FADER PREMIERE
Based out of a town called Leiden in The Netherlands, Spike Wolters is a little-known singer-songwriter who recorded four private press LPs full of odd but beautiful, psychedelic drum-machine pop in the mid-'80s. According to New York-based label Golf Channel Recordings, who recently released a sixteen-track collection of songs from those releases, he's a "conscious objector to nearly everything," and a rare Dutch citizen who earned the right to unemployment benefits for life after categorically refusing to have a day job. Per an interview he did recently for Juno, he's also been "stoned every day since March 1973," and counts Steven Spielberg as an influence alongside Woodstock-era wonders like Hendrix and Santana. I think you can almost hear those influences, respectively, in the cinematic synth swells and raging guitar riffage of "Magic Table"; but there's something quirky and demo-like about the totally unprocessed metric beat that he's playing over, and dude's clearly got a heart-string-pulling melodic sensibility all his own. Orange Cloud Nine is out November 4th.
Stream: Spike, "Magic Table"