Soul-Junk
Also credited as Soul Junk
San Diego, California20 reviews across 8 releases
Soul-Junk is a San Diego project formed in 1993 by Glen Galloway, who adopted the name Glen Galaxy after leaving Trumans Water. Its early records combined low-fi indie rock with free-jazz noise, while Galaxy delivered Bible passages in an unpolished singing style. 1953, released in 1996, still used guitars as its anchor but moved between catchy rhythmic songs and psychedelic noise. By 1956 in 2000, the music had shifted toward hip-hop, electronic programming, jungle rhythms, drum and bass, and playful rap, with Galaxy criticizing church legalism as readily as he praised Jesus. 1957 pushed the experiments further, burying the lyrics under samples and orchestration, while 1958 in 2003 made the dense production more coherent without becoming conventional. The records remained explicitly Christian and resistant to stable genre boundaries.
By 2005, Slo-Ro's period as a regular collaborator had ended, leaving Galaxy to carry Soul-Junk forward in a more solitary form. The next major turn came in 2007, when he released 1959, built from Psalms 1 through 23 set to music rather than from the rap-centered approach of the earlier records. 1960 followed in 2009 and set all 22 sections of Psalm 119, with Galaxy joined by his son Jude on drums and his daughter Mila. The project later continued with 1961 in 2012. Soul-Junk therefore moved from a loose San Diego ensemble toward a family-assisted vehicle for Galaxy's long-running effort to record biblical text, while retaining the numbered titles and homemade experimental method that had marked its first decade.
