
Earlier this month we ran a feature about the reissue of Gary Sloan and Clone’s “Harmonitalk.” Sloan, a long-time fixture in the Anchorage blues scene before relocating to Arkansas, was playing Blues Central that week and played the Live After Five concert series last week at Town Square Park.
“Harmonitalk” was an anomaly in the Sloan discography, an experimental foray into synthesizers and vocoders that was originally released in 1980. It’s the sort of curiously strange record that fits right at home on the label Finders Keepers, which specializes in plucking these kinds of records from obscurity.
The album is out now, and a reviewer for Dusted Magazine, a website known for championing strange records, kept coming back to one idea – that this is one weird album.
If a weirder album than Harmonitalk comes out this year, then whatever it is will go down in history as one of the most bonkers records ever. This strange and unfathomable album, dug up by the guys at the ever-wonderful Finders Keepers, is about as peculiar … as they come. It should probably come as no surprise, then, that Harmonitalk was originally released not in 2012, but at the height of the synth-pop craze in 1981, when just about every musical idea conceivable, no matter how absurd, was brought that much closer to reality by virtue of artists having access to cheap and nasty synthesizers. For Gary Sloan and his buddies, that meant electronica backing, um, a harmonica.
Read the full review here.
Below is the title track, and the whole thing is streamable on Spotify.


