Flying high again ,(as the Double O once sang), I have the feeling there just might be an outbreak of things Skin Graft related earfood and eyecandy on these fractured pages in the next days and weeks. Skin Graft are, if we really we’re to be pinned down, the finest of all record labels, one of those labels that you just know you can always trust, one of those rare rare things, a record label that just never ever lets you down, Right now we’re gearing up for that tasty looking Chicago vs New York compilation as well as the fact that it looks like Eric Paul’s (Arab On Radar, Doomsday Student) new band Psychic Graveyard will be touring Europe in May – right after their debut LP comes out. More about both of those releases in the next few days as well as the fact that you probably saw that Koenjihyakkei will be playing London on May 12th

.Now one of the very best things to be unleashed via Skin Graft back there was a monster of a band called The Flying Luttenbachers, it was love at first note when that first package dropped through the Organ letter box back there somewhere in the last century, they’re a band who, in all their forms have always been right up there at the very top our musical mountain (up there alongside Cardiacs, Van Der Graaf Generator and a very very small select list of the very very very best).

The Flying Luttenbachers came to what we all thought was a final end back around 2007, but hey, we all know nothing ever ends when it comes to bands, and while most of them really should really know that they’re past their sell-by-date and just let it all lie, the return of Weasel Walter and his band for some live shows last year (or was it the year before, life is flying by) was more that welcome, and now, and now they’re properly back with a new album, another evolution and a indeed European tour (a tour that takes in a London gig on our street, don’t you just love it when your favourite bands play within a stones throw of your front door at Hackney’s Moth Club on April 5th) .

“The Flying Luttenbachers are more of an idea than a band. Just as Robert Fripp has steered King Crimson through countless line-ups and styles during the past 50 years, Luttenbachers drummer, composer and sole consistent member Weasel Walter rebooted his group constantly during its initial 1991–2007 run, typically re-emerging each time with a whole new sound and set of collaborators. Depending on when you were tuning in to the project — whose odd moniker came from Harold Luttenbacher, the birth name of original horn player Hal Russell— you might have heard No Wave–influenced punk-jazz, hyper-detailed metallic prog or a warped, DIY take on 20th-century classical”. We’re blatantly stealing some of this from somewhere else, the Luttenbachers have of course been extensively covered on our pages as well as our various radio shows over the last twenty-five or so years, they’re our idea of radio friendly pop music. .

“Once the ball got rolling with the band in the Nineties,” Walter told saxophonist and sometime collaborator Chris Pitsiokos during a fascinating three-hour radio profile in 2014, “I felt like it had this pseudo-mythological thrust and I felt like I was a lunatic and I felt like I was a warrior and that this was my band of warriors and that we had to go on these different sort of like assaults to prove our points. In 2017, after a decade-long break during which he focused on free improv and avant-garde rock projects like Cellular Chaos and Behold… the Arctopus, Walter reactivated the Luttenbachers for a week’s worth of shows in France. Last year brought yet another new lineup, with saxophonist Matt Nelson, guitarist Brandon Seabrook and bassist Tim Dahl. This quartet made its recorded debut in January with a reworking of an old Luttenbachers track, slated for an upcoming compilation from Skin Graft Records, which released several of the band’s Nineties albums. (Full disclosure: A band I play in also appears on the compilation and will release an album via Skin Graft.) This week, the current group is unveiling Shattered Dimension, an album of all-new music and the first Flying Luttenbachers LP in 12 years”.

Ahead of the record’s Friday release on Walter’s very on ugEXPLODE Records, you can stream the third track, “Epitaph,” right here:

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