I call Deep Water an on-going experiment. “Experiment,” in this case, doesn’t refer to the scientific process for testing a hypothesis as much as it refers to the kind of idiot curiosity that urges a match to a combustible substance.

Face it, magnesium is just cool, the way it burns bright white; the cone of granules begs the spark.

Going back to Issue the First of the printed magazine, you can see our cast shadow from this flame in the “Thunderclap Toad” composition. I love that picture, but nothing evidences the anthropology of idiot curiosity like “Thunderclap Toad” or the “Page of 23s.”

If you’re not careful, the incendiary moment becomes the purpose of the exercise, instead of the action necessary to produce the desired outcome. Deep Water has always been an attempt to produce a magazine of thoughts about music, culture, and ideas without commercial constraints determining or limiting editorial decisions.

The lack of constraints enabled, even spurred, us to create “Thunderclap Toad.” And, while I still love the moment that created that image and the image itself, it represents the confusion between means and purpose. By Issue the Third, we had gained that sense of restraint that balances the difference between what we can do and what we ought to do.

Just like the name of Det Gamla Landet (“The Old Country” in Swedish) indicates, this is an ensemble that delivers nostalgic qualities in spades. Band member Mats Larsson says that the name “brings back memories from an old, dark but yet romantic place that we come from or where we have lived in a past life.” Given all that, it makes sense that the two official releases of the band - a 7” and a full-length CD on the Swedish Aa label - deliver mostly instrumental back porch tales fusing traditional folk with something slightly more modern, and the results are nothing short of spellbinding.

Det Gamla Landet is basically a bunch of old friends that in the year 2000 started to make music while hanging out and drinking. One day one of the guys found a banjo and from that point there was simply no turning back. There’s something distinctly Swedish about the sounds these guys create. I would even go as far as to say that these acoustic, folk-inspired sounds simply couldn’t have been recorded anywhere but in Sweden. There’s something about the band’s whiskey-soaked sadness and disillusion that reflects the dark rainy winters of the south, but there’s also enough Midsummer happiness hidden under the surface to illustrate the time of the year when it’s pretty much light night and day.

I keep a small garden, and because of crop rotation issues I have to skip growing certain vegetables from time to time. I’ll grow onions every other year, potatoes once every three years, soybeans for edamame once in a great while. But aside from the asparagus bed, I make it a point to plant four things every single year: pole beans, tomatoes, garlic, and ... swiss chard.

The first three might make sense – they’re about the most versatile veggies one can grow, and store-bought just doesn’t cut it for flavor or nutrition. The same goes for the lowly chard – in fact, I find that chard is just about the most essential vegetable crop I grow each year.

The reasons are many. First off, swiss chard is incredibly easy to grow – start it indoors a few weeks before the last frost, put it in the garden once the soil reaches about 50° F/10° C, and let it be. About a month later you can start snipping off the first stalks, and enjoy it all summer and right up to the killing frosts of autumn. It won’t bolt if you forget to pick it for a few days, and like the hydra will grow faster and stronger the more you harvest.

In 1969, Miles Davis profoundly altered the genetic makeup of jazz with In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew. Impressionistic, enigmatic, and intoxicating: the former possessed a concentrated beauty that contrasted with the latter’s oceanic scope. Each introduced aberrant grooves, electric tonal colours, and post-production methods that were then unfamiliar, if not entirely alien, to the jazz idiom. Because of their extensive influence, these two recordings are widely recognized as the ones that crystallized the somewhat nebulous genre of jazz fusion.

Such a notion might satisfy at a superficial level, but to anyone with more than a passing interest it's readily clear that the most celebrated of the fusion groups (Mahavishnu Orchestra, Return To Forever, Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, mid-period Weather Report) were musically at odds with what Miles was turning out during the 1970s. Certainly Davis had tilted the heads of his progeny toward new ways of thinking, yet beyond the basic electrification of jazz—which in any case had become pervasive after the relative commercial success of Bitches Brew—there were few sonic aspects in common. The work of fusion’s most conspicuous artists also seemed to imply that these “new directions in music” (to quote Miles himself) had lost their original sense of freedom and been reduced to the furious convolution and over-composition of jazz-rock or the tight, well-rinsed deliveries of jazz-funk.

Combining beach life with shopping precinct values, mapping strained spatial divisions between working class Australian pubs and upwardly mobile clubs for 20-somethings in polo shirts with upturned collars, Adelaide suburb Glenelg is not the place I would expect to find minimal techno dotting the record store shelves. Nevertheless, there I was on the day of Christmas Eve 2005, ploughing through second-hand CD racks on the search for the ultimate bargain. After an eternity of luckless drilling, Robert Hood’s 2002 album Point Blank glared balefully at me from the morass, its monochrome austerity the gateway for the entrained eye/ear.

Hood’s history is unimpeachable. Minister For Information for the primary ‘second wave of Detroit’ techno outfit Underground Resistance, Hood worked on their X-101, X-102 and X-103 series of concept 12” singles before internal dissension cracked the UR hull, Hood jumping ship with founder member Jeff Mills to work on the Waveform Transmissions series for Mills’ Axis label. Hood’s solo recordings for the Tresor label, alongside his own M-Plant imprint, are some of the bedrocks of minimal techno, alongside other ‘second wave of Detroit’ producers like Richie Hawtin/Plastikman.

Bones from the Garden is a column devoted to the documentation and exploration of mostly limited underground releases from the US and elsewhere. A lot of these are CD-Rs in an edition of 100 or less -- some by virtual unknowns, others by more established familiars. Since this is the first of what we hope to be a regular feature, some of the releases mentioned this time will be older and possibly out of print, but most were released during the last half of 2005 and should be findable. Contact information is included, and these can be purchased from the usual suspects (Eclipse, Boa Melody Bar, Time-Lag, Volcanic Tongue, etc).

When the Charalambides relocated to Austin at the end of the 90s, Tom and Christina Carter found themselves living next door to Eric and Vanessa Arn of the Primordial Undermind. As could be expected, crosspollination ensued. Tom joined the ‘Undermind for their Beings of Game P-U LP (Camera Obscura) -- a molten Krautrock fireball well worth the hunt if you ever wanted to hear Carter in rock mode a good decade after the Mike Gunn. And then there’s The Friday Group, which arose out of jam sessions between then ‘Underminder Brian Smith (Iron Kite, Ethereal Planes Indian), Shawn McMillen (Ash Castles on the Ghost Coast, Iron Kite), Tom Carter and Matt Martinez. Like these other ensembles, Friday Group is concerned with mapping oblique trajectories through familiar musical terrain. These guys have stripped away all the bullshit of whatever might be their starting point (folk, blues?) to devolve into a more damaged electro clatter space and ultimately reveal their own post-industrial path to aural divinity.

I first encountered Nick Castro’s music under the banner of the collectivist musical project Children of Ghaud, which had Nick and fellow freak music enthusiast and San Diego record store clerk Josh Quon as its twin centers-of-gravity. What was clear from the dark, introspective recordings issued as the CD Kinder des Gottes was a keenness to experiment with instrument, sound and form; as elements of folk, rock and psychedelia were thrown into an imaginary particle accelerator and warped into new and intriguing substances. Clearly, here was music on a journey of discovery rather than at a destination, and here were musicians to put on a watch list for future misbehavior of similar dimensions.

I next encountered Nick’s work in mid 2005, when a CD titled Further From Grace arrived in a package of promotional materials from the estimable Strange Attractors Audio House label. In stark contrast to the open-endedness of the Children of Ghaud material, an ensemble including various members of Espers and neo-folk luminary Josephine Foster were now assisting Nick in realizing one of the tightest and most exquisitely arranged folk albums I had ever heard issue from any period, including the mighty 1968-1973 heyday of British progressive and psychedelic folk. It’s the kind of album that refuses - and is in fact demeaned by - easy reference points in the present and past, existing as a sui generis masterpiece of new acoustic music, and a model for what might fly in the future to replace to already tattered and stained flag of “freak folk”. British, American and Middle-Eastern traditions are respectfully drawn together, and it’s difficult to imagine improving on any decision made on the record. Brian McTear’s production at the Miner Street studios in Philadelphia, - always excellent - reaches new heights on Further From Grace also, as he perfectly synchs Nick’s West Coast sensibilities with the East Coast ensemble he chose to work with on this occasion.