Another gorgeous sprawling collection of smoldering guitarscapes and warm liquid lysergic drones from Evan Caminiti, one half of psychedelic drone-doom-duo Barn Owl, and while West Winds does in fact touch on some of the same sonic territory as past solo efforts, it definitely moves in a much darker, much heavier direction, exploring blackened sonic vistas that have only been hinted at in Barn Owl but that have been gradually becoming more of a focal point on Caminiti's solo ventures. Which is obvious from the opening track, "Night Of The Archon", which begins all tranquil and serene, spidery tendrils of guitars unfurling in a reverbed expanse of billowing shimmer and layered chordal drift, before the guitars begin to rumble and grind, the distortion a living breathing thing, crumbling and glowing like sonic magma, moving glacially, and engulfing the sounds all around, spitting sparks of fragmented melody, before finally spiraling back to ground, the crush receding, leaving an ethereal cloud of chiming harmonics and distant hushed whirr.
But even with the darker vibe, and the heavier overall sound, none of the emotional resonance has been lost, even the heaving slabs of rumble and crush, are shot through with subtle harmonies, with lush layered textures, the tracks slipping from thick swells of almost post industrial sounding blackdrone to gorgeous Arvo Part sounding chorales, a constantly shifting landscape of hazy streaks of blurred melody, gauzy flecks of folk, soft tangles of reverbed twang, slow motion melodies rendered in thick slabs of coruscating guitar crunch, blissed out dronedrifts laced with almost pop like melodies, a little shoegazey, a little Morricone, a little Earth, a little SUNNO))), and a lot of Barn Owl, this is epic, expansive, highly personal music for the soul, evoking the desert, of starry nights and of the landscape painted red with the blood of an burnt orange sun, "Path To The Sea" is maybe the most propulsive, like the score to a post apocalyptic Leone flick, wheezing harmonium melodies over rumbling burnt black guitars, bits of twang laid upon a woozy almost Western lope, which leads directly into the 10+ minute closer "Black Desert Blooming", which does in fact live up to its title, the vibe arid and sun baked, the sound black and bleak, beginning as maybe the most harrowing and intense track on the record, only to blossom into the most abstract, the thick rumbling crush peeling away, leaving just soft swirls of layered guitars, to overlap and intertwine hypnotically, a minimal blurred loopscape, growing ever more indistinct, and ever more hushed, until even the guitars drift off, leaving a gradually dissipating cloud of blackened rumbles, of distant metallic blur, all keening and moaning and finally fading out completely.
LIMITED TO 600 COPIES, pressed on thick vinyl, housed in a gorgeous matte jacket with original artwork by Caminiti, includes a printed insert and a download card. Plus, it's available at aQ two weeks before the official release date!!
Latest solo record from Barn Owl and Higuma member Evan Caminiti, and one of the first releases on Handmade Birds, a new label launched by R. Loren of Pyramids, White Moth and Sailors With Wax Wings. When California Falls Into The Sea finds Caminiti ditching the billowing brooding drones of recent Barn Owl records, and the humid dronedrift twang of past solo efforts, and instead, stripping his sound way down, crafting something much more intimate and contemplative, abstract and atmospheric, as rife with space and drift as notes and chords, the tone is still dark, and the sound lush, and there is a bit of abstract twang, bit these tracks are more like smoldering folk flecked ragas, smoldering swells of crumbling melody, spare serene stretches of hushed shimmer, hazy sprawls of hushed melancholia, spidery guitars underpinned by distant swells, streaks of fragmented melody, all wreathed in delicate echo, swaddled in spacey reverb, the sound soft, and soft focus, crystalline and fragile, but infused with a dark energy, a subtle power, that transforms muted minimal thrum into a sort of blackened blues. The various sounds shot through with serpentine tendrils, the chords drifting apart, into blurred and smeared expanses of dark moonlit sound.
A fantastic collection of introspective electric guitar meditations, each a hushed and haunting, otherworldly and tranquil, meditative and mesmerizing blackened spectral emanation. And every one spectacularly lovely.
Definitely one of San Francisco's musical treasures, here's the country/jazz guitar master and band, with instrumentals inspired by robots, Pee Wee Herman, and the alien autopsy, along with versions of "Harlem Nocturne" and "Mr. Sandman"...wonderful. Fans of Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant will be happy (the pedal steel player is amazing!), and I could see folks into the likes of Man or Astroman? also digging this.
Here's a private pressing from the enigmatic project The Candlelight Service, whose various members have a very minimal public profile, consisting mostly of some ubiquitously uninformative Twitter accounts. But musically, this project, which seems to be centered around the production of one Josh Kinney and a host of female vocalists, is a pretty intriguing concoction of goth oriented italo-disco and downer-pop witch house vibes. The leading track "Alchemy" has the decadent emptiness of those Johnny Jewel produced disco tracks for Italians Do It Better (i.e. Chromatics, Glass Candy, Desire, etc.), furthered along by the cool detachment of vocalist Zoe DuFault. "Comfort" pushes a buzzingly punk guitar chord well into the distance behind a downtempo slink from the drum machines and blown out Nord synth lines to go along with the ice-queen vocals from Sierra DuFault, who seems to be the primary vocalist here, presenting more of a Karen O snarl and theatrical warble. The album works through its sparse arrangements for synth, drum machines, guitars, and vocals, with that minimal wave approach to the less is more production values. This is even true for the relatively noisy guitar track "Drink For You" which reprises another track on the album but with the gritty lo-fi goth vibe of Chelsea Wolfe. There's just 100 of these kicking around, and the lp does come with a cd-r of the whole record as well.
We were only able to get ten of these and odds are we won't be able to get more, so we'll keep this brief. Needless to say, you might want to grab one of these before they're gone, cuz the A side Finds Cantu-Ledesma unfurling a gorgeous slab of Lovesliescrushing style prismatic dreampop shimmer, skeletal rhythms suspended in crystalline fields of bleary sundappled rainbow synth swaddled guitartroniks, thick swaths of chordal thrum, whirls lazily over a warm billowy background of keening melodies and abstract ethereal ambience. Distorted and dreamily blown out, noisy, but a sort of gauzy soft focus noisiness that makes it sound like the sounds are melting into deliriously colorful fractals before your very ears. Some heady sonic confection for sure, and miles removed from the minimal contemplation of many of Cantu-Ledesma's other releases.
The flipside merges the two, the more subdued ambience of earlier works with the above mentioned blissed out 4AD blur/blear/bliss, the resulting track is a dark, Twin Peaks like drift, all lush soft swirls, fractured dubbed out rhythms, hazy sonic smears, all druggy and droney, a lovely lysergic comedown from the A side's more effervescent sonic swirl.
EXTREMELY LIMITED!!! These are very likely the only copies we'll ever get, includes a printed insert, and comes housed in a swank, thick, full color sleeve.
Only got a little handful of these. 150 copies total, already out of print and we have less than 10. Latest bit of ultra minimal bliss out dronemusic from Cantu, he of Tarentel, the Alps and the mighty Root Strata label. On Bloodstream Sermon, Cantu creates softly billowing stretches of lush shimmer, using only a Roland Juno 60 synth, a pure wave oscillator and a handful of electronics, each of the two tracks gorgeous and hazy and warm, soft swells of dreamlike sound, constantly shifting tones and overtones, utterly tranquil and hypnotic, the first side much more dense and layered, a thick undulating sprawl of deeeeeep tones. While the second side/track is more abstract, a bit more whir and glitch, ambient and almost industrial sounding. A blurred symphony of muted machine-like buzz and rumble, peppered with little glimmers of glitch, all wrapped in a gauzy patina of washed out thrum. So lovely.
Before we blather on like we so often do, it seemed like it might be good to just toss out a first impression of Love Is A Stream, the fantastic new record from Root Strata label Head Honcho Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, his first for the type label. And heck, that first impression might be all you need:
Lovesliescrushing meets Flying Saucer Attack.
There. Hard to argue with that. Warped warbly, blurred shoegazey drift, long stretches of incendiary psychedelic guitar drone, streaks of soft noise, buried melodies, ethereal vocals, lush layered textures, dense and explosive, expansive and dreamily hazy, and in its own way, gorgeously heavy.
A new side of Cantu-Ledesma for sure, whose past records seemed to hover in a much more tranquil serene otherworld, unfurling hushed landscapes of whispery minimalism, of delicate crystalline shimmer, and of barely there soft focus ambient drift. Love Is A Stream is anything but, a fiery, fierce, yet ultimately lush and washed out series of bold shoegaze dreamnoise experiments, not so much pop songs swathed in distortion and effects, as carefully crafted sonic impressions, a series of gorgeous miniature epics, each a brief expanse of prismatic hypnogogic psychedelia, every one a unique a roiling concoction of fuzzpopbliss and murky melodic churn. On the surface, the record plays out like a series of textures, from warm whirling hum, to crumbling blown out white noise blur, to grinding muted pulse and throb, to gauzy bleary haze, to thick billowy low end rumble, to superdistorted effects-drenched synthnoise, and yeah, you're reading right, this is in fact a noisy record, but it's an artfully crafted, carefully sculpted noise. A thick, billowing, warm and gloriously enveloping melodic noise, like sinking into a swirling sea of burnished muted crush, a nearly overwhelming avalanche of whirling swirling crumbling throb and thrum, beneath it all lurk delicate melodies, tendrils of minor key guitar, ghostly voices, whirring synths, they rise to the surface here and there, but for the most part exist as shadowy impressions, infusing the noisy textures with a melodic core, a warm glowing sonic heart, which is what transforms these heaving slabs of shoegazey heaviness into something divine, and divinely dreamy.
There are brief moments, where the surface noise, and the distortion, and the walls of effects peel back, and we get to peek behind the curtain, which reveals the lush minimal underpinnings of the songs, a brief melodic smear here, a hushed little fragment of guitar there, but a glimpse is all we get, and really all we want, because it's how those bits of minimal songcraft interact with the intense sonic effulgence that is truly the magic that Cantu-Ledesma wields in conjuring up the sounds here. And like all magic, the joy is not in how it was done, but it how it makes us feel.
The lp version comes with a bonus cd, a collaboration with Type label mainman Xela, who took source material provided by Cantu-Ledesma, and fashioned his own bit of ambient dronemusic. Nearly 50 minutes of haunting drift, after a short burst of caustic super distorted crunch, Xela settles into a slow burning sprawl of washed out chordal shimmer, deep rumbling thrum and lush streaks of shoegazey buzz, a few moments as dense and psychedelic as the record proper, but for the most part, more of a chill out wind down coda, the perfect addendum to an already practically perfect record. Really quite lovely.
A brand new, brief and lovely missive from Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, frontman of Tarentel, member of The Alps, The Holy See, Two Suns, head honcho of the Root Strata label and a pretty handy drone alchemist on his own, this little 3" is no different.
Utilizing a borrowed autoharp and a handful of electronics, Phantom Harp is all glistening glimmering solar flares, shimmering sunlight filtered through green fields sparkling with dewdrops, a gorgeous soft focus glacial drift, an otherworldly, slowed down Appalachia, the chords slowly drifting apart, notes carried skyward like leaves on a summer breeze, sleep, bleary eyed dreaminess, which all gives way to a washed out, lugubrious lowercase smear of fluttering drones, and creeping moonlit fog, hushed and dreamy, an oceanic seascape of twinkling muted melody and near static shimmer. All arranged into a single twenty minute track, multiple movements woven into an epic organic constantly evolving sonic dreamscape. Gorgeous.
Packaged in a beautiful black on black fold over thick paper sleeve, inside a 3" cd in a tiny plastic jacket, and a printed insert.
LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES!!
Another super limited sonic transmission from right here in the Bay Area, from AQ fave Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, the man behind Tarentel, and the Root Strata label. Those familiar with Cantu-Ledesma's music, knows that he usually speakers in hushed whispers, breathy and breathless, soft sonic shimmers allowed to drift like billowy clouds into your ears. But here, CL is no longer whispering, instead he's breathing fire, his guitar a newly minted incendiary device. A sonic flame thrower, each track a layered assemblage of thick peals of sound, glowing tongues of distorted flame. A sonic assault more similar to Total or Sunroof! Than CL's usual output. Makes sense that the first song is dedicated to Pete Swanson of the Yellow Swans (who also mastered it).
But all of this talk of fire and flame shouldn't scare you off, there is still plenty of delicate beauty to be had, it's just wrapped in thick sheets of sonic napalm, the guitar effulgent and glowing white hot, the chords washed out and the distortion crumbling. Melodies are jagged and dripping with hissy buzz, each track a glacial guitarscape turning your speakers to ash.
There are a few tracks, almost half of the 8 here, that drift in a soporific haze, and hew closer to CL's usual aesthetic, but here, they sound less like individual pieces, and more like interludes, brief moments of tranquility, a chance to catch your breath, let your ears heal, allow time for your speakers to re-solidify, before launching the next buzzing crumbling divinely distorted salvo of gorgeous blown out guitar bliss.
Fans of stuff like Nadja, the Yellow Swans, Tim Hecker, the Angelic Process, Fear Falls Burning, will be quite pleased with Cantu-Ledesma's visit to the sonic dark side.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES. Packaged in full color cardboard sleeves, with printed inserts.
After a couple of super limited cd-r's and tapes, a release or two as Colophon, and a bunch as records as a member of the Alps and Tarentel, The Garden Of Forking Paths is Cantu-Ledesma's first proper full length, and it's a doozy. A subtle and immersive sound that belies the huge array of instruments used. Electric guitars, acoustic guitars, gong, sruti box, harmonium, singing bowl, cassette, microcassette, reel to reel tape machine, electronics, sound booster and ride cymbal, with help on one track with percussion, tapes and electronics. Somehow, all of those bits and baubles are melted down into a gorgeously lush, yet minimal series of slow crawls, deep rich drones, each adorned with subtle variations and bits of sonic color.
The multitude of tape machines used in the creation of this record gives the proceedings a raw, fuzzy analog vibe that definitely hits our Jeck-Hecker-Basinski spot. Fuzzy and indistinct, thick smeared sonic drifts, that occasionally glow with some sort of diffused inner light, but for the most part, slither darkly through the shadowy corners of your speakers. Here and there, some of the sound will spill from your speakers like black ink, shiny and shimmery, staining you ears with a mysterious darkness. The final track is the only track where you can hear the guitar, a mumbling buzzy melody buried way down in the mix, creeping through a moonlit landscape of shimmering warble and distant barely-there hum. A gorgeously murky minimal world of slow moving tape, vibrating metal, creaking buzz, whirling whispers and abstract dreamy drift.
Packaged in a cool, sleek oversized digipak style folder.
Second dvd collaboration from film maker Paul Clipson and Root Strata / Tarentel head honcho Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Another gorgeous and sonically blissed out tag team, Clipson's films this time around, again on Super-8, shot entirely in NYC, impressionistic shots of cityscapes, rolling hills, the texture of water, sun dappled evening skies, many of the shots textural, extreme close ups, patterns as much as images and shapes, sunspots, shadows, reflections, very active, the world flying past out the window of a train, power lines and bridges slipping out of eyeshot, setting suns and colored clouds, so lovely and dreamy.
Cantu-Ledesma offers up the perfect soundtrack, music culled from the same sessions that produced the huge aQ fave Shining Skull Breath, so even folks who don't care about the dvd, will want this for the sounds, which are thick and dense, whirring dronescapes, textured and layered, slipping from minimal shimmer to buzzing roar and back again, very much active, the intensity and propulsion of the sounds perfectly matching the motion of the visuals, in some cases, seemingly slowing it down, the drone dragging the landscape flashing by into sudden focus before letting it go again.
Either of these elements would be fantastic on their own, we can only imagine seeing these films projected against the side of a building, or on a huge movie screen, and these sounds would kill broadcast through some massive PA, the thick roiling drones washing over us, filling our ears with grit and grime, but together they work even better, even just viewed on the tiny screen of our computer, sonically and visually evoking all sorts of deep feelings and lost memories, of places never visited, of better times, of lost loves and of a past that keeps slipping further and further away. So lovely.
Packaged in an folded up origami style vellum sleeve with a printed insert. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES! Already sold out at the label so these are the last copies EVER!
In the age of YouTube and MySpace, the idea of the music video has changed dramatically since the days of MTV (or at least the days when MTV actually played videos). In the past, only bands on major labels could make a video, often hiring a real director and dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, plenty of bands have videos before they even have a record out. Super 8, digital video, Final Cut Pro, anyone can put together their own video and have it look as good if not better than the classic videos of old.
Old news maybe, but the thing is, most bands seems to use the video as simply a promotional tactic, or an excuse to fuck around and film it. Instead of, dare we say, ART. In the underground though, it's not at all uncommon for like minded musicians and filmmakers to join forces. In fact, with the advent of live performances featuring laptops and other sedimentary sound making devices (when is someone gonna make a laptop guitar, so left out laptoppers can windmill and leap about with the rest of the band?), often it's the accompanying films that are way more compelling. Often, a show is touted as some band performing "with films by so and so", but in fact, more often than not, it plays out more like seeing a film, that just so happens to feature live accompaniment by some band.
Few labels have really taken advantage of this new technology as much as Root Strata, who have quietly and steadily been releasing a series of super limited dvd-r's, each featuring new compositions by a small handful of artists, coupled with original films. The results have been pretty sublime, the films tending toward the abstract and impressionistic, the music following suit. When watching / listening to these, it's hard not to imagine laying on the floor, propped up on cushions, lights low, the film being projected on a huge blank wall, the band hunkered over their instruments in the corner, which makes sense as that's most likely how these films/sounds were conceived.�
So we have two new super limited dvd-r releases, one from Zelienople and one from Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Paul Clipson, both limited to 100 copies, both already out of print, so these are the only copies we'll ever get.�
This is the third collaboration between filmmaker Paul Clipson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, who also plays in Tarentel, and runs Root Strata with his partner Maxwell Croy.�
The Phantom Harp, as the title might lead you to believe, is in fact a reworking of the piece of the same name, originally released as a 3" cd-r and now out of print. Not only has the piece been reworked, but no it is accompanied by Clipson's gorgeous abstract images. The Phantom Harp is a super minimal sun dappled stretch of glimmering shimmering dreaminess, soft notes float like leaves in the summer sun, smears of high end wreath each note in glimmering sonic haloes, the pace is glacial, the melodies stretched out over minutes instead of seconds, a little ambient, a little new age, a little free drone, all deftly blurred into one smoldering sonic dreamscape. The visuals are super striking, and manage to fit perfectly with the sounds, all black and white, images of rain slicked streets, sun shining through the treetops, car headlights at night, images sometimes overexposed, blurred, superimposed, but mostly left to just play out, cityscapes, buildings, people rushing to and fro, light reflecting on water, shapes and textures, walls, grills, neon signs, restaurants, a soft, a dreamy faded super-8 travelogue. So nice.
Packaged in printed, folded papers sleeves, and again, LIMITED TO ONLY 100 COPIES, and already out of print.
Finally available, this long in the works compilation of the various collaborations between super 8 filmmaker Paul Clipson and musician Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, he of Tarentel and the Alps as well as one half of the team that runs the Root Strata label. Many (if not all) of these collaborations were previously available as ultra limited dvd-r's, some so limited (as in 50 copies!) we only got a handful, some so limited we never got ANY. This is the first time they've all been compiled on a proper REAL dvd (not a dvd-r), and we're the only store that has the ultra limited version which comes with a bonus 3" cd-r, but more on that in bit.
First, let's talk about the films and the music included here. First, The Phantom Harp from 2007. The Phantom Harp, was in fact a reworking of the piece of the same name, originally released as a 3" cd-r and long out of print. The reworked version found the music accompanied by Clipson's gorgeous abstract images. The Phantom Harp is a super minimal sun dappled stretch of glimmering shimmering dreaminess, soft notes float like leaves in the summer sun, smears of high end wreath each note in glimmering sonic haloes, the pace is glacial, the melodies stretched out over minutes instead of seconds, a little ambient, a little new age, a little free drone, all deftly blurred into one smoldering sonic dreamscape. The visuals are super striking, and manage to fit perfectly with the sounds, all black and white, images of rain slicked streets, sun shining through the treetops, car headlights at night, images sometimes overexposed, blurred, superimposed, but mostly left to just play out, cityscapes, buildings, people rushing to and fro, light reflecting on water, shapes and textures, walls, grills, neon signs, restaurants, a soft, a dreamy faded super-8 travelogue.
Then there's Corridors, also from 2007, which was the second dvd collaboration between Clipson and Cantu-Ledesma. Another gorgeous and sonically blissed out tag team, Clipson's films, again on Super-8, were shot entirely in NYC, impressionistic shots of cityscapes, rolling hills, the texture of water, sun dappled evening skies, many of the shots textural, extreme close ups, patterns as much as images and shapes, sunspots, shadows, reflections, very active, the world flying past out the window of a train, power lines and bridges slipping out of eyeshot, setting suns and colored clouds, so lovely and dreamy. Cantu-Ledesma offers up the perfect soundtrack, music culled from the same sessions that produced the huge aQ fave Shining Skull Breath, thick and dense, whirring dronescapes, textured and layered, slipping from minimal shimmer to buzzing roar and back again, very much active, the intensity and propulsion of the sounds perfectly matching the motion of the visuals, in some cases, seemingly slowing it down, the drone dragging the landscape flashing by into sudden focus before letting it go again.
Two Suns from 2005: A beautifully abstract and paranoid impression of Southern California, filmed on grainy Super8, with lots of dizzyingly hypnotic footage of telephone wires, helicopters, cityscapes, gorgeously blurred out traffic lights and tail lights and street lights. There's late afternoon silhouettes, fuzzy smears of neon, rain drops on glass, cranes and docks, abstract streaks of passing cars and slick roadways, hillsides covered in windmills, the sun reflected on the sea, highways and green hills. So lovely. And haunting. As are the accompanying sounds created, an ominous, buzzing, vocal drone, affected to the point that it still sounds organic, but not like a voice, more like streaks of sound, greys and blacks and browns, all smeared into blurred soundscapes of purr and whir and thrum, that perfectly compliment the shaky camera work, the grainy film stock, and the gorgeously and ominously mundane subject matter.
Constellations from 2006: A dreamlike drift through a dense visual latticework of plants, chainlink fences, branches, leaves, stoplights, neon signs, a delirious series of slow motion visual tangles and patterns. A bug's eye view of the world mysterious and wonderful, like cutting room floor super-8 plant studies and urban landscapes woven into soft focus home movies. All set to the warm glow of Ledesma's swelling dronescapes.
The other three films here may have been released before, but are new to us, Sphinx On The Seine from 2008, is another collection of gorgeous hazy landscapes, in washed out color and start black and white, the films flitting back and forth, industrial structures, glowing lights, moving textures and solar flares, all set to a dark and haunting melody laced low end thrum, meditative and ominous. There's also Within Mirrors, which is also from 2008, and is much more impressionistic, branches and leaves, constantly shifting in and out of focus, while Cantu-Ledesma's score shifts accordingly, from pulsing looped mesmer to warm washed out dreaminess.
And finally, there's Lights & Perfections from 2006, more patterns, this time a journey through ever shifting foliage, another bug's eye view, flowers and grass, and shifting leaves, blossoms, everything swaying gently in the breeze, the soundtrack equally breezy, soft focus, hushed and dreamy, soothing and tranquil and so lovely. In fact all the sights and sounds here are gorgeous. And as if that weren't enough, we have the super limited version, which comes with a bonus 3" cd-r, featuring an exclusive 17 minute track, a gorgeous hazy dronescape, of pulsing softly psychedelic shimmer, of strange hushed industrial whir, of grinding shoegazey crunch, of barely there whispery drift, of staticky dreamlike shimmer, so gorgeous.
EXTREMELY LIMITED, at least the deluxe version with the bonus disc, so grab one quick if you want the extra disc! The packaging is super swank too, an oversized complex multipocketed origami style cardstock sleeve, printed front and back. Nice!
Slip this new Capitol Years album up alongside the latest one from the Pernice Brothers, and you'll have the yummiest soft pop double scoop. Really, the two go together perfectly. Their lilting vocal harmonies and chiming guitars recall the splendor of Big Star and The Raspberries. Despite the album's title which might lead you to expect an electric dancefloor packer like Radio 4 or The Rapture, these eleven polished reverb-drenched songs will prolly have you swaying gently in the autumn leaves instead. Take it nice and easy. Soooooo good.
Hurray, it's a new album from this Bay Area duo! Ever since Kirsten Capricorn brought in their debut cd In The Zone last February it's been a very consistent seller, and this sophomore effort seems primed to follow suit. Filled with bittersweet odes to sweethearts and heartaches, it's still keeping with their beloved lo-fi '80s Casiotone preprogrammed drumbeats and arpeggiated peppiness. Their vocals are much more self-assured and expressive this time around, but still within the same range as Corin Tucker's emotive warble. On a couple of songs though you might also find them a bit reminiscent of the GoGo's Belinda Carlisle too. Super fun and high spirited!
Captain Fatass, who have been playing around town for some time now, finally recorded and released a full length album so that now there's no need to wait for their upcoming shows to listen to them. Musically they draw a lot from the musical well of SF's rock
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Listening to Captured Alive! in a musical sense is nearly impossible. That is of course if you haven't actually witnessed for yourself the incredible live performance of Captured By Robots. Luckily for all, the performance that took place right here at San Francisco's Bottom Of The Hill is not only found on the cd, but you may witness it for yourself in digital video form on the accompanying dvd. Probably the most entertaining and elaborate one-man-band ever.
Incongruent is a collection of highly intelligent, mostly melancholy songs sung extraordinarily well by a six-foot man in a frock and wig. One would never know that, of course, from any of the minimal (and "naughty") imagery included with the record... The songs here demand your attention: they're catchy, clever, and heartfelt without being sentimental. Carletta Sue Kay's Incongruent is a record that many will obsess over. An obvious comparison would be to Antony (& the Johnsons). Even though Antony and Carletta's voices occupy completely different sonic ranges, they both approach songwriting with an inherent sense of drama. And, like Antony, there's no campiness here. A bit of humor, yes, and a bit of genderbending, but Carletta is definitely not a drag performer. There's no question of Randy playing some kind of character: Carletta is Randy Walker is Carletta Sue Kay. Carletta/Randy lent his vocal talents to the most recent Magnetic Fields disc Love At the Bottom of the Sea. An honor (for a fan), and homage can be felt in the staccato, precise quality to the storytelling and playing on Incongruent. "For the Birds" and "Just Another Beautiful Boy" provide nice juxtaposition as opening tracks. Lyrically, "For the Birds" is some dark shit, but the band takes you to such a dreamy Willie Nelson kind of place you don't notice until your second time through the record. You also don't notice the song tops well over six minutes until maybe your third. After an introduction that includes some crafty arrangements and production to segue, "Beautiful Boy" kicks in with a nod-your-head pop jangle you never expected. By the end you're humming along with the refrain, but there's no way to sing along once Carletta really opens it up at the end unless you've got pipes like his, and that's pretty doubtful. The opening lines of "Pas la Meme" has CSK wondering how much dog shit is in Paris, delivered with just enough bitterness to make you wonder why Carletta has such antipathy for that city. During the entire record, Carletta's androgynous voice never strays below an alto, and is quite strong even in very high registers. He makes you WANT to listen. At a recent (albeit somewhat compact) show, he held the mic well away from him for most of the performance and his voice was still well above the instruments. "Joy Division" sounds more like the also-mentioned Echo and the Bunnymen (no complaints) but none of the songs are predictable or too traditionally arranged. Aside from "Joy Division" and "Beautiful Boy" there's very little use of percussion on Incongruent, relying on the percussive qualities of the piano and acoustic guitar to provide the pulse. The more rocking, poppier songs are great, but the songs without drums provide a more intimate cushion to caress Carletta's voice. The choice to keep the record more orchestral and less traditionally "pop" was a good one. People have been coming into the store for the past week or so asking for this record and that shows no sign of letting up... HIGHLY recommended!
We're kind of running out of superlatives for these guys, and new ways to describe the deliriously druggy din they whip up. If only there was a psychedelic space rock thesaurus... So bear with us if it sounds like we're repeating ourselves, but in a way, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because even though every Carlton Melton record definitely stands up as its own album, they all sound linked, which makes sense, as they're all recorded in the same space (the DOME), and are all culled from sprawling mega-jams, but instead of sounding simply 'jammy', it's almost as if these guys are psychedelic shamans, tapping into some alien sonic continuum, that the rest of us just aren't privy to, and CM are the conduit, the portal, channeling mysterious cosmic vibes from the ether, and transforming them into some of the sweetest (and hard rockingest) psych we've heard. The core members of CM are once again joined by unofficial 4th member John McBain from Monster Magnet, and together, whip up another gorgeous blast of wasted zoner dreaminess, and driving tranced out kraut-psych. The opener here is definitely familiar territory, easing us in with a sound that seems like it bled over from one of the other recent records, all softly billowing shimmer, and blurred melodic tangles, abstract and dreamily drifty, a serious kosmische kraut-age vibe, and as always, if these guys had stretched that out to fill up the whole record, we'd have been perfectly happy. Instead though, they mix it up, with "Keeping On" being one of the weirder jams we've heard from these guys, driving and propulsive, drum heavy, with thick crumblingly distorted guitars, and some awesome progged out synths, that give the sound a serious seventies prog epic/opus vibe, that these guys manage to craft into something way darker and meaner, with some seriously kick ass drum pound, and wild psych freakouts, super heavy AND heady.
"Spiderwebs" pairs creepy Carpenter-ish cinematic synth with some lazy sun dappled slo-mo dream-psych languor, while "Sarsen" seems to fade into a jam already in progress, one that sounds like it's been going on since the beginning of time, primal and primordial, another muscly hard rocky, drum driven psych-kraut blow out, again laced with swirling synths and dense clouds of freaked out FX, all the while the band locked tight into some serious post-Hawkwind heaviness, and finally, "The Splurge" finishes things off with a sound much more raw and blown out, sounding like it was captured live, lots of reverb and echo, like they're playing in a big concrete bunker, the sounds crumbling and in-the-red, the vibe sorta German Oak-ish, definitely super bunkurfunk mixed into the slow-burn psych, noisy, and trippy and fucking awesome.
Killer psychedelic cover art. The cd is housed in a digipak, while the vinyl comes in two versions, one on green wax, one on black wax with a poster, make sure you order the one you want, they're listed as two different items. (And maybe let us know if you're willing to take the other, if we run out of one...)
We're kind of running out of superlatives for these guys, and new ways to describe the deliriously druggy din they whip up. If only there was a psychedelic space rock thesaurus... So bear with us if it sounds like we're repeating ourselves, but in a way, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because even though every Carlton Melton record definitely stands up as its own album, they all sound linked, which makes sense, as they're all recorded in the same space (the DOME), and are all culled from sprawling mega-jams, but instead of sounding simply 'jammy', it's almost as if these guys are psychedelic shamans, tapping into some alien sonic continuum, that the rest of us just aren't privy to, and CM are the conduit, the portal, channeling mysterious cosmic vibes from the ether, and transforming them into some of the sweetest (and hard rockingest) psych we've heard. The core members of CM are once again joined by unofficial 4th member John McBain from Monster Magnet, and together, whip up another gorgeous blast of wasted zoner dreaminess, and driving tranced out kraut-psych. The opener here is definitely familiar territory, easing us in with a sound that seems like it bled over from one of the other recent records, all softly billowing shimmer, and blurred melodic tangles, abstract and dreamily drifty, a serious kosmische kraut-age vibe, and as always, if these guys had stretched that out to fill up the whole record, we'd have been perfectly happy. Instead though, they mix it up, with "Keeping On" being one of the weirder jams we've heard from these guys, driving and propulsive, drum heavy, with thick crumblingly distorted guitars, and some awesome progged out synths, that give the sound a serious seventies prog epic/opus vibe, that these guys manage to craft into something way darker and meaner, with some seriously kick ass drum pound, and wild psych freakouts, super heavy AND heady.
"Spiderwebs" pairs creepy Carpenter-ish cinematic synth with some lazy sun dappled slo-mo dream-psych languor, while "Sarsen" seems to fade into a jam already in progress, one that sounds like it's been going on since the beginning of time, primal and primordial, another muscly hard rocky, drum driven psych-kraut blow out, again laced with swirling synths and dense clouds of freaked out FX, all the while the band locked tight into some serious post-Hawkwind heaviness, and finally, "The Splurge" finishes things off with a sound much more raw and blown out, sounding like it was captured live, lots of reverb and echo, like they're playing in a big concrete bunker, the sounds crumbling and in-the-red, the vibe sorta German Oak-ish, definitely super bunkurfunk mixed into the slow-burn psych, noisy, and trippy and fucking awesome.
Killer psychedelic cover art. The cd is housed in a digipak, while the vinyl comes in two versions, one on green wax, one on black wax with a poster, make sure you order the one you want, they're listed as two different items. (And maybe let us know if you're willing to take the other, if we run out of one...)
We're kind of running out of superlatives for these guys, and new ways to describe the deliriously druggy din they whip up. If only there was a psychedelic space rock thesaurus... So bear with us if it sounds like we're repeating ourselves, but in a way, that wouldn't be such a bad thing, because even though every Carlton Melton record definitely stands up as its own album, they all sound linked, which makes sense, as they're all recorded in the same space (the DOME), and are all culled from sprawling mega-jams, but instead of sounding simply 'jammy', it's almost as if these guys are psychedelic shamans, tapping into some alien sonic continuum, that the rest of us just aren't privy to, and CM are the conduit, the portal, channeling mysterious cosmic vibes from the ether, and transforming them into some of the sweetest (and hard rockingest) psych we've heard. The core members of CM are once again joined by unofficial 4th member John McBain from Monster Magnet, and together, whip up another gorgeous blast of wasted zoner dreaminess, and driving tranced out kraut-psych. The opener here is definitely familiar territory, easing us in with a sound that seems like it bled over from one of the other recent records, all softly billowing shimmer, and blurred melodic tangles, abstract and dreamily drifty, a serious kosmische kraut-age vibe, and as always, if these guys had stretched that out to fill up the whole record, we'd have been perfectly happy. Instead though, they mix it up, with "Keeping On" being one of the weirder jams we've heard from these guys, driving and propulsive, drum heavy, with thick crumblingly distorted guitars, and some awesome progged out synths, that give the sound a serious seventies prog epic/opus vibe, that these guys manage to craft into something way darker and meaner, with some seriously kick ass drum pound, and wild psych freakouts, super heavy AND heady.
"Spiderwebs" pairs creepy Carpenter-ish cinematic synth with some lazy sun dappled slo-mo dream-psych languor, while "Sarsen" seems to fade into a jam already in progress, one that sounds like it's been going on since the beginning of time, primal and primordial, another muscly hard rocky, drum driven psych-kraut blow out, again laced with swirling synths and dense clouds of freaked out FX, all the while the band locked tight into some serious post-Hawkwind heaviness, and finally, "The Splurge" finishes things off with a sound much more raw and blown out, sounding like it was captured live, lots of reverb and echo, like they're playing in a big concrete bunker, the sounds crumbling and in-the-red, the vibe sorta German Oak-ish, definitely super bunkurfunk mixed into the slow-burn psych, noisy, and trippy and fucking awesome.
Killer psychedelic cover art. The cd is housed in a digipak, while the vinyl comes in two versions, one on green wax, one on black wax with a poster, make sure you order the one you want, they're listed as two different items. (And maybe let us know if you're willing to take the other, if we run out of one...)
There's no shortage of psychedelic space rock in SF these days: recent Record Of The Weekers Lumerians, the Spyrals (who have a new tape reviewed elsewhere on this week's list), Wooden Shjips, Sleepy Sun, and these guys, Carlton Melton, not a person, but a quartet, who conjure up epic stretches of spaced out psychedelia, and who, unlike many of their contemporaries, seem to be less concerned with the pulse, and the rhythm, and the groove, as they are with the SOUND, and the VIBE, weaving lush, expansive sprawls of effects drenched psychedelic ambience, drifting more often than driving, huge clouds of swirling wah guitars, and minimal spare drumming, which seems to exist more as a pulse, than a beat proper, everything murky and muddy and washed out, at once lo-fi, but impossibly dense and heavy, the band seeming to drift weightless though swirling starlit sonic skies, their sound loose and free and abstract and ephemeral, the whole first side here is a single track, the title track, and it's a fantastically entrancing space drone epic, a sound the drifts and buzzes and flutters and swirls, the sound emerging in swells, building into squalls of warm whirling chaos only to slip back into something more druggy and dreamy and meditative, it's not until the final couple minutes that the song finally explodes, and even then it doesn't really get heavier, the rhythm doesn't get any more intense, instead, it just sounds like the whole band crank it up a notch, the swirling clouds of effects and guitars suddenly become more volatile, and more chaotic, the melodies gradually swallowed up by slashes of distorted guitar crunch and crumbling walls of distortion, the sound gets more dense, and more thick, and the whole time the main groove, now buried beneath the roiling surface, continues on unwavering, the only thing keeping the track from drifting into the heavens and toward the heart of the sun.
The flipside is more of the glorious same, barring a brief bit of solo guitar, an interlude that is bookended by two more heaving walls of krautpsych swirl, the band unfurling droned out minimal hypnorock mini epics, that howl and thrum, buzz and shimmer, songs that obviously could have been stretched way out and turned this into a double lp.
As always, fantastic stuff. Fans of the SF psych/space/drone/kraut rock contingent that aren't already into CM, get with it! And obviously, anyone into White Hills, Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, Cave, The Heads, Heavy Winged, Bardo Pond, White Noise Sound, Spacemen 3 and the like, these guys will definitely hit the spot.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We were all ready to write an epic review of this, a special Record Store Day live record from our of our favorite outfits, local psychedelic spacelords Carlton Melton. We ordered as many copies of the 500 pressed that we could get, but as you might imagine we sold tons and as of the writing of this review, we're getting to where we have less than a dozen. Hopefully lots of you were able to grab one in the shop on the day, and those who didn't, might have seen our lists of Record Store Day leftovers and grabbed one then, but for those of you who did NOT, here's what is most likely your last chance, to grab one of these before they are gone (and by gone, we mean on eBay for crazy money).
Released on Agitated, and recorded in 2012 in Belgium and the UK, these four sides of primo CM display everything we lover about these guys, sprawling droned out atmosphere, clouds of synthy shimmer, spidery guitars, all druggy and dreamy, dense and hypnotic, some serious motorik hypnorock minimalism that gives way to seriously shredding heaviness. Lots of the hits here, from all the records, a bit more live and loose and free, but not much, since most of their records are recorded live anyway, so in that sense, this is almost like a sort of alternate version greatest hits. The first side and a half is seriously blissed out, not really kicking into gear until side two, at which point things get seriously heavy and super rocking, the band channeling Hawkwind into their own swirling spaced out brand of riffy freeform psychedelia. The rest of the record(s) shifts constantly from dirgey churn, to wild psych shredding to droned out mesmer and back again. Killer performances, awesome sound, the recording is massive, if it wasn't for the crowd sound at the end of the second record, this easily could have been a CM record proper!
Once again, CRAZY limited, these are the last copies we'll have EVER. Pressed on super psychedelic green/yellow/clear splatter vinyl, housed in an old school distressed looking heavy sleeve.
Latest batch of deliriously druggy psychedelic space-out from these local gents, and yet another killer collection of improvised slow burn sonic drift, as always, culled from hours and hours of wasted late night amp worship captured in 'The Dome' (a geodesic dome where all the CM stuff is recorded!). The core trio of Andy Duvall, Rich Millman and Clint Golden are once again joined again by unofficial member and (not so) secret space rock weapon, John McBain from Monster Magnet, and conjure up a smoldering sprawl of hazy, heady, darkly dreamy wasted zoner psych drift, on the mellow side of the CM canon for the majority of Four Eyes, the group unfurling lush, billowing clouds of blurred bongsmoke buzz, shot through with prismatic shimmers and lazy sun dappled melodies, all underpinned by hushed motorik drum skitter, gurgling synth thrum, all the sounds gorgeously indistinct, oozing and bleeding into each other, a gauzy cloud of tonal color, sculpted into woozy pulsing rhythms and slow shifting sheets of tripped out chordal mesmer, a lysergic slo-mo psych that's all about tripping / chilling / blissing out.
While opener "Personal Space" keeps the rhythms to a minimum, spending most of its time swirling lysergically, "Glass Home" tethers CM's freeform psychedelic drift to a simple caveman kraut rhythm, the sky above filled with reverb drenched melodic squiggles, and spidery melodies, all over a softly churning backdrop of deep rumbling shimmer, while closer "Mist" pushes the rhythm to the fore, with its Necks via Hawkwind throb, the only deviation from this drugged out mellow mesmer comes in the form of "Road Swagger", which does indeed display some rhythmic swagger, easily the most rocking of the bunch, like a super charged Spacemen 3, the drums driving and muscly, the guitars thick and almost metallic, still plenty drowsy and druggy, but with some sonic heft that positions the sound closer to the Heads or White Hills, that the more Bardo Pond-y bliss out of the rest of the record.
As always gorgeous stuff, and like all their records, seemingly cut from the same sonic cloth, as if Carlton Melton are permanently engaged in a jam for the ages, that dome actually some sort of space station, drifting through time and space, traversing sonic starfields into the endless blackness of the universe, playing endlessly to appease whatever gods truly rule over all, these songs the sound of a group, drifting further into oblivion, each record a mere glimpse into their epic cosmic journey.
Pressed on 180 gram vinyl, and LIMITED TO 600 COPIES!!!
One of two brand new Carlton Melton releases this list, the other being their strange and culty split with Qumran Orphics. This one an amazing 7" on a cool brand new deluxe 7" label, Valley King (we also have a new Sweet Apple 7" on the same label to be reviewed later). Housed in a mini-gatefold sleeve with insert and sticker, with gorgeous artwork by Alan Fobres who also did Carlton Melton's Pass It On LP as well as their split with Empty Shapes.
"Handling Snakes" is a jolt of heavy hypno-blues a la Wooden Shjips but even heavier with wailing riffs and pummeling drums. The B side, "The One That Got Away", is more majestic and broodingly heavy with searing and weaving guitar lines and molten textures.
It's over before you know it, but it's just long enough to hit the spot. Limited to 500 copies. Grab this taste of radness while you can!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We only got a handful of these, direct from the band, and since there are only 100, odds are we won't be able to get more. Which is too bad, cuz it's pretty great. Carlton Melton doing their thing in the UK during 2012's Photos Of Photos European tour, hazy, druggy expanses of extended psych drift, sun dappled slow build epics, some pounding drum driven kraut-psych workouts, a handful of CM classics reworked live, swooping easily from hushed prettiness, to fierce, fiery heaviness, wild tangles of psych guitar draped over squiggly spaced out synths, simple motorik rhythms locked tight, anchoring the group's otherwise heavenward drift. Dense and droney, darkly rocking, psychedelic and epic, essential psychedelia for sure, and CM fans won't want to miss out. Sad thing is lots will, so those quickest on the trigger will nab one. And as if you needed to be told, one per customer.
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES, the tapes silver/purple glitter, with 12 different labels, each housed in a cloudy plastic clamshell case with a full color sticker.
If you got the chance to record and play music in a Geodesic Dome off the coast of Northern California, wouldn't you form a band just for the occasion? Well that's the modus operandi of this strangely monikered band made up of former members of Zen Guerilla and friends, who ventured up to Point Arena (an area rife with Utopian minded dwellings including the Sea Ranch) for this once in a lifetime opportunity. But don't expect this to sound like Zen Guerilla's trashy MC5-inspired garage R&B, instead Carlton Melton experiment with a sound more sonically befitting to the dome's acoustic resonance, Space Rock! Equally krauty, droney, and at times cosmically ramshackle, Carlton Melton channel White Hills, Wooden Shjips, Cave, bits of Kinski, Steve Hillage, and of course the less proto-metal leanings of Hawkwind with dual guitars, bass and organ hypnotically riffing through the domed stratosphere. Trippy and Limited!!!!!
The field of psychedelic hypnno-drone rock in San Francisco keeps getting wider, and more amazing. Along with Wooden Shjips, Sleepy Sun and The Lumerians comes the slow growth space rock of Carlton Melton. We raved about their first self-released cd-r, Live at Point Arena, CA recorded in a genuine geodesic dome, and we're psyched that they have returned with a vinyl only follow-up! While the first cd-r had a more rough around the edges shambling momentum to it (after all, the band had pretty much formed just to record in the dome!), Pass It On has a more penetrating and focused feel. Recording in the dome once again, the songs have the slow motion but still very heavy vibrations of White Hills, Moon Duo, Hawkwind and Pink Floyd. In fact, the album begins with a heavy cover version of Pink Floyd's "When You're In" from Obscured By Clouds, which builds with intensity setting up the stoned pillowy cushion freefall of follow-up track "Found Children". "Off The Grid" takes a more divergent path through the woods with freaked out tribal rhythms and strange loping pulsations and alien guitar swells. Side two begins with a reworking of a track from the Point Arena cd-r called "Fucking Funky Shit" now renamed "Digging In" that utilizes its bass and drum rhythmic foundation as a means for the guitars and organ to arc off into the stratosphere before descending into the final track "Sequoia", which burrows deep into the earth with a smouldering drone that leaves us, for the lack of a better analogy, cosmically wasted. On redwood colored vinyl. Recommended!
We can't be sure if this is something we actually heard from the band, or if we're just making it up, but really either way, true or not, it does paint a pretty good picture of the sprawling druggy psychedelic jamscapes of local space psych cosmonauts Carlton Melton - and it's that CM records are basically the product of a copious intake of various substances, before holing up in their geodesic dome / recording studio, to jam epically for hours on end, days sometimes, only later sifting through the reels of tape, and hours of bong-ed out headtrip cosmic heaviness. Could be true, should be true, probably is really, cuz how could sane and sober minds produce this sort of psych-bliss space-drone nirvana!?! Regardless of its provenance, we're just glad we're privy to another chunk of CM's heady heavy psychedelia.
This new record finds previous CM special guest John McBain, of the mighty Monster Magnet, seemingly signed on as a full on Melton (even though he's still listed as a special guest), as he's on every track here, and can only imagine that he helped push CM's sound into realms heavier and spacier. And indeed, that's what's going on here. Opener "Nor' Easter" is a brooding sprawl of lumbering dirgey dreamy heaviness, all thick swirls of tripped out shimmer, softly roiling riffage, lazy loping motorik krautrock-ish beat buried in the mix, spidery melodies and woozy washed out shred, woven into the heaving swells of warm lugubrious thrum and churning soft focus space rock crush.
The title track finds the band getting all new age-y, ditching drums, riffs, pretty much everything except warm woozy swirls of shimmery melody, slow shifting layered pulses, whirling, whooshing synths and sparkling glimmering FX, maybe the prettiest thing we've heard from these guys, all dreamlike and kosmische, a little soundtracky, lush and layered, total trip out bliss out.
"Space Treader" is another slow builder, all brooding and moody, thick swaths of buzz and fuzz, a slowly developing propulsive heft, and some Queen like (!) melodies/leads that infuse the track with a gorgeously super melodic vibe, those melodies soon mirrored by synth melodies, that push this track too in a much more kosmische direction, before devolving into a murkier bit of deconstructed riffing, and droned out slow fading FX flecked drift. The record proper finishes off with "Wingspan", which sonically sounds like the title track part two, a symphony of synths, all blurred and smeared over a barely there rhythm, and a loose framework of soft psychedelic grooves, more spidery melodies, and chiming harmonics, drifting in a starfield of synth swirl and bleary jangle, woozy and wonderfully tranced out.
The cd (and the download that accompanies the vinyl) includes two bonus tracks, two of the three tracks from the recent Smoke Drip 12" (good news for you cd nerds who missed out). The first track is the sprawling 22+ minute, originally side-long epic "Adrift", and the band spend the first few minutes just sort of, well, adrift, a simple motorik drumbeat, spidery tendrils of electric guitar, some sitar-like buzz, all wreathed in a swirling cloud of synth shimmer, it's the sort of hazy zoned out psych-drone mesmer that we can't get enough of, and we like to think the original was closer to 3 or 4 hours long, this being just the best 20 minutes, a totally tranced out hypnorock groove, that's druggy and dreamy, a slo-mo swagger that sounds like Hawkwind on tranquilizers, there doesn't even need to be any sort of build or explosive blown out climax, cuz once you're lost in these sounds, you're a willing celestial traveller, drifting on CM's beams of sonic light, headed for the heart of some black sun. But the band do crank it up, the guitars growing wilder near the end, and louder, but never letting totally loose, instead just slipping right back into the same mesmeric groove, and playing us out to the very end.
And then the second, "Smoke Drip" itself, which like much of Photos, ditches drums completely for a heady sprawl of psychedelic ambience, multiple guitars, synths and manipulated tapes, are let loose in a sun dappled spray of softly tangled melodies and smoldering buzz, abstract riffage and swoonsome swells of FX drenched thrum unwind into slithering sonic tendrils and lush layered psychdrone shimmer.
Ok, this is where cd people can stop reading, cuz that's all you get. But for you vinyl folks, at least for this first pressing, while they last, the record proper comes bundled with a whole bonus 12", with two extra tracks (30+ minutes total). The first is a remix from John McBain, of CM's "The One That Got Away", which strips down CM's sound, adds some programmed percussion, and over the course of 14 minutes, transforms the original into something WAY more druggy and trippy, the first few minutes, a lazy meander through a hazy landscape of melody and slowburn psych thrum, before the sound grows a bit more ominous, the buzz cranked up, the sounds smeared and blurry, the Spacemen 3 vibe HUGE, plenty of warped effects, swooping backwards melodies, processed stuttering melodies, muted murky riffage, all wreathed in a warm sun dappled gauze, the whole thing deliriously dreamy and druggy, and sorta makes us wish McBain would remix CM's whole catalog! The bonus 12"s finishes off with a live track from CM's recent trip to Roadburn in Holland, a 16 minute blowout of heavy, churning, retro-riffing, hard rocking, shred laced, bombastic bloozy hard psych, that KILLS.
The vinyl version with the bonus 12" is most definitely EXTREMELY limited, we're getting a bunch, but odds are those will fly out of here, so be prepared to settle for the single lp version when that time comes...
What's better than a new record from SF psychedelic space rockers Carlton Melton? Howabout a new record from SF psychedelic space rockers Carlton Melton with John McBain from Monster Magnet?! That's right, McBain, from the original space lord motherfuckers teams up with our beloved local psychlords for three long tracks of improvised spaced out psychedelia, recorded as always in a geodesic dome, where the band go to get lost, and conjure up the sonic spirit smoke that somehow becomes Carlton Melton. Hours of drug addled jamming and sonic experimentation bottled up and distilled into these sprawling smoldering slow burn epics.
The A side here is a sidelong blowout called "Adrift", and the band spend the first few minutes just sort of, well, adrift, a simple motorik drumbeat, spidery tendrils of electric guitar, some sitar-like buzz, all wreathed in a swirling cloud of synth shimmer, it's the sort of hazy zoned out psych-drone mesmer that we can't get enough of, and we like to think the original was closer to 3 or 4 hours long, this being just the best 20 minutes, a totally tranced out hypnorock groove, that's druggy and dreamy, a slo-mo swagger that sounds like Hawkwind on tranquilizers, there doesn't even need to be any sort of build or explosive blown out climax, cuz once you're lost in these sounds, you're a willing celestial traveller, drifting on CM's beams of sonic light, headed for the heart of some black sun. But the band do crank it up, the guitars growing wilder near the end, and louder, but never letting totally loose, instead just slipping right back into the same mesmeric groove, and playing us out to the very end.
The title track on the flipside ditches the drums completely for a heady sprawl of psychedelic ambience, multiple guitars, synths and manipulated tapes, are let loose in a sun dappled spray of softly tangled melodies and smoldering buzz, abstract riffage and swoonsome swells of FX drenched thrum unwind into slithering sonic tendrils and lush layered psychdrone shimmer, which gives way to the closer, which has McBain credited with "Dome Treatment", and is the densest and heaviest of the bunch, the riffs muddy and murky, a churning almost Stooges-y vibe, the drums weirdly chaotic and splattery, the track never locking into a groove, instead seeming to remain unhinged to any specific rhythm, the sounds super twisted, the production all over the map, with the drums sometimes leaping to the front of the mix, bit just as often disappearing beneath an avalanche of crumbling scrabbling guitarnoise, the strange skittering making us imagine Aussie jazzdrone outfit the Necks trying their hand at space rock, which we imagine would not be a bad thing at all. Loose, wild, chaotic, and borderline unhinged, everything doused in distortion, and woozy warped effects, a dizzying, disembodied dose of fucked up space psych drug-DOME bliss!!
Housed in super striking psychedelic jackets, with thick printed inner sleeves, and pressed on milky clear vinyl!
aQ Hits is a new collection from beloved SF psychedelic space rock minimalists Carlton Melton, and is our second annual official aQuarius recOrds Record Store Day release. Last year's was a live disc called Black Valleys, a document of a killer aQuarius instore by NY psych rockers White Hills, and that one sold out in a flash. This year's looks to do the same - if you like White Hills, you like Carlton Melton, right?!
It's a super limited (just 300 copies) compact disc, collecting a handful of rare, and now out of print vinyl tracks, from various singles and split lps from the last couple years, including one super extended version.
Let's run through the various tracks... "Bottle Of Heat [Extended Version]", is, as you can probably tell from the title, the aforementioned alternate cut, which takes "Bottle Of Heat", originally released on the 2011 Agitated Records 12" comp I'm So Convoluted!, and offers up the unedited full-sprawl recording, stretching out to more than 19 minutes, thick smoldering clouds of soft focus psychedelia, drifting and blissed out, free form and abstract, a meandering epic of lush chordal swell and shimmery FX drenched swirl, all over a shuffling hypnotic and motorik kraut-psych beat. "Handling Snakes" is the A side from the group's Valley King 7" single, and is a jolt of heavy hypno-blues a la Wooden Shjips, but in the hands of Carlton Melton, somehow even heavier with wailing riffs and pummeling drums.
The next two tracks are from Carlton Melton's split 12" with Empty Shapes, originally released on Mid-To-Late Records in 2010: "Call and Response" is an epic (and originally nearly side-loooong) blowout, beginning with a heavy rumble of monolithic sludge eventually progressing into a slow wave of burnt-out blues riffage a la early Comets on Fire, that churns and steeps into a gnarly brew of molten fuzz. While "Purer", is more cosmic and dreamy, built on a layer of percolating synth drones that give way to a more uplifting space rock jam trajectory, total heart-of-the-sun zoner blissout.
And finally, the last two tracks are from CM's split 12" with Qumran Orphics, also originally released on Mid-To-Late Records, that one in the beginning of 2011. "March Of The Cicadas" is a glorious ten minute slab of psychedelic heaviness, that sounds exactly like the title implies, a slowmotion dirge over martial rhythms with buzzing electronic hisses and stratospheric guitar leads. And things finish off with "Murder Ridge", a noirish Bardo Pond-like spiral of burning sonic embers and sustained decay, a gorgeous hazy stretch of blurred lysergic drift, the perfect final movement, psych-drone comedown.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES, each one hand numbered, the artwork is printed on metallic silver cardstock, everything housed in a slim dvd style case, only available here!
We sold tons of the last Carlton Melton full length, Pass It On. In fact we even sold a copy to J. Mascis who made it his top favorite record of 2009. No small feat, there! So the dudes are on a roll, and just before their first big tour, they release this awesome split with the equally heavy Empty Shapes from Delaware.
The Carlton Melton side is two tracks. The first, "Call and Response" is nearly side-loooong and begins with a heavy rumble of monolithic sludge eventually progressing into a slow wave of burnt-out blues riffage a la early Comets on Fire, that churns and steeps into a gnarly brew of molten fuzz. The closer, "Purer", is more cosmic and dreamy, built on a layer of percolating synth drones that give way to a more uplifting space rock jam trajectory.
This is the first we've heard from Empty Shapes, a 5 piece from Delaware, who contribute 3 tracks to their side. The first, "MLK" is a sprawling cloud of noise a la Bardo Pond, levitating around a repeating head-nodding riff with all kinds of instrumentation stretching the form and shape of the murky haze. "Hell of a Night" and "Lord" bring vocal elements into the works, but heavily effected and damaged, sometimes emotive yet incomprehensible channeling a primitive psych-blues through some New Zealandish free-rock space clutter!
Limited to just 300 on brown and white swirled vinyl! Dope!
Local psychedelic space rock heroes Carlton Melton team up with UK psych drifters Kandodo 3 (which is in fact Simon Price of aQ fave the Heads, gone solo, but now seemingly a trio, thus having appended a 3 to the moniker) for this heady slab of cosmic trippiness. CM start things off with three lengthy tracks. The first, being a loping sprawl of head nodding krautrock style mesmer, the drums locked down, pulsing away beneath clouds of shimmering guitars and slow shifting chunks of effervescent riffage. It's the most straight ahead rocking CM track we've heard in a while, but fear not, the follow up gets a bit more abstract, sounding like some blown out electric blues Appalachia coming apart at the seams, dense tangles of buzz and strum gradually unfolding and unfurling, a bit twang flecked and still plenty zoned out. The final track defaults more toward the rocking side of the spectrum, this time a bit nosier and more swinging, channeling some serious classic sounding spacerockiness, although somehow via some interplanetary alien jam band, their hypno-rock churn wrapped in all sorts of slippery slide guitar, conjuring up a sound that's like some twisted Allman Brothers / Hawkwind hybrid, which you know is a very good thing indeed.
The now expanded Kandodo 3 fill up the entirety of their side with a single track, one that seems to ooze from the darkest corner of the sonic cosmos, some seriously dense, trippy blissed out dronemusic, a softly pulsing, layered, chordal thrum, that grows gradually more and more wispy, until it's finally just a barely there shadowy swirl, over which a groovy bassline emerges, before it's joined by some tribal percussion, and streaks of guitar buzz drift in from every direction, a hazy cloud of druggy shimmer, over a woozily rhythmic churn. The guitars eventually grow more fierce and less distinct, moving from behind the shadows, the sound more of a Spacemen 3 style druggy drift, chiming harmonics and fragmented bits of melody swirl in the foreground, while that background churn collapses into a roiling black hole of softnoise churn, over which those guitars continue to glow and glimmer, before eventually settling back into one final stretch of tripped out psychedelic grooviness.
Pressed on transparent blue vinyl, with cover art by Kandodo 3's Price. LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!!
We've said it before, and we'll say it again, sometimes it feels like some records were just made specifically for aQ. And this is one of em. So thanks Trensmat, for picking two of our favorite bands, and putting them together on one record, with exclusive (and killer) tracks from both. SF's very own Carlton Melton, offer up a gorgeous bit of thick psychedelic haze called "Company", a serious slow burner, and maybe one of their heaviest yet, a simple stripped down beat anchoring thick undulating layers of blurred guitar buzz, shot through with warm spidery melodies, a brooding chunk of pulsing hypnotic sonic mesmer with a seriously blown out heavy heavy explosive finish. Be sure to download the bonus material (the link's on the sleeve) to get the epic nearly 12 minute long version, which is how this was meant to be heard, sprawling and druggy and EPIC. Too short for us even at twelve minutes. Also with the bonus download you get another track, "Death Whisper", which is another murky brooder, a hazy minimal lo-fi raga, which lopes and lumbers dreamily through fields of buzz and static and dreamy chordal swirl.
Former aQ Record Of The Week-ers Mugstar offer up another fantastically epic psychedelic space jam, thick driving buzzing bassline, dense busy drumming, shimmery guitar jangle, churning moody riffage, a sinisterly slow build, that manages to grow more tense and ominous and intense, without ever actually getting louder or exploding into a crashing cacophonous climax, instead, weaving a dense sprawl of churning psychedelic krautrock-style hypnorock that almost sounds like a more muscly Circle. And with the bonus download, you get a second track, the hushed minimal "Never (Part 1)", which is all sun dappled and dreamy, hushed and hazy, all soft swirls, skittery rhythms, whirring organs, definitely shades of Spacemen 3 or Loop, a sort of druggy blissed out spacepsych drift. So great.
Nice full color sleeves, and as mentioned above, a download with tons of bonus material, SUPER LIMITED of course. Already sold out at the label, which means these are the last copies we'll ever be able to get.
Brand new split of heavy freakiness from one of our favorite local bands Carlton Melton teamed up here with new-to-us bizarre shamanistic cult collective Qumran Orphics.
The Melton side is two 10 minutes slabs, the first, "March Of The Cicadas", sounds exactly like the title implies, a slowmotion dirge over martial rhythms with buzzing electronic hisses and stratospheric guitar leads. The closer, "Murder Ridge" is a noirish Bardo Pond-like spiral of burning sonic embers and sustained decay.
The Qumran Orphics side is a stranger beast altogether. Recorded from a live set at the Blank Club in San Jose, Qumran Orphics is led by KFJC DJ Cy Thoth (host of the show Firebunker, that plays lots of our favorite metal and experimental sounds), backed by an array of simmering guitars and shifting droning electronics. Like a strange and unfurling Crowleian ritual, Cy Thoth croakingly intones bizarre utterances one might hear in an H.P. Lovecraft story. It's a wild and charged performance. Not sure where this project will go next, all info on the group is rather scant or cryptic, but we're definitely curious!
Super limited to 259 copies, pressed on smoked wood and blood colored swirl vinyl. These probably won't last long....
No Reserve is a limited run release of a radio broadcast care of KALX in Berkeley from the eccentric Thomas Carnacki, whose ooze-riddled sound collages are buttressed by the likes of Gregory Hagan (Common Eider King Eider), Jim Kaiser (NFOrchest, etc.), and Jesse Burson (Big City Orchestra). Carnacki's live performances are notoriously last-minute affairs with the ringmaster collecting his resourceful motley crew of sullen noise makers a few days before any given performance, almost always resulting in spontaneous madness of illogical sounds and colliding electro-acoustics. Strangely, the gigs almost always work wonderfully, and such is the case for this KALX transmission.
At the onset, the quartet finds themselves in a claustrophobic space, with metallic exhalations and looping scrapes reflecting all of the optimism of a bombed-out bunker. Gritty pulsations of electronics build out of residual drones, oscillating two and fro, with a thick clatter of that bunker-powered reverb settling at the bottom of the layering of sounds. Hagan's violin, which adds to those sadder-than-sad moods to Common Eider King Eider, creeps to the foreground at various intervals, amidst the cooing electronics, the crumblings of sand, rock, and debris, and the funereal tolls from a resonant bell. Think early HNAS, Cranioclast, and Nurse With Wound, and you'll be close to the unsettled atmospherics of Mr. Carnacki and his so-called Anti-Memorial Orchestra and Choir.
As described by the eloquent Thomas Carnacki, Oar Of Panmuphle is the 'long-threatened' full album for Mr. Carnacki - the pseudonym of sound designer and audio wrangler Gregory Scharpen who has worked with the likes of irr. app. (ext.) and Nurse With Wound for both projects' live presentations. Not surprisingly, his sensibility of off-kilter collage-based composition is not too far from either irr. app. (ext.) or NWW; but after a couple of teasing short-program discs, it's quite nice to witness a fully formed Carnacki presenting slow-motion, carnivalesque incantations of ectoplasmic horror spiced up with a few strange interludes of comedic appropriation. Clattering machines glide into a murky cut-up of organ-grinding Victoriana muffled by plenty of reverb and shadow to begin the album, leading into a similarly saturated loop from a Screaming Jay Hawkins track, with disembodied whispers, slapstick sound effects, and mechanical howls bounding maniacally alongside the purloined rhythm. With the wind-up springs and wooden percolation of noises on "Bedtime Story For The Most Fragrant Room In The Ward," Carnacki sets a perfectly spooky mood of mechanical toys coming to life and setting forth on an evil plot to revolt against their human creators, before snapping to another lifted sound segment - this time from Jon Ronson talking about his journalistic investigations into psychic assassins. The rest of the album drifts eerily with shapeless clouds of darkened thought with flourishes that hint at a hauntological semi-musicality but always slanted toward the odd and the surreal. Fans of Andrew Liles, irr. app. (ext.), and Nurse With Wound would be well served to check this album out.
Greg Scharpen is an artist who's never without a project at hand. While the bulk of his artistic career has been spent in the sound design realm of East Bay theater and dance troupes, he also dons the Thomas Carnacki pseudonym to conduct various exercises in audio surrealism. Over the years, Scharpen has been a noted contributor to the irr.app.(ext.) live presentations and has even made appearances in the Nurse With Wound's rotating cast. These two figureheads of paratactic collage and bizarro-world atmospherics loom large in the audio vocabulary of Mr. Scharpen, and that of course is a very good thing! The Disappearance Of This Terrible Spool is just the second release by Carnacki / Scharpen, following the 2006 album Far Voyage From A Placid Island. Thus it begins with deep swells of thick reverberations that ascend towards a clatter of indeterminant gizmos, only to collapse into a maudlin half-melody of vibrato drone and lost-at-sea undulation. Think Nurse With Wound circa Shipwreck Radio, and you would not be all that far off. The somber tone of this first track continues through the second, due in part to the central role of a mournful violin performed by Gregory Hagan also of Common Eider, King Eider. The final two tracks embrace the disjointed, disembodied, discombobulated cut-n-paste collage techniques with spluttering electronics and truncated gaspings for air - again NWW, irr.app.(ext.) or HNAS comes to mind. A tad brief at 24 minutes, but not a minute is wasted within!
Quite the tease that Thomas Carnacki, giving us only five copies of this mini-opus for nightmarish collage before declaring it out of print. 40 of these were produced in conjunction with a rare daytime performance at Amoeba Records in Berkeley for the suitably nocturnal Carnacki. Spooky drones culled from electrical hums and jagged artifacts get matched with elongated bowed-metals and haunted violin tones at the beginning of this 20 minute piece, gradually deflating into catacomb-like drips and clanking bells that later get coupled with subterranean moanings and bellowings coming to a ghastly conclusions of varispeed tape machinations churning over strange motorized sounds and elliptical looped patterns. The sonic references to Nurse With Wound, Andrew Liles, and irr.app.(ext.) are still quite evident on these recordings, although the cabal working for, with, under Carnacki (aka Gregory Scharpen who is Mr. Carnacki's doppleganger, Jim Kaiser of NF Orchest & French Radio, and Gregory Hagan of Common Eider King Eider) are building a stronger and stronger case for their own aesthetic in the wide-open field of post-surrealist / post-industrial sound design, which is always haunted and often very compelling. Like we said, super limited - and we only got 5 copies.
In an interview for Re/Search sometime in the early '80s, J.G. Ballard quipped that San Francisco must have the highest population of deviants with college degrees. Back then, the Bay Area did boast a sizable contingent of acid-damaged drop-outs, sexpot performance artists, transgendered punks, mischievous hucksters, members of Caroliner, and the unclassifiables, all flying their freak flags, with those numbers gradually dwindling, relocating, and/or aging over the ensuing decades. The weirdos and the degenerate artists still exist; yes, they do! But San Francisco should be a little ashamed that most of them live in the East Bay. Berkeley denizen Gregory Scharpen is one such character, who sometimes goes by the pseudonym Thomas Carnacki and sometimes is the absurdist bandleader for various minstrels operating under a banner of the same name, that being Thomas Carnacki. A gnomish / wizardly type with an old-growth beard and extraneous tentacles dipped with ectoplasm, Scharpen / Carnacki is a larger-than-life character who toils in film, theatre and sound design, with his expertise finding sympathetic ears and fingers in irr. app. (ext.) and Nurse With Wound.
This split release marks the first slab of vinyl for Carnacki, and finds him / them working in parallel with the equally obtuse but less flamboyant outfit Vulcanus 68. The Carnacki ensemble for this 20 minute track includes stalwarts Jesse Burson and Gregory Hagan (the latter also being in Common Eider, King Eider) and occasionalists Sheila Bosco and Cheryl E. Leonard. What these five are doing in a room is really anybody's guess. Huffing glue and fumbling with Tibetan bowls? Channeling the spirits of grizzled thugs and wrestling with those ghosts? Ripping apart a piano and putting the whole thing back together all wrong? All of these could be the method acting principles behind these nocturnal collages and strange actions of slow-moving events. Oakland's Vulcanus 68 (nee Jared Blum and Dominic Cramp) dial in something not too dissimilar to Homotopy To Marie, with plenty of gurgling noises, radiophonic allusions, backmasked gestures, and hauntologically challenged puffs of smoke. These too could have originated from similarly liver-destroying acts of sound immolation as on the Carnacki side of things. Yeah, this really could have been a United Dairies release circa 1983. Limited to 250 copies and comes with a download.
Welcome to the wonderfully eccentric world of SF's Ralph Carney - such an amazingly skilled musician able to jump genres and instruments at the witty wink of an eye and blends them together at whim. He's worked with an astounding array of artists, some of which include Tom Waits, Marc Ribot, the B52's, Bill Laswell, and William Burroughs. Plus, if you were one of the many who packed into AQ a few months ago to catch the Jonathan Richman in-store you would've also been entertained by Carney's accompaniment. Carney's music is as far from run-of-the mill as you can get, and his oft-bizarre aural trips might not be for everyone. Some might even find it all to be a bit overwhelming and disorienting at first, but that's the splendor of his work. He's so adept at completely transporting the listener to... somewhere else! You're never quite sure where he's led you nor where you're off to next! The record label makes reference to Roland Kirk and Capt. Beefheart and these are certainly right on the mark, but we'd also add the Residents, the Lonesome Organist and the criminally unsung, fellow-SF genius Graham Connah to the list of those dextrously imaginative akin. Just nine seconds shy of a full hour.
You might say that the illustrious, seemingly tireless Ralph Carney is sorta the musical equivalent of a colorful traveling circus... uh, carney! Such a remarkably chameleon-like multi-instrumentalist / entertainer both on his own in the spotlight and in collaboration or support of others (Tom Waits, Jonathan Richman, B-52s, Marc Ribot, Beth Custer, Bill Laswell, Tipsy, Victoria Williams, Drizzoletto, Jim White, and Oranj Symphonette, to name just a few of the folks he's played with over the years)! Ever on the go, you just never know what he's gonna pull out of his hat or his bag of tricks or his magical wardrobe next. But you can pretty much bet that it'll be a little (or maybe more than a little) bit tweaked with an unorthodox yet seamless blend of styles (Dixieland, prog, bluegrass, lounge, pop or any fashion of jazz -- you name it!), and that the chops (musical that is, not his mutton chop sideburns!) will be bulletproof. Such is the case with this, the debut cd by his latest mostly instrumental project he formed with Kimo Ball, Scott Johnson and Allen Whitman (fyi: they also released a live cd-r last year which we also have in stock). Their horns, woodwinds, guitars, piano, percussion and sporadic vocals come together, become pals and have a rollicking coloring fest, shading both neatly inside and more rambunctiously outside of each track's lines. For a particular highlight, check out the third number "Interstellar Low-ways / Watusa". Great stuff!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A brand new cd-r version of the 1999 lp from these demented SF old timey, dayglo, detuned, industrial post bluegrass weirdos...
There was a time a few years back, that if you lived in San Francisco, you could stumble into a bar, or a club, and find yourself transported to some fucked up and freaked out otherworld, an eye popping blacklight, dayglo world of huge cardboard buildings, and weird costumed, big headed characters, a musical world, set to the strains of some sort of demented detuned, industrial post bluegrass, a noise drenched 1800's hoedown, all detuned banjos, screeching violins, wheezing organs, scattered percussive splatter, little bursts of frantic bluegrass with twisted falsetto vocals, set amidst, thick streaks of undulating drones, and shards of crumbling noise, it was a bit like a stage production of Oklahoma, as performed by members of Faxed Head, stumbling and demented and confusional, a massive crumbling sprawl of sonic whatthefuck for sure.
In keeping with their confusional / obscurist approach, Caroliner took on a different name for every record. The Sabre Waving Saracen Wall originally released on vinyl in 1992, found the band christened Caroliner Rainbow Fingers Of The Underground & Their Breakable Bones, and was yet another document of the group's fractured faux historical sonic explorations, equal parts avant rock prankery, pure demented songsmithery, and an unhealthy interest in musics of the past, not to mention a visual aesthetic that fell somewhere between special ed kindergarten and drug addled Keith Haring, all blobby shapes and retina burning patterns, geometric constructions, and of course gallons of dayglo paint. The perfect backdrop for the group's unhinged pageantry. On record, it plays out like some unearthed wax cylinder, a recording of some sort of educational radio play, about the old west, but translated into some alien language, the soundtrack a demented deconstructed noise drenched country / folk, complete with random sound effects, strange voices, and what sounds like a small chamber ensemble wrestling with a bluegrass band, as the various players begin to lose brain function, resulting in a gloriously stumbling, lurching soundtrack, that starts out weird, and only manages to get weirder.
Not sure why suddenly this reissue popped up, but Grux from Caroliner just popped in with a stack, packaged in that distinctly Caroliner fashion, all strange folded multi color papers, glued and photocopied, the sort of packaging that once you open, you can never reassemble, which when you think about it, suits the group's sound to a 'T'. Not necessarily limited, but they are pretty fancy and handmade, so when we run out, it might take us a little while to get more...
