Honey Owens is one busy woman. Besides her vocal based drone outfit Valet (whose gorgeous new 7" we reviewed last list), she is also a sometime member of Jackie O Motherfucker, Nudge, Dark Yoga and others, as well as running the kick ass Yarn Lazer cd-r label. Somehow she also manages to record in the duo World, with Adam Forkner, who plays in Yume Bitsu, White Rainbow and with Owens in Dark Yoga. This is the last World release ever apparently, which is sort of too bad since this is the first one we've managed to get a hold of.
Can You Feel It Coming In The Air Tonight? is a collection of sorts, gather up two tracks�originally meant to come out as part of a box set of Portland bands that was eventually scrapped, a 30 minute collaborations with another Portland band called Tres Gone, as well as a handful of unreleased track and remixes. But it hardly matters that this is a collection, as all the tracks here are ghostly and haunting, and all flow together perfectly as if they were written and recorded to be this single suite of music.�
Every track is mysterious and murky, lots of dark shimmer, and fuzzy druggy twang, when there are vocals, they�are smokey and ghostly, or cooed and creepily sexy, the percussion is minimal and as muted and mumbly as the rest of the sounds. Our favorite songs are the ones where the band sound sort of country, incorporating bits of abstract twang into their glacial drift. Like�a way more stoned, spaced out and cough syrupy Red Red Meat all�languid and languorous, stoned and sleepy sounding, or imagine�taking a Souled American record, and spinning it manually on the turntable with your finger as slooooooow as possible,�a gorgeous, dreamlike warble.
Elsewhere the rhythms become more active, and the songs begin to resemble a more soft focus No Neck or Sunburned Hand, all spare and sparse, reverb drenched and, drunken melodies stumble through wide open fields of choral voices, distant drones, everything swirling dizzily, while�in the background crumbling melodies drift in crunchy distorted soundscapes of buzzing and crackling drones, all smeared into traffic-light-through-rainy-windshield blurs. So gorgeous.�
The record finishes off with that 30 minute collaboration with Tres Gone, and combined, the two bands are way more propulsive, adding some more distinct angular distorted guitar and wild skittery free jazz drumming, all tangled and abstract, over a roiling bed of distant industrial whir, and rumbling low end shimmer, the result being some sort super druggy, stumbling outsider free folk acid jazz jam. Cool.
Packaged in an oversized photocopied and hand painted sleeve, with a full color photo. LIMITED TO 120 COPIES!!!
Legendary lost krautrock treasure (so obscure that NONE of the krautrock obsessives here had even heard of it) originally released as a triple lp in 1970 and lost to the ages not long after. We weren't sure what to expect really, but the second we laid eyes on this, we knew it had to be good. The original elaborate mirror sleeve has been reproduced as a triple cd quadruple minigatefold, all the art metallic and reflective, the cover textured and trippy with a little eye-like mirror right in the center. Inside, lyrics, acid drenched landscapes populated by plastic toy animals, and song titles like "In - a) Beginning b) Analysis Of True c) To Hear Inside d) A Very Simple Song" and "Out - a) Misty Tour b) Water Sound c) Television d) Organ Dreams (A Very Simple Song)"... crazy long titles, but then the songs are crazy long as well, all in the twenty minute range, three cds, an hour and forty six minutes...
But don't be expecting that typical propulsive, motorik groove, nope, this is way on the other end of the spectrum, with one foot in the sort of drifty, abstract new age drift of groups like Tangerine Dream and Popol Vuh, but with the other foot squarely in some other dimension entirely. A world of damaged, freaked out crumbling soundscapes, dense black holes of outer space FX, stumbling deconstructed folk and a lo-fi orchestra of tape experiments and druggy noisemaking.�
The tracks are so long that it's hard to describe them individually, as each track is a series of parts, 10, 20, more, it's all like one huge twisting squirming living thing, changing shapes constantly, blurry and indistinct one second, sharp and crystalline the next, long stretches of hiss and thud and clatter, peppered with gorgeous little pockets of lilting fuzzy folk, only to be pulled apart moments later into shards of angular sound and chunks of smeared melody. The whole record is like navigating a wandering stream through some underground cavern, whirlpools of sound and�abstract swirls everywhere, the listener floating dreamily as the sonic landscape subtly shifts and shimmers in the background. Random bits of echoey percussion underpin�mysterious voices, singing, and chanting and groaning, long stretches of conversation and bits of found sound,�chaotic squalls of caveman percussion all tangled up with�detuned spaceship guitar, loads of�microphone rattle and tape hiss, but the majority of the record is made up of abstract clouds of sound that drift and shift and subtly change over the course of minutes, the sounds of jets, running water, warbly organs, reverbed wheezes, voices chopped up and blurred into fuzzy streaks, dense clouds of crowd sounds, tape speed shifts and chipmunk like vocals, sweeping industrial soundscapes, children playing, backwards loops, everything dusted with a thick layer of FX.�
Trip - Flip Out - Meditation is almost less music, and more some massive sonic experiment, a travelogue in sound, a crazy freaked out drug trip, captured and carved into wax, at once totally epic and ambitious, but at the same time totally primitive and childlike. Sure it's German and from the seventies, but this is a record that might appeal less to straight krautrock fans, and more to lovers of all things strange and wonderful and all fans of damaged outsider musical weirdness.��
