Irishman Dave Colohan is a central figure in the United Bible Student movement, his voice unmistakable, his presence always felt. When you get your hands on an Agitated Radio Pilot release (they can be elusive) and wrap your ears around its melancholy pleasures, it's clear that the music of ARP is a conduit for Colohan's most personal thoughts and feelings, which are presented unfiltered (mostly) by the collaborative imperatives of other familial projects like United Bible Studies and Magickal Folk of the Faraway Tree. When seven ARP releases came across my desk in a quite short space of time, the opportunity to round 'em up and make some kind of sense of the project's progress seemed too good to pass up. For the sake of completeness Your Turn to Go It Alone, which was received somewhat earlier (though still in 2006), is included.

As you may have noticed, we've been away from the Garden on an extended sabbatical over the last few months, and we emerge from our voyage fully charged and ready to shine more light on the precious substrate of the weird music underground. All in all 2006 has simply provided the mother load in terms of far-reaching, strange, unique, mind-bending, soul-cleansing sound. It's a great time to be alive if you have the ears for this stuff and the time to sift through it all. Enter your ever diligent gardener.

First off: a few words about the highly influential VHF Records. For over 10 years now owner Bill Kellum (who also played with Kranky prog-droners Doldrums) has served as a dependable bridge between the psychedelic underground and the avid sound art consumer. Certainly one of the most influential and dependable bands on the roster - it gave us Jack Rose for Chrisssakes! - is Pelt, the improvised brainchild of Patrick Best, Rose, Mike Gangloff and Mikel Dimmick. The story of how Pelt went from a primitive anti rock unit to one of the most fluid cosmic noise raga bands on the planet probably deserves a book, but in the meantime Skullfuck / Bestio Tergum Degero, a recording of a recent live set captured in NYC at the Knitting Factory, not only shows how far these lads have come compositionally, but also just how much their musicianship has improved, from Rose's fluid open-tuned fingerpicking to the other players' command of the deep drone (comprised of harmonium, srutis, fiddle, singing bowls, gongs, portacello and flute). It can all be glimpsed magnificently on their epic, mind-blowing rendition of Rose's "Calais to Dover." Perhaps even more fascinating are the brooding gongs and percussive drones of the three part title track, which grows from a cold whisper to a cloud-breaking sunburst before it's through.

Y'know, it's kinda surprising that a publication located as far off the main highways as Deep Water Acres still receives a significant amount of music sent our way for possible review. We're mighty grateful for it though, yes we are. There's just such an explosion in creative independent music-making nowadays, and thanks to technological advances so much more of it is available/findable than ever before, that it can be a real bear to keep up with it all. We do try to stay on top of things, but making time even for the music we've spent our hard-earned money on (or traded a chicken for, or whatever) can be a big enough challenge, let alone sorting through all the surprises that arrive in the mail. Now, it's only fair to note that some of those items don't necessarily fit within our particular purview, though we're still thankful for the chance to hear ‘em. But at least a few do hit us right where we live (here, that would be), and so we'd like to take this opportunity to spill a few words in their honor.

A definition first -"jumbuck" is Australian slang for a sheep, and more specifically a young 'un (i.e. probably a lamb). The term has mystified millions and is best known from Banjo Paterson's use of it in "Waltzing Matilda". Its etymology is equally mystifying. It is possibly from an Austrlaian Aboriginal language, or perhaps an Aboriginal alteration of an English phrase like "jump up". Some suggested etymologies are a stretch. In 1896 a writer in local period journal The Bulletin suggested:

The word ‘jumbuck' for sheep appears originally as jimba, jombock, dambock, and dumbog. In each case it meant the white mist preceding a shower, to which a flock of sheep bore a strong resemblance. It seemed the only thing the aboriginal imagination could compare it to.

Enough of the sophistry anyways, we're here to cook. For this one, you'll need a camp fire with some good steady coals and a sturdy, preferably heavy duty cast iron (doubles-as-weapon grade) frying pan.

After some delay we’re back in full force here at the compound: watering the greens, raking the dirt and finding fresh digs, including a few goodies nabbed on our recent Terrastock voyage. First off, let me just say we love vinyl. We love the warm clicks and pops that come with giving an old (or new) 33 (or 45 or 78) LP a spin. We even love that there are entire musical genres devoted simply to playing records, but mostly we just love the feel of vinyl’s smooth surface, the overt bulkiness of its package and the eye-popping dimensions of its artwork. We also love that records take up too much space and have to be flipped over halfway through playing. It’s the ritual.

In the annals of recording, an interesting development is the lathe-cut record, a thin polycarbonate disc that looks and sounds (almost) like a real record and plays on normal turntables. The rationale behind the lathe-cut apparently has something to do with cost effectiveness. Homemade in New Zealand by Peter King, it might seem unlikely that shipping to and from NZ for anything could ever be considered cost effective, but that doesn’t stop artists of every stripe from giving it a whirl. A quick glance at Dan Vallor’s Lathe Cut Universe reveals hundreds of folks from all over the globe that have gotten in on the action, and if you own a lathe-cut, then you have too. Lathes are much thinner and their aural capacity is diminished compared to normal records, so a piece of music coming from a lathe has a ghostly, tinny quality. This quality is perfect for Steven R. Smith’s recordings under the name Hala Strana. His compositions—combining 4/8-track recordings of live instruments with minidisk and boombox overdubs—conjure a dream symphony that defies easy categorization on the 7” lathe, White Sleep (Soft Abuse). Beset with wheezing ambient tones and degraded tape noise, these pieces (including a Dog Faced Hermans cover!) sound positively ancient and fall somewhere between Eastern European traditional folk, the homemade primitive works of Harry Partch and the early noise drone of Velvet Underground. Limited to 60.

At a subterranean level below the much-hyped press darlings of the “freak-folk” - God, I hate that label - movement, is a network of genuinely intriguing noise-makers that are the true carriers of the flag raised by the hippie-tribal-psychedelic folk movement of the late 60s. Whether it be the fragile experiments on Jeweled Antler, the kaleidoscopic fragmenting of the apartment folk scene started by Tower Recordings, the myriad of projects of Foxglove and Digitalis, or the dynamically interchanging Finnish free music scene centred on Fonal Records, these are collectives not content to pastiche hippie folk or be quirkily bohemian. Rather the nodes in this network draw in influences as far-ranging as free jazz, noise, industrial and found sound, as well as the high quality home-brew technology of the CD-R format, to create a new topography of the underground. Add the allure of limited editions with hand-made packaging, and the use of the Internet as a means of distribution, and you have an immersive, addictive playground for artists and fans alike. Two of the more fascinating (and least-hyped) collectives are the United Bible Studies crew out of Ireland (see the recent Deep Water profile), and the group of artists orbiting around Michael Donnelly’s “Musicyourmindwillloveyou” imprint, based in the Australian country town of Kyogle, which nestles in rain-forest country near the border between the states of New South Wales and Queensland.

This past April (21-23, to be precise), the fine city of Providence, RI, USA played host to the sixth Terrastock music festival (cleverly titled Terrastock 6), which gathered some 35 of the finest artists in the contemporary psychedelic rock / folk / avant / whatever scene for what surely rates as the underground musical event of the year. Luckily, several members of our Deep Water team were able to attend the festival, and with a little bit of editorial arm-twisting we managed to convince them to reflect on their T-stock experiences in a round-robin conversational fashion via the magic of email. So, without any further ado, your editor will get out of the way and turn the floor over to: Mats Gustafsson (MG), Lee Jackson (LJ), Nathaniel Rasmussen (NR), and Heraclitus Franklin (HF). Take it away lads!

HF: I think we definitely need to start by giving major kudos to the folks behind the festival, especially Phil McMullen (longtime visionary behind the Ptolemaic Terrascope publication and the Terrastock festivals) and Jeffrey Alexander (of the excellent group Black Forest/Black Sea, the Secret Eye label, and the AS220 club). It’s probably totally oversimplifying things to see it as Phil providing the inspiration and Jeffrey providing the organization, especially since they both chose the roster of artists that appeared over the weekend. In fact, I know that some folks wondered in advance if that might not lead to a somewhat schizoid fest—Phil and his mates over here, Jeffrey and his gang over there... But I think the scheduling of the groups helped mitigate against that, and one thing that really worked for me was the diversity of sounds on hand, as you could walk from a set of solo acoustic guitar instrumentals to a noise-rock maelstrom to catchy pop to avant experimentation without ever losing a sense of flow.