Mark Robinson, Coffin Prick, Les Sewing Sisters

Mark Robinson is an indie-rock musician from Washington, D.C. who founded Teen-Beat in 1984. Best known for founding Unrest (with Phil Krauth and Tim Moran), he has also been a member of Air Miami, Flin Flon, Grenadine, and currently plays with Evelyn Hurley (Blast Off Country Style) in Cotton Candy and also with D. Trevor Kampmann as Fang Wizard.
He has released a number of solo records. His recordings are typically sparse, often based around a carefully controlled guitar.

Over and through the hot cement of North East L.A., an almost-dry riverbed winds like a snake through the city. Coyotes lap at its trickling stream by moonlight, as pedestrians rush past it by day without a second glance, their thoughts tangled up in the distractions of life in a sprawling metropolis. Here, amongst the many avenues and gentle hills, we find Coffin Prick (alias: Ryan Weinstein).
Loose Enchantment, this latest Coffin Prick record, is music conceived of in a different frame of mind for humans living in a world nearly-disenchanted with itself. The album consists of eleven new pieces of music recorded by Coffin Prick himself at his home in Los Angeles, a great city of quicksand-like commitments and those who love them enough to uphold the ends of their collective bargains. A record as much about the confusion of modern life as it is endeavored to expose the lusts in the very loins of creation. Sounds enchanting enough for you? Let’s look a little more closely…
Coffin Prick primarily records on his own, though occasionally receives great collaborative assistance from a sometimes-silent and shadowy partner, Pancho. When the time is right, he leans on a host of harmonically sympathetic luminaries that exist in and out of his immediate musical community. These musical endeavors implement elements of the technologically advanced and the undeniably broken. Equally informed by the not-so-distant past as imaginary future scenarios, his ongoing recorded life continues to mine this deep well. Not so much a “solo” performer as an idea, Coffin Prick is a malleable form whose potential is concurrently cemented and unknown.
On the heels of 2023’s Laughing (Sophomore Lounge), Coffin Prick got busy. And fast. Playing shows into the year with a newly minted live band, while simultaneously working day and night in his home studio laying the ground for what would become Loose Enchantment. Whereas he was essentially a recording know-nothing at the inception of his last LP, he’d learned a thing or two about better capturing his ideas by this point, taking the sidesteps and victories born of the experience Laughing provided and turning the bright lights on them. As many of Los Angeles’s drivers choose to do, it was time to take some surface roads. Odes to self-delusion, the mysteries of creation, cleanliness, and the secrets in other people’s lives.
A little Loose Enchantment for everyone, basically.

Sewing is putting two things together. Ever since the Paleolithic era, humans have been stitching between fur and skin clothing as well as using animal body parts. The invention of the sewing machine in the 19th century led to the introduction of manufacturing clothing. Little did historians knew that in 2020, Les Sewing Sisters would make music out of the 20th-century sewing machine. Like fastening fabric or objects together, Lun*na and Saori sew sewing machine sounds to the human voice. With every song about the making of clothes, the machinery of manufacturing clothing, and of course, the existential problem of what to wear? Les Sewing Sisters is the Sound of Now.
The revolutionary aspect of Les Sewing Sisters is that they take a 19th-century machine, the sewing machine, and turn it into an instrument for the 21st-century. Nothing has been this dynamic since the Ventures introduced the popularity of the electric guitar to Japan in the early 1960s. A machine that made women (the primary users of the sewing machine in the early days) free from dreary and time now is used in sound. Every song deals with the nature of clothing, or making clothes, or the old existential problem of what to wear? Lun*na and Saori (Les Sewing Sisters) look back to the industrial age to make noise and pop songs for the Sound of ‘Now.’
Ever since the Paleolithic era, humans have been stitching between fur and skin clothing as well as using animal parts. The invention of the sewing machine in the 19th century led to the introduction of manufacturing clothes. I can’t imagine Isaac Merritt Singer in 1851, thinking that his sewing machine in the faraway future (2020, to be exact) will be a musical instrument. Or that two women from Japan, Lun*na Menoh, and Saori Mitome (Les Sewing Sisters), would be producing noise from the machines to make exciting pop music. Every song on “Les Sewing Sisters” is based on the theme of clothes, either sewing clothes, the nature of cashmere, and of course, the existential problem of what to wear? It has been a long journey from the first musical instrument, the simple flute (67,000 years ago) to the electric sewing machine. What you hear on this album is noise from sewing machines, that is fine-tuned via computer, and the human voice. There are no guitars, drums, Synths - just voices, and the beautiful sound of the sewing machine. Lun*na and Saori looked back to the industrial age when the sewing machine came to existence and looking onward to making the ‘now’ sound of Les Sewing Sisters.

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