For some unfathomable reason, iTunes lists this as being Responding to the Treasures of Faith from the album, Staying On the Road to God. That may not be too far off. Kawabata Makoto has often paid tribute to his musical heroes and fellow travelers by adapting their music to his own transcendental wavelengths. He’s built entire albums around Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra and Terry Riley’s In C. Here, he goes a step further, turning Gong's Master Builder into an epic shamanistic journey of heavy-metal astral-projection. It's like the Boredoms' Vision Creation Newsun being possessed by early Hawkwind. Introduced by an unaccompanied chorus of solemn Buddhist chants, the track quickly explodes out of the gate with the furiously head-banging "OM Riff", never stopping to look back for the next fifty-one minutes.
If you're new to the Acids, this might be a relatively safe introduction. Their trademark layering of spacey electronics, rocket powered riffage, and propulsively thunderous drumming is all here, but where they can occasionally wander off into aimless, free-form chaos on record, this comes the closest to capturing their rapturous live sound. On OM, their path to religious ecstasy is pretty well plotted. Although they take the opportunity to travel from space rock through prog, Celtic and Asian folk influences, ambient drone, and full-on psychedelic racket, they never meander. Each section evolves naturally out of the previous one. Oliver Sacks wrote about the way migraines arrive fully formed, but distant. The whole experience is there, but it's like watching it approach from the horizon until it envelopes you. Similarly, the various styles the Acids traverse are all inherent in the preceding sections. They're just drawing them out as they go along.
Recorded in the midst of line-up changes, the band takes the opportunity to sum up their deep history as well as use Gong’s source material to propel them into new territories. Elements of their outer-space freakouts have been stripped down to their essential bits and channeled through the OM Riff’s monster-sized bad-assery, imbuing them with a singular vision and sense of purpose. Kawabata is unquestionably a guitar god, although his usual style has little to do with the specific notes he's playing. It's all about the feel of the song, or more accurately, channeling whatever he's feeling—which is probably something like growing to be 5000 feet tall and reaching through the heavens to grapple with the infinities of atom-smashing, burning star cores of the universe. When he’s really on, he can make you feel it too. By the time the OM Riff crashes in again for the final third of the album, it’s pulled elements of all the preceding movements along in its gravitational wake. This is the true sound of the Cosmic Inferno. Kawabata’s soloing like a maniac, his controls set for the heart of the sun. Higashi Hiroshi’s electronics could be an Aurora Borealis of scintillating scotomas; or just as likely, you’ve gone subterranean, and what you thought were shimmering stars was a wildly writhing mass of glowworms. And Shimura Koji and Okano Futoshi power the entire trip with their dual, hammer-of-the-gods drumming.
This is pure, glorious, brain-melting exhilaration all the way, and easily one of the top five albums in the Acid’s sprawling Temple.
Here's the original version by Gong. Now imagine that stretched out for nearly an hour and played by Dr. Manhattan on an LSD freakout.
Sometime after posting All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavor’s Turning Into Small, I got an email from guitarist Merc letting me know that he and drummer Brian Doherty had a new band called Ifwhen. Actually, they’ve been around since 2003, but they do have a new EP that’s available as a free download from their website. I’ve got it linked below in mp3 format, but if you head over there you can also get it in FLAC, plus download their cover of Syd Barrett’s No Good Trying.
Ifwhen doesn’t sound exactly like ANL&LF, but it does sound like its natural progression. The shoegaze and post-rock elements have become very compressed, and the songs are more jaggedly three-dimensional. There’s a geometric feel to it, as if they aren’t playing melodies, but unspooling the schematics of theoretical architecture from an AUTOCAD machine that’s just finished reading House of Leaves.
The logic/programming implications of their name become readily apparent in the multifaceted intersections of sound and direction. Each song is a maze of possibilities being explored simultaneously. It verges on noise, but like ANL&LF, Ifwhen is always revolving around and reflecting a solid pop core through its many twirling prisms. It’s the Everlasting Gobstopper of ear candy. It’s still highly disorienting—psychotically (psychedelically) schizoid, like listening to Barrett, Belong and Melt Banana all at the same time—but they really are working to fuck your shit up for your own good. They’re trying to change your perception.
And they can do it, too. Unlike most post-MBV bands, Ifwhen don’t compose based on volume, or reverb, or textures, or shades of color. They aren’t feeling things out improvisationally, they’re reconfiguring the actual internal structure of the music. Keyboardist Mary McDowell can actually play in two different time signatures (one with each hand) at the same time. And Merc’s guitar has a way of constantly folding in on itself like origami that never resolves into known shapes. Everything is oblique without being obfuscatory. The hidden song structures will slowly crystallize on repeated listens as you learn to navigate their psychohedron space.
Although it’s fair to say that All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors sound like an exquisitely realized cross between My Bloody Valentine and Stereolab, they’re actually more interested in shaping and manipulating those waves of feedback and distortion into a kind of frazzled, cubist space-rock rather than solid sheets of blissed-out headspace. Eschewing classic shoegaze’s supposed avoidance of straightforward melodies, they compose their swells of woozy, stomach-ache synths and guitars as “actual” songs, slipping in subtle instrumentation, psychedelic washes, and shuffling funk beats amidst the syrupy speaker-drippings. Your Imagination could be the blueprint for A Sunny Day in Glasgow, and Lattershed totally makes out with New Order. The whole album feels like being swept under in a threatening but majestic riptide.
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.
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.
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.
It starts by hemorrhaging sound. Some type of deep space satellite has sprung a leak and a bottomless ocean of electronic scree is seeping out into the universe.
Switching between dissonant drone (Listening In Depth's layers of looped feedback) and cloudy ambience (Disremembering's shades Stars of the Lid or ambient Cocteau Twins), Labradford instantly made a name for themselves as the flagship release on Kranky (soon to become well known for this type of updated, experimental space-rock). Think of Loop covering Cluster, and you have the basic idea. Of course, you can also hear a bit of Landing, Aix Em Klemm, Pan•American, and some of the Cure's best minor key atmospherics. And nestled right in the middle of all this static is Soft Return, whose pillowy instrumentation and whispered vocals sound like Spiritualized on some sort of cosmic quaalude comedown. It's a divine, Sunday morning pop song by any standard and easily the best thing they've done.
I don't know what it is about Japan, but for the last two decades or so they've turned out more atomic-monster sized rawk bands than anywhere else on the planet. Add Leningrad Blues Machine (not from Leningrad, not really playing the blues, probably lying about being machines) to the list. Although lead guitarist and vocalist Tabata Mitsuru has been in Acid Mothers Temple, The Boredoms, and Zeni Geva, Leningrad Blues Machine dabbles in none of their abstract, scribbly freak-outs and instead offers up righteous slabs of "traditional", brain-melting, psychedelic awesomeness.
Roman Castavet makes me think of Red Krayola and Boris covering something from Echo and the Bunnymen's Crocodiles. Woodstock Monster sounds like L7's Pretend We're Dead and Nirvana's Aneurysm holding hands and headbanging at a Hawkwind concert (even weirder, considering this was recorded in '88). And Moon & Milk Bar builds into something resembling one of the Butthole Surfer's old brown-acid instrumentals (In fact, several of their songs display the type of psych-damaged heaviosity that the Flaming Lips burned through on Hear It Is, and both records reference Eddie Cochran's Summertime Blues).
They have at least two more albums, although I haven't had any luck finding anyplace that sells them outside of Japan. If you know where to get them, leave a note in the comments, please.
It's Stereolab. You either love them or haven't cared since Dots and Loops. This was a single from the Margerine Eclipse tour and sounds pretty much exactly like what you expect it to sound like. I actually think they're a little more on the ball here than they were on the album. The space-age bachelor pad muzak has a lot more punch than they'd recently managed, and never overstays its welcome. I never saw them in concert that they didn't rock the hell out of everything they played. I only wish they'd gotten around to putting that sound on record.
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.
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.
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.
Musical duets rarely live up to hopes and expectations. Artists usually spend their time just exchanging verses, and never really try to blend their styles. Schema, on the other hand, are almost exactly like what you would want a cross between Hovercraft and Stereolab to sound like.
Hovercraft's afterburner equipped guitars tone down the epic roar in favor of heavy dub (check out the cosmically echoed event horizon that is We Think We're Sane) and a post rock take on Neu! (waves of muted, space-dust feedback, relentless, looped rhythms, and Mary's spacy keyboard bloops). Like a pair of communicating vessels, the album starts out heavy-on-the-Hovercraft/light-on-the-Stereolab with a progressive mixing of styles. Unde builds to Hovercraft's usual racing down a windtunnel trajectory with Mary moaning and murmuring over the top. They find their level in Echolalia...Curvilinear, the sprawling centerpiece, then tilt more towards Stereolab's old school motorik pop on Far from Where We Began and Getting Smart.
Sadly, Mary was killed in a bicycle accident, and Hovercraft disbaned soon after. There had been talk of another album and a tour, but this is all we'll be left with. Not a bad epitaph.
The reason Hovercraft's members hid their identities behind stage names and generic, vintage science photography is because they were not humans, but giant, autistic beetles that had their limbs replaced by robotic arms and then decided to record instrumental love songs to each other.
Pink Floyd is one of those bands that occupies such a huge portion of my listening history and love of music that I'm at a loss for where to even begin describing them in any coherent way. They were the very atmosphere of my teenage years. Anyway, pretty much everybody formed their opinion of them ages ago. Of course, if your only knowledge of them is from classic rock radio*, you might find that this sounds like a completely different band.
As bootlegs go, this is a great show with fantastic sound. They're still in that early middle period; just emerging from the Piper and Saucerful days, excitedly exploring who they were and what they could possibly be. The early material, though not quite as tight as the live versions on Umma Gumma, show them reaching for something more, trying to pull them apart a little and incorporate some of their newfound tension and drama. Cymbaline sounds sufficiently ethereal without them dicking around with that disembodied footsteps effect, and Saucerful always sounds better when Dave does the choral part at the end. On everything, you really get a sense of them interacting as a band; the intertwined musical call and response to the various directions, sounds and melodies each member creates. I love this period of pure musicality, before they got locked into playing sets that just required duplicating their previous concept album (not that some of those aren't worthwhile, too).
*An open rant to classic rock and oldies stations: Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick people! You have over fifty fucking years of music to pick from. Play Fearless instead of Another Brick in the Wall, or No Quarter instead of Stairway to Heaven, or any of the dozens of awesome Kinks songs that aren't Lola. And just because something was a top ten hit during the 50's or 60's doesn't mean it was rock and roll. I think I may have heard Buddy Holly once on an oldies station, but fucking Sugar Shack got played all the god damn time. There's no excuse for that.
1. The Embryo 2. tuning 3. Interstellar Overdrive 4. tuning 5. Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun 6. tuning 7. The Amazing Pudding (Atom Heart Mother)
I'm sure there are lots of genres and traditions in Japanese music that I would never pick up on, not being a native listener. Similarly, I often get the feeling that, to non-western ears, Led Zeppelin, The B-52's, Add N to X, Duane Eddy, and Devo could all be in the same band. That band would be the Spoozys. You'd think that would suck, but it's actually glitter-coated-cotton-candy-disco-balls-in-a-laser-blender glee.
We've been lucky enough to catch Oneida on several of their tours, and they nearly always put on a show that is just as much a test of endurance as it is a rock action. Most of the shows we've seen ended with Kid Millions and Fat Bobby battling it out over who can pound the hardest/last the longest. Kid Millions may be the best drummer I've ever seen (after Janet Weiss, although they have very different styles). I don't think he ever stops playing, even between songs. In fact, seeing them live confirmed something I half suspected from their albums—the drums are their "lead" instrument. On songs like Changes in the City, the organ and guitar are primarily rhythm instruments that provide the structure for Kid's increasingly intricate and melodic drum patterns.
These two songs come from a tour single, and although I recognized the titles as belonging to the Grateful Dead (Cream Puff war and Cold Rain and Snow), I had to listen to them a couple of times before I was sure they weren't just adopting them ironically.
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