a music fanatic running up and back down the creakystairs with every obscure record she could find to drop into the mix, along with a few better-known LPs, say Sugarcubes, Kurt Weill, and Jacques Brel. To sweeten the deal, Esselink layers on her own urgent and imploring vocals, pealing outabstract stories that form a seamless pastiche of their own.