Some new finds!
Star Power: this Los Angeles band sounds great! The band just released on Bandcamp an 8 song album called “The Fragrant Year” and it is quite a surprise to me. Where did they come from? Would be fantastic to find out more about them. What do I know? That they are a four piece formed by Mark Nakamura, Jeffrey Eloriaga, Luke Cook and Blake Cook and that they sound pretty good.
The Catherines: the Hamburg band is so prolific. They get featured on the blog all the time. Their latest is a digital single with three songs, “Please Don’t Freak Out While You Drive My Car”, “Jingle Jangle” (a cover of The Archies original) and “Good Golly Goo – I never Thought that I Could Love Someone as Much as I Love You” (a piano/vox version of their first ever single). Very enjoyable jingle jangly music!
Un Día Soleado: just one song by this Argentinean band from the city of Viedma. The song is titled “La Lluvia Vuelve a Caer (demo)” and it is a lovely piece of bedroom lo-fi tweepop, the sort that we used to listen in the mid 2000s. The song is available on Hikkomori Discos as a digital single.
Flaüta/Fotograma Lunar: exploring other releases on this Argentinean label I find this digital split EP by these two bands. Each contribute two songs, Flaüta has “Pensar Mucho” and “A Veces te Encuentro en Canciones” while Fotograma Lunar contributes “Pero Ahora Sé” and “El Final”. The songs are upbeat lo-fi bedroom indiepop, though I must say Flaüta is my favourite of the two.
Cloud Babies: how pretty this 4 song EP sounds. It is called “Message in a Bottle” and is being released on tape by this wonderful Kyoto band that took their name from a Blueboy song. The band is just two people, Masami and Sachi who each wrote 2 songs. This is very very pretty. I just hope it gets a vinyl or CD release so I can have a copy and play it home!
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Orans, a loanword from Medieval Latin ōrāns translated as one who is praying or pleading, also orant or orante, is a posture or bodily attitude of prayer, usually standing, with the elbows close to the sides of the body and with the hands outstretched sideways, palms up.
Today is the turn for the letter O. For the O at first I thought featuring One Night Suzan but it seems that the Greek band will be releasing a new retrospective very soon. So I will try to interview them for the blog. Another O band? Orange Juice? Oh we know a lot about them. What about the Orans? I know very little about them!
When I interviewed Tim Alborn of Harriet Records I asked him about Orans as I knew nothing really about them aside that the band released one 7″ on his label. He told me: “Orans was Julie and Ramona from Twig, and by 1998 they had a falling out, leaving Julie all by herself in Balloon Chase Team on the “Friendly Society” compilation. So she holds the record for being in four different Harriet bands. ”
I know little about Twig, even less about Balloon Chase Team. I’ll start trying to figure out Orans first.
Orans released their 7″ in 1996 on Harriet Records (Harriet 039). It had three songs, “Windfall” on the A side and “Paper” and “Windshield Wipers” on the B side. All three songs were recorded at The Cold Room in Boston, MA, during August of that yea by Hugh O’ Donovan who also produced the record.
The record came with a square info sheet. That’s how we know that Julie Kantner was on lead vocals and guitar, Ramona Herboldsheimer on drums and vocals and Jerry Kyn on guitar. The pretty art that the jacket has was created by Eleanor Ramsay.
So yes, Ramona was in Twig with Julie, but she also was part of the band The Lothars. Julie was on Twig and also in Fertile Virgin , Balloon Chase Team and Uranium Daughters. Jerry Kyn was involved with Toetag, Kozik and Crimson Ghosts.
There is very little about the band on the web. I did find a mention on John Hovorka’s website. Here he mentions that in 1996 he, Ramona and Julie were starting a “Noise Pencil cover band” that was to be called Noise Pencil II. It seems it didn’t work in the end.
Aside from that there’s not much on the web. Did they only record 3 songs? It is hard to believe. No compilation appearances either. I wonder what happened to them. Why did they split?
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Listen
Orans – Windfall
4 Responses to “:: Orans”
There’s a long interview with Julie Kantner from 2019 on the Don’t Let’s Start podcast site, run by fans of They Might Be Giants.
https://www.stitcher.com/show/dont-lets-start-a-podcast-about-they-might-be-giants/episode/15-interview-with-julie-kantner-from-the-turtlenecks-60469681
Kantner dishes no dirt on former bandmates, and only mentions Orans in passing.
I was a big Fertile Virgin fan back in the day, and I think the Orans songs are fine. It’s too bad the vocals aren’t more audible.
Since Julie Kantner has been so generous in making the contents of her archives available on Bandcamp — including material from three of the four bands Tim mentions in the interview — it’s fair to wonder why the three songs from Orans don’t appear anywhere online except for poor-sounding mp3s on YouTube. The energy of the band and the charm of the songwriting are obvious, even when they get crushed under the heavy-handed production.
Despite what Tim reports, both drummer Ramona Herboldsheimer and guitarist Jerry Kyn from Orans played in Kantner’s subsequent project, Balloon Chase Team. (One of Jerry’s ex-Toetag colleagues, Keith Arcari, joined BCT on bass.) Their single “The Other Shoe” b/w “Clip Clop of Doom” was produced by Dave Minehan of the Neighborhoods, and sounded a lot cleaner than the Orans cuts.
It seems likely Ramona bailed after that, basically around the time Tim closed Harriet Records down.
Orans had a six-song EP on tape, as well as the Paper/Windfall 45. The tape won the Boston Phoenix’s Demo Derby.
I remember hearing that Julie was so disappointed with the band’s performance at Terrastock in 1997 that she didn’t play live again for many years. That may account for their material not showing up on her Bandcamp collection.
Julie Kantner had a busy summer on Bandcamp, releasing not just a collection of new Uranium Daughters songs but also a whole set of material from Orans and one from Balloon Chase Team.
According to her Facebook post about the Orans release: “I needed some distance from these songs before I could listen to them again and I guess more than a couple of decades will do it.”