No. 23 Jessica Bailiff and Alan Sparhawk

And I'm back. May is always a bit hellish work-wise, so time has been in short supply. Yes I know there's a week's holiday in there somewhere but we were camping in moderately wild Devon, in the land beyond Wi-Fi and 3G.

Firstly, there will be those that challenge whether this is in the correct place alphabetically (hello, Mark). By my reckoning it goes under B for Bailiff, rather than S for Sparhawk, V for various artists or (definitely not) J for Jessica. There are those misguided folk who might be tempted to file it under L for Low, but that would clearly be deeply wrong.

Having said that, the reason this is in the collection is because of the Low connection. Sparhawk is one third of Low and has been something of a champion of Bailiff's slow-core influenced music. It was he who first alerted Kranky, Bailiff's regular label, of her earliest demos.

I know relatively little of this single, released on Ypsilanti Records in 2001. Crush, Version 2 is a reworking of a track from her second album, 1999's Hour Of The Trace, whilst the B-side, Highwire, is a Marc Bolan composition. Sound-wise this is fairly typical of her shoe-gaze-y, slow-core sound; slightly buried vocals, drone synths and a glacial pace. It's not surprising that she's collaborated with the likes of His Name Is Alive and Flying Saucer Attack - they're working with a similar sonic palette. 

I can't find a copy of the single version anywhere, but here's the original; a lovely thing it is too!