Sparkling Rope by Lud

In late 1997, as Lud entered a new era, we released our second album, Sparkling Rope.
At this point, I had moved back to Chapel Hill and was living on Dodsons Crossroads in the former White Cross Post Office, which had been moved from its location on NC 54 in front of what is now The Kraken when the highway was widened.
All of the copies of Sparking Rope were assembled on the kitchen table there. We wrote out the spines by hand and put little flowers in the CD cases. The art was a couple of collages, outside was from a 1959 edition of Britannica and inside from a Zapatista encampment I photographed in Mexico City in 1991. The covers are in an array of hues, predominately a yellow series and a blue series.
Sparkling Rope was recorded over about a year at the Yellow House. Yellow Recording expanded during that time from the control room and Lud rehearsal space into a third, much larger area. This allowed for an all in the room set up. Mike and Bryon had improved the gear, especially mics and perfected techniques to coax a good sound out of an old funky house. Everything was recorded on a one-inch 16-track machine.
Like most Lud records Sparkling Rope veers wildly and unapologetically between genres — Classic Lud, Folk Rock Lud, New Music Lud and for the first time a kind of quirky Dance Lud. Very rebellious in mid-1990s Chapel Hill.
The lineup of the band shifted during the recording. Drummer Graham Harris left the band in 1995 to concentrate on her own group and Evans Nicholson took over on drums. We also added a bass player, Bill Graham, who was with us for two years including the early sessions for the record. Both of them helped drive the band in a new direction. Bill, who inspired a lot of the improve and new music work, left after the initial sessions and original Lud co-founder Paul Price returned from Africa and rejoined the band on bass.
So complicated. But it all worked out.
This is Sara Bell’s first Lud album. She has been on every Lud record since and has been playing bass and singing with us since 2012. She plays bowed banjo on In the Sea and sings on Immigration and Ritalin Time.
Other guest stars on Sparkling Rope include Mike Beard on oboe for Lobster and Melissa Swingle on harmonica for Sadie.
Mike and Bryon engineered and mixed it and Chris Stamey mastered it.
The songs were written by Bryon and I and as soon as I can reconstruct all the lyrics, I’ll post them here.

Lud is a band in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. We started around 1993 and have played shows and recorded records ever since

Facebook