His Name Is Alive — Livonia (2024 Remaster)
Qobuz reissue review (Sept. 2024)
His Name Is Alive mastermind Warren Defever originally wanted to call his 1990 debut album 17619 Woodside, Livonia, Michigan, 48152, the actual, full address of the home he shared with his parents. Thankfully, someone at 4AD talked him out of it, reasonably predicting that the odds of a highly invested and possibly overemotional fan showing up at Defever’s doorstep were better than even. Still, that idea not only illuminates just how intense, naive, and slightly delusional the then-20-year-old Defever was, but it also points directly and exactly to the wellspring of the music on what would become Livonia. Defever had been making music since he was an early teen, and nearly all of it was recorded by him alone (with guest vocalists) on rudimentary equipment in the basement of his childhood home. It was sparse by necessity, but it was also highly individual. Guilelessly blending DIY noise, ambience, melodrama, more noise, and a distinctly impetuous formlessness that spoke to the way he constantly explored new idea after new idea, Defever was less concerned with finesse and fine-tuning than just getting the sounds in his brain onto a tape. These early recordings were compiled into cassette releases, but were all promptly rejected when sent to labels as demos. However, 4AD label boss Ivo Watts-Russell expressed just enough admiration for the material in his rejection that Defever’s response was to remix and re-send it to him not once, but twice. (Again, “intense, naive, and slightly delusional.”) The third version of the tape prompted Watts-Russell to ask Defever to stop working on it and, instead, let him take a crack at editing it. The result was Livonia. And, while it was reworked and remixed by a label head, there’s no universe in which Livonia was built for mass appeal. Instead, Watts-Russell helped sharpen and clarify Defever’s disparate and sprawling sound into something distinct and immersive, while fully embracing its weirdness and abrasiveness. The result is less a collection of songs (or even “pieces”) than it is an extended soundscape: equal parts proto-shoegaze, musique concrete, ethereal goth-pop, squally feedback, lo-fi folk, and more. It was utterly uncategorizable and continues to be one of the most unique and individualistic releases in a label catalog full of them. This expanded edition tacks on four versions of Livonia tracks that Defever re-recorded in 1999 with a string quartet, as well as the title track which, wildly, only appeared as a bonus track when the album was reissued domestically by Rykodisc.
