Anna Butterss - Mighty Vertebrate

 

Anna Butterss — Mighty Vertebrate

Limited edition 140-gram "Skull" colored vinyl

Lacquers cut by Daniel K. at SST

Pressed at Pallas in Germany

Heavyweight reverse-board jacket with Obi strip and poly-lined inner sleeve

Mighty Vertebrate is the International Anthem leader debut from Adelaide, Australia-born bassist and composer Anna Butterss.

Butterss has steadily become a first-call for tour and studio work since moving to Los Angeles (after a stint in Bloomington, Indiana) in 2014. They've racked up credits with notables across the indie, jazz, and pop worlds alike — including Makaya McCraven, Phoebe Bridgers, Jason Isbell, Andrew Bird, and Daniel Villarreal — but their most notable contributions to the burgeoning West Coast creative music scene have been as a core member of both Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet and rising proto-trance supergroup SML, who Pitchfork says "represents the thrilling next phase of a vibrant L.A. community."

Their first solo album, Activities, was similarly hailed by Pitchfork as "one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022," but the improvise-edit-reconstruct method used on that record couldn't be further from the foundation of 'Mighty Vertebrate', which began amid the very real challenge of threading solo work into the dense calendrical web of an in-demand collaborator.

"I had just gotten off of a bunch of touring at the end of 2022 and just wanted to write music," says Butterss. "The best way for me to do that, I've found, is to set myself a discrete and focused task."

- I'm going to make a song where the bass doesn't function in the role of a bass.
- I'm going to work on this for an hour and then I'm going to stop.
- I'm going to make a song that uses groups of three-bar phrasing.
- I want to sample something and make it into a song.
- I'm going to start with a drum machine.

"Every song was like that," they continue. "Then once I got started I just followed where my mind wanted to go. It was very structured."

The music itself reflects that structure beautifully, with the material being tightly composed and melodically realized by Butterss well in advance of production concerns. They eventually migrated the operation to Chris Schlarb's Long Beach hideaway BIG EGO to track a selection of full band material. With Schlarb at the controls they reconvene a group of trusted longtime collaborators to bring their compositions to fruition: Josh Johnson (sax), Gregory Uhlmann (guitar), and Ben Lumsdaine (drums, guitar, production).

"I am definitely hearing this group when I'm writing the music or thinking of how it's going to be played live," Butterss notes. "I'm hearing these specific people. They're going to understand what this is supposed to feel like. We're not going to have to talk about it much. It's just going to feel very natural, which it was."

 

 

 

1. Bishop

2. Shorn

3. Dance Steve (Feat. Jeff Parker)

4. Ella

5. Lubbock

6. Pokemans

7. Breadrich

8. Seeing You

9. Counterpoint

10. Saturno

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