Alex Bleeker & the Freaks. Alex Bleeker & the Freaks.

Somebody reshuffled Real Estate’s cards, and instead of turning over Woods or Beach Fossils, they cut deep into the middle of the deck and came up with Neil Young. This side project from bassist Alex Bleeker features most of the Real Estate crew, along with Julian Lynch on guitar, and sounds for all the world like an unsung Laurel Canyon band coming down with the last good buzz of the 70’s. Wistful and meandering with undercurrents of real power, it rolls down the highway like a Studebaker into the evening’s twilight. Cozy and easy going with tidal rhythms spiked by Lynch’s loose and ragged soloing, it’s classic rock for the “let’s rock the beach” set.

Freaks

Seefeel. Quique (Redux).

In 1916, Russian Futurist painter Vladimir Rossiné invented the Optophonic Piano, an electronic instrument that created sounds and projected colors and patterns through a series of painted glass discs. Most likely, it sounded like shit. But if you could do such a thing correctly, and had someone like, say, Helen Frankenthaler or Agnes Martin or Bryce Marden been responsible for the layers of plates, then you might have gotten something quite beautiful. Something like Seefeel.

Formed in the early 90’s as dream pop was just beginning to discover electronics and samples, Seefeel melded My Bloody Valentine’s lush fuzz with Aphex Twin’s serenity into a mesmerizing pulsar of languidly revolving beats, rubbery bass lines, and looped guitars. Approaching the idea of techno from the standpoint of a rock band, and using its instruments to replicate and interpret that sound, they stretched dream pop out like ribbons of taffy, endlessly folding it over and over on itself until it became a moebius strip of glassy-skinned candy.

Like looking through a glass clockworks, their compositions reveal themselves by adding and subtracting layers of sound, with different elements rising to the surface or slinking off into darker depths, with only the slightest of glows to remind you of their presence. Chord and tempo changes are kept to a minimum, so the songs float along as the textural, ambient equivalents of Op Art. It’s better than sonic wallpaper though—it’s more like the dizzy buzz of butterflies in your stomach, or the blissful space between orgasms and sleep.

I seem to remember referencing the Cocteau Twins ambient experiments before and I was planning on doing so again here, when I noticed that Seefeel member Mark Clifford produced those remixes (on the Otherness ep), which is probably why this album feels so familiar. The second disc includes remixes and alternate takes that push the songs further into pillowy, endorphin-flushed, Terry Riley territory.

CD 1
CD 2

James Ferraro. Marble Surf.

If you're unfamiliar with James Ferraro...remember the guys in high school who planned to start a band and then change their name for every release, and it didn't matter if anyone knew how to play an instrument? James Ferraro actually did that. If he's most well known for anything (and he isn't), it's probably The Skaters. As a "solo" artist, he's had more identities than it's worth listing here. He's probably the only person who's more prolific than Acid Mothers Temple. You could spend a lifetime trying to track down all of his releases and never be sure you'd found them all, or if they were even the right ones. It can be pretty hit or miss, too, depending on your patience for lo-fi, scrambled tape messes of wasteland-psychedelic samples and alchemical keyboards and random noises that sound like they were rescued from a box of betamax tapes. That whole alternate 80's universe that bands like Wingdings, Sun Araw, Dolphins Into the Future, Infinity Window, Matrix Metals, et al are floating in? James invented it. I think he's kinda genius, but it's an acquired taste.

Except for Marble Surf. This is simply the most endlessly beautiful thing I've ever heard. In a post-post-Eno way, he's composed a slow-motion, ocean-sized waterfall of washed-out angelic choruses, watery steel drums, and dreamy synths that repeat the same basic structure for forty minutes (there are two tracks, but they're essentially the same piece of music). Eno proposed the idea of "holographic" music that would be indistinguishable from any other part of the recording no matter where you started listening to it. Marble Surf does it in a way that's gorgeously, almost psychedelically hypnotic rather than ambient.

At first it might seem like he's just set a brief snippet of music on repeat, but as you get drawn in it's clear that he's actually playing this. Musical cues come in at slightly different points on each loop, making it sound shiveringly, shimmeringly alive and organic, like light sparkling on water. Even when new instruments do arrive, it's so subtle and matched to the grand astral pageantry of the whole that you hardly notice they weren't there before. It's a cloud-floating heroin-basted rimjob from jesus in a Terry Reilly calypso dream. It's J.S. Bach for the polaroid-transfer, new-age tapes set. It's weightless and epic and magnificent and ecstatic and transcendent all at once, and it's the best fucking thing I've ever heard.

Marble Surf

Washed Out. Tour CD-R.

We saw Washed Out with Small Black a while back, and I snagged this little tour-only CD of demos and samples and experiments at the merch table. Having only heard Washed Out’s split 45 remix of a Small Black song (which is excellent, btw), I was a bit surprised that his solo portion of the show was mostly a techno/rave type thing. It sounded nothing like the sun-bleached, Balearic “chill-wave” that I’ve since encountered by him on record. His portion of the set with Small Black was amazing, though. I loved the self-titled EP they put out, but (like Le Loup, who we saw a couple of nights later) they’re so much better live. Their endlessly yelping, pogoing, joyous, upwardly spiraling indie-tribal dance jams reminded me a lot of Animal Collective’s energy back around Sung Tongs. Anyway, I wish this little album were longer and more fleshed out, but only because what’s there is so sunny and good natured. It’s dance music for people in hammocks.

Washed Out

My Bloody Valentine. Loom. Vancouver. 7/1/92.

Amazing facts about My Bloody Valentine:

• Since its release in 1991, Loveless has been played on a continuous loop through underwater speakers, inspiring certain erotic feelings in cetaceans, and is single-handedly responsible for the resurgence of the Humpback Whale population
• Before being mastered, the original tracks were beamed into space, bounced off the rings of Saturn, and then filtered through a device that mimics the sound of dragonflies on absinthe.
• Loveless sounds the same in every known alternate universe.
• Early copies of the album came with packets of Dramamine to counteract wooziness.
• Not that I would know, but under certain influences you can actually listen to the album just by looking at the cover.
• The band was named after an unsuccessful Bing Crosby Christmas special.
• At least one track was created by dropping magnetic recording tape through the Aurora Borealis.
• Vinyl copies of Loveless actually contain minute trace amounts of love, Pixie Stix, and Kevin Shields’ pocket lint.

Loom

Sway. The Millia Pink and Green.

Information on the band is almost nonexistent. The website listed on the album has disappeared, and the band itself abruptly and inexplicably changed names a number of times. As far as anyone knows, they’ve broken up, which is too bad as this seems to be regarded by those who like their pop dreamy as one of the best shoegaze albums of the decade (admittedly, there probably aren’t a lot of bands still working in this category).

Instead of following MBV’s swarming, electron-honeybee buzz, Sway tend more towards the blissful, liquid pigmentation of Slowdive, Chapterhouse, and Lush. Their waterfall guitars are blurred and melted like those super-saturated polaroids of flowers that used to show up all the time on fffound.

Short and sweet.

Pink and Green

Palm Fabric Orchestra. Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream.

Some of the best music I’ve ever heard came in snatches from passing cars, or fell from apartments, muffled and crumbling in the rich sonic mulch of the city.

This is the music that wafts through open windows. It’s a masterpiece of floating moods and textures that richly evokes the feeling of being adrift—in nature, in sleep, in life—calm, accepting, and sensual. Like feeling the pulse of the ocean making space in itself for the shape of your unmoored body. Vague Gropings in the Slip Stream works just as well as a review as it does a title. Its gentle, acoustic ambience drifts like dandelion seeds, or swells and ripples like prairie grass in the wind. It’s wordless, though not without vocals, and Susan Voelz’ violin works some kind of magic with Ellen Fullman’s “long stringed instrument”, weaving luminous drones throughout several songs (If you’re familiar with Volo Volo, that’s her playing on the almost otherworldly Entrance and Endtrance). And Frank Orrall’s guitar has the same kind of happy nonchalance that Mark McGuire has been playing with on his solo acoustic releases.

I should probably mention that this album was a side project of Poi Dog Pondering, one of my favorite bands when I was in high school and college. There were bands that I idolized (like the Cure or the Velvet Underground), and then there were bands that I would have actually wanted to be in, and being in Poi Dog Pondering sounded like it would have been one of the most exuberantly wonderful things you could do.

Orrall, who once portrayed "Happy-Go-Lucky Guy" in the film Slacker, managed to write incredibly catchy songs about how awesome being alive feels without any of them being the absolutely gag-inducing shit-fests that would imply. Also, a lot of the songs were pretty filthy (Pulling Touch, Diamonds and Buttermilk). It’s ridiculously happy stuff that doesn’t think feeling ridiculously happy is anything to be ashamed of. Irony doesn’t exist for Poi Dog Pondering. Even some of their best songs (Complicated and God’s Gallipoli from Pomegranate) put relentlessly danceable music behind tales of cancer and loss and death—not as a joke, but as an acknowledgement that eventually life will be your adversary, and that, although you want to live as much of it as possible, sometimes the only weapon you’ll have left against it is joy.

Slip Stream

Sovetskaya Gone. Sovetskaya Gone.

I came across this a couple of years ago and it instantly became of my favorites. Kevin Danchisko is a genius at creating endlessly fractalized abysses of cycling, shifting drones and golden tones. This self-titled tape coats blissful glacial fields with an analog glaze of synapse-frying, minimal psychedelia. Whether igniting a de-orbit burn into crackling, minimal dub space, or sending telegraph signals from the dream-like ambience of Twin Peaks, Sovetskaya Gone sounds like it’s choreographing a Skylab waltz among the stars. It’s music that exists only in crystal fracture planes—the sound of the infra-thin, that stretches to infinity when experienced head on but disappears entirely at right angles.

Look for an Ossining and Sovetskaya Gone vinyl outing on Digitalis in the near future.

Get Gone

Sovetskaya's Blog

Sovetskaya on myspace

Wingdings III. Symbol of Infinity.

Much sharper and more rockist than most other neo-somnambulists, this is possibly the densest and most psychedelic of the three Wingdings releases. It's also my favorite. I especially love the Sha-Na-Na echoplex calliope 8:30 into Side A, followed by the partially sentient Commodore 64's built-from-memory approximation of The Association's Everyone Knows It's Windy. Side B is similarly awash in subliminal memories of tunes that have been peeled and re-fitted over Wingdings' unique framework (the best being The Walk/Japanese Whispers era Cure pastiche at 8:40), like an alien borrowing someone else's face.

Symbol of Infinity

Wingdings. Wingdings II: Zarathustra's Puzzle.

So it turns out that Wingdings is Sam Meringue, of Matrix Metals and possibly Explorers and Flashback Repository. He also worked with James Ferraro on one of the 90210 projects. Wingdings I was pretty 1980s-radio-through-a-loop-delay-and-effects-pedal dipped in Lamborghini Crystal's beer, so that makes sense. Each of the subsequent Wingdings releases seem to develop more song-like structures. Wingdings II has a definite beachy feel to it—sort of like Rangers and Ducktails playing the Hokey Pokey at a roler rink on the boardwalk. There's so many layers of sound and I'm pretty sure they're referencing all sorts of cheesy, good-times songs (at the very end, they just space out on the Witch Doctor song. Oo Eee Oo Ah Ah, Ting Tang Walla-Walla Bing-Bang and all that) that have been processed through Dylan Ettinger styled memories of neon-lit futurescapes from bad 80s sci-fi films. It's quite enjoyable.

This one is by request for Glangel. Thanks for the email.

Zarathustra's Puzzle

Landing. Centrefuge.

We spent a couple of years in Landing's home base of Connecticut, so I was lucky enough to see them live a number of times. At house party at Dave Longstreth's place, The Dirty Projectors , Mount Eerie, and D+ played acoustic sets in the middle of the bare living room. Phil Elverum tried to teach us a slow stomp...stomp...clap rhythm to accompany one of his songs, but as we tried it everyone burst into laughter as we collectively realised we'd slipped into doing Queen's We Will Rock You instead.

I guess because they'd brought all of their instruments and needed a better electrical hookup, Landing played in the basement. It was tiny and the band took up most of the available space. The rest of us were packed in like cordwood. I was about a foot away from Adrienne Snow. It felt weird staring her in the face so I just closed my eyes. Everyone was reverentially silent and as they started to play, the room and all the people in it just evaporated. Even listening to them on record feels like wearing the Aurora Borealis as a blanket. You're both embraced and dissolved. They make perfect company with Seefeel, Harmonia, Cluster, and Harold Budd, so if you're into those sorts of drifting, midnight-deep pools of sound, this EP will be exactly your sort of thing.

Centrefuge

Landing on myspace

Landing's website

The High Violets. 44 Down.

I was pretty sure these guys were British (probably as a result of discovering them in a record store during my one trip overseas), but it turns out they're from Portland. They could easily have been some lost band from the early 90s prime dream-pop/shoegaze period, sounding as they do like an otherworldly mix of The Field Mice, The Cocteau Twins, MBV, Lush, Spaceman 3, Galaxie 500, and Julee Cruise. Cool angelic vocals, waves of white light climaxes, and spooling gossamer guitar chaos make this perfect dorm-room make-out music. It's like mirrorballs as satellites.

44 Down

High Violets on myspace

The White Foliage. Zurich.

What with the holidays coming, this would be great music to make out to underneath fresh sprigs of holly and Christmas-tree lights. Considering it was recorded through the mail by a pair of love-struck nineteen year olds in North Dakota, it's an astonishingly gorgeous and mature album. Awash in french horns, delicate banjo, and buoyed here and there with elecrtonic flourishes, they make me think of a Baroque, chamber-pop version of the Circulatory System. There's that same sort of textural psychedelia that's just far away enough from folk music to be receiving smoke signals from Charalambides. It's very "woody" music. Nothing tinny about it at all.

Gorn.

Zurich

Buy It

White Foliage online

White Foliage on myspace

Wingdings. Wingdings I: Return to Earth.

Windings traverse the same sunny, intergalactic, hypnagogic, scrambled-tape recesses of space as James Ferraro and Matrix Metals. There are two more Wingdings tapes available from Outer Limits Recordings, all of which come with extensive inserts that read like Dr. Bronner's spaced out cousin explaining his theory of everything.

Return to Earth

Buy a copy

The Grateful Dead & John Oswald. Grayfolded.

I feel like I need to make all sorts of excuses for posting something related to the Grateful Dead as they seem to be the one band permanently barred from hipster/music snob appreciation. I don't think you're even allowed to like them ironically. I never thought they were the greatest band on the planet, but they're not the worst, either. LiveDead is a magnificent album, American Beauty is a ramshackle gem, and other than those two I'm pretty "meh".

This, however, is a magic mushroom of a different color. John Oswald (a way early proponent of the mashup) took twenty years worth of live recordings of the Dead's signature song Dark Star, fed them into his computer, twisted, sliced, folded, and did all sorts of unnatural things to them, and spit out a two hour version that was simultaneously something created by the Dead, but unlike anything they had ever played. Guitar solos from the 60s float atop drums from the 80s. A Chorus of a hundred Garcias are layered into infinity. At other times his voice starts a line, only to stretch out a single note until it melts into the sonic tapestry. It's deep and spacey and, in places, transcendently beautiful. At various times I'm reminded of Hovercraft, Yume Bitsu, Emeralds, and any number of recent, underground, psychedelic tape releases. If you enjoy any combination of turning off your mind, relaxing, or floating downstream, it's worth a listen.

Transitive Axis
Mirror Ashes

Listen to Grayfolded online

John Oswald online

Yamamoto Seiichi & Acid Mothers Temple. Giant Psychedelia.

Yesterday, the end of two weeks of rain announced the first day of Fall: frisky breezes, cool sunlight, deepening shadows stretching away from our bodies like pulled taffy. All I wanted to do was lay in the grass with my girlfriend and feel the pink, pulsating glow of the sun through closed eyelids. It was this sort of weather—crackling with the energy of possibilities—that, back in high school, always had me throwing open my windows and blissing out to Wish You Were Here; the music and cold air raising goose pimples on my skin.

This album would be suitable for either activity. Hooking up with former Boredoms (and Rovo, and Omoide Hatoba) guitarist, Yamamoto Seiichi, the Acids leave (most) of their usual frenetic scribbling behind and aim instead for pure, gorgeous, stardust, hippie nirvana. And god damn do they hit it. Kawabata and Yamamoto meld the acid drenched DNA of Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Dark Star, and their own Pink Lady Lemonade into spiraling, mutating, transcendent comet tails of sound, forever rising into the stratosphere, pushed upwards on gusts of nimble fretboard runs—the necks of their guitars veritable stairways to the heavens.


Disc 1
Disc 2

Emeralds. Fresh Air.

A glimmery, gooey, outer space nebula of music, as colorful and melty as its cover. Just lovely.

Fresh

A Sunny Day in Glasgow. The Sunniest Day Ever & Tout New Age.

Pretty noisy/Noisy, pretty.

Everyone calls them shoegazers, so I guess I'll go along with that. It's not shoegaze like anyone I'm familiar with, though. The Sunniest Day Ever is a masterpiece of vertiginous, see-sawing rhythms and smashed glitter-ball textures that suggests an alternate universe Siouxsie Sioux/Cocteau Twins mash-up with severe equilibrium problems. I've never listened to it on headphones, but I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to do while standing. You know that sliding sensation you get just before fainting, where the world itself seems to have tilted before you realize it's actually you? That's what this sounds like. A Mundane Telephone Call to Jack Parsons is a whole new kind of awesome.

Tout New Age is a bit tamer, eliding into the sort of sound the Cocteau Twins were exploring on their later ambient remixes (this has become more pronounced on their latest release, Ashes Grammar). Not quite as fractured as thier first EP, but still adventerous and very pretty.

Sunniest

ASDIG official site

ASDIG on myspace

Windy & Carl. A Dream of Blue.

As kids speculating on the hidden origins of dust, we reasoned that it must come from great, soft clouds of silver winged moths that descended in the night, like a legion of miniature powdered wigs shivering off the accumulated particles of crystallized sleep that grew on their delicate furry bodies, the sediment gradually coating our daytime world in soft-focus nostalgia.

Blue

Windy & Carl's official site

Windy & Carl on myspace

Harmony Rockets. Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void.

Over forty solid minutes of shimmering, hypnagogic beauty from inside a diving-bell.

Void