Bones from the Garden, April 2006

Well it’s springtime again; at least that’s what the calendar says. Here at Deep Water we’ve done our best to till the soul soil for another bountiful harvest, and sure enough a whole new pile of bones has come up through the crumbling earth.

First up is the tranquil improvised guitar space of Badgerlore, a psychedelic “supergroup” that started life as the duo of Ben Chasny and Rob Fisk, and has since swelled to include Tom Carter (that guy again!) of Charalambides and Pete Swanson of Yellow Swans. Fisk used to kick it with Deerhoof, but lately focuses energies on operating his excellent Free Porcupine Society label, releasing CDs with all original hand-drawn artwork he does himself, and he also kicks it with angular skronksters, 7 Year Rabbit Cycle. With Stories for Owls, Badgerlore employs multiple guitars, piano, mostly wordless vocals and electronics to arrive at some blissfully ragged improvised plateaus, landing somewhere between West and East. There’s definitely a hint of the driving, post Sonic Youth/Velvets atonal guitar clang thang, but these haunted hymns are played slower and lower, occasionally infused with a devotional acid folk quality. In fact, much of this album strikes me as almost religious, vocals approaching Buddhist chant, but smothered with delay and dark ominous drones humming beneath. The recordings of Peter Stapleton’s Metonymic label come to mind, but glimpsed through a West Coast sun kissed forest haze. This one’s for drifting and sifting.

Also from FPS, Grouper is the work of Oakland’s Liz Harris, conjuring an ambient minimal tone wash via guitar, keyboards and vocals. The sound explored on Way Their Crept is not so far from Badgerlore, a tad more processed and much more ghostly. The vocal workouts of Christina Carter or Fursaxa come to mind, backed with an ambient wash that suggests late 70s Eno in the garage, or maybe early Throbbing Gristle, minus all the perversion. These nine tracks are deeply textured, transportive journeys into spiritual uncertainty, with ghostly chorals (Harris’s voice is often looped and layered) born from the subconscious void that lurks within us all, but rarely coalesces as this kind of breathing, digestible mood soup.

Since we’ve mentioned the Dove Yellow Swans (the first word changes regularly, but always starts with a ‘D’), may as well get more specific. The Oakland/Portland duo has been making a post-Throbbing Gristle noise racket for a few years now, dropping more limited CD-Rs and collaborations than I’ve been able to snatch up in that time. Their sound can vary considerably from release to release, which makes Live During War Crimes a prime intro. As one might suspect, it was captured live during the first months of the Iraq war back in 2004. This expanded CD, which incorporates the original CD-R plus some extras, comes via Sweden’s Release the Bats and features guitars, feedback, tape loops, moans, screams and other damaged noise generators conjuring sound storms that build from piercing tones to decimated electro-industrial swells. The Yellow Swans are one of the few bands to take this kind of earth rot to new places, frothing over with all manner of strange bacterial life and writhing in the orgiastic trans-species possibilities. New life!

United Fairy Moons is another new, extremely promising label from the psychedelic holy land that is Dunedin, New Zealand. UFM is run by one James Currin; he plays in quite a few of the label’s ensembles, including Three Forks, a new trio with Currin on cello and viola, Tim Cornelius of the revered trash psych jazz combo Sandoz Lab Technicians on drums, violin and field recordings and Donald McPherson on guitar, flute and percussion. The vibe is deliberate and spontaneous across the seven free jazz improvisations that comprise Seven Layer Ape, which gets a deserved big time CD treatment. The Shadow Ring and Flies Inside the Sun come to mind, though Three Forks rarely approach the white noise vistas Flies can reach, nor are they as stumbling as The Shadow Ring. There’s a hint of old folk and blues in some of the more downcast passages, yet the melodic progressions constantly reward in this capable trio’s hands. There are moments of great beauty infused with a pervasive edge which should come as no surprise to people familiar with this sound, but I find much of this disk to be nothing less than life-affirming in its multi-textured, many-styles-compressed-together-at-once vibe.

But why stop there! For something a bit more all-purpose psychedelic, touching on ramshackle folk space with subtle effects, dusted old west ambiance, massed string voyages that would make Tony Conrad blush, and an altogether undeniable alien beauty, you probably won’t find a better escape hatch than Ray Off. The duo of James and Joseph Currin mines black gold with the sprawling Ghost Wolf of Thunder Mountain CD-R. The title is likely an allusion to the Will Henry short story of the same name which is set in the American old west. I haven’t read it, but want to. I imagine what Ray Off divines across these five tracks of peyote laced aural fever dreams would make for a fine backdrop to images of sun scorched rock formations, distant liquid hallucinations and other strange lizard-scuttling desert phenomena. One of the earliest UFM releases, currently in its third press and still roaming the wilds, highly recommended for lovers of skin-crawling, head-tickling sonic mutations. Features excellent silk-screened cardboard packaging (as do all UFM releases I’ve seen).

And what of this Rory Storm character? This one man Kraut psych explosion makes for an especially sweet ride across the ten tracks that comprise the stoned, blissfully spaced We Are Superior Beings CD-R. I usually don’t get behind such grandiose statements, but it’s official: United Fairy Moons is a superior musical organism. The freshness and vitality of all the recordings I’ve heard from the label is encapsulated exquisitely in Rory Storm’s “Sick Robot / Lightning Robot,” which starts as a slow motion trudge of solitary electric guitar and crackling amp buzz that could be the burning of kindling, sort of like Spacemen 3’s narco-blues crossed with the blown speaker vibe of Dead C; then blam(!)—mutates into the spastic space-coaster of the second part with cascading explosions of angular guitar and rubbery synth lines bouncing all over the place. The effect is sort of like reading some obscure sci-fi comic book while listening to Harmonia, Vocokesh and ingesting LSD all at the same time, but there’s a lot more going on here, too.

Last but not least from UFM is the percussive sound sculpture of Spit. Know nothing about this fellow, but he pulls some fairly interesting maneuvers on Trash Music Spitacular. Opener, “Painting for Prepared Piano (ex. 1),” kicks off with clattery jazz drum/vibes eruptions that sound like lunchroom trays being shook back and forth violently before slowly merging together into a tumbling post Velvets throb, only to cut out instantly. The field recordings of church bells, traffic sounds and contact mic noise on the second track make me think of Organum’s Vacant Lights, an intoxicating site-specific drone/industrial melding. The subtle shifts from mono to stereo on this track are effective. Otherwise we get a shovel scraping and dumping dirt as a rhythmic loop beneath bowed strings and crowd noise, glass gongs gliding over hammered metal and the three part free noise instrumental of “Painting for Prepared Piano,” which could be homage to the first Red Krayola album. Somewhere between Seht, later Sun Ra and even Keiji Haino’s more percussive efforts, Trash Music Spitacular is more nourishing than week old cabbage.

I also scored some good swag recently from the increasingly dependable Twilight Flight Sound, mentioned in our last roundup upon the release of The Friday Group’s Wet Fur. As Ethereal Planes Indian, B.C. Smith (who runs TFS in Austin and plays in The Friday Group and Iron Kite) sounds basically like what he is, a Texas psych head indulging gleefully in his love of home-recording, and in the process turning any perceived limitations into bona fide gateways to the psychedelic hinterlands. Smith has a firm grasp on the aesthetics and an anything-can-happen approach that consistently surprises and, to be quite honest, regularly induces fat salivating grins of approval when experiencing Smoke Signals under the (hint, hint) proper listening conditions. The second EPI release, this time on CD, covers a lot of ground from effected instrumental garage psych passages to industrial-clank-meets-Native-American-whoop-dance (NICE!) and totally destroyed minimal acid pop constructions (hello, Brother JT!) that, on occasion, feature little more than clinks on vibes and cardboard box thwacks for percussion and wonderfully destroyed acid guitars riffs that hearken back the glory daze of weed worshipping sludge boogie. It’s rare that someone combines such a handmade outsider approach with scattered, lo-fi (by design and necessity) psychedelic strangeness and makes it shine all the way through.

And here’s a swell surprise, a CD-R reissue of the very first United Bible Studies album, Stations of the Sun, Transits of the Moon, this time for the excellent Barl Fire label (they’ve already dropped quality sounds from Lamp of the Universe, The North Sea, The Floating World and Kitchen Cynics in the past six months, all with fantastic handmade packaging). UBS is a psychedelic (free) folk/chamber music ensemble hailing via Ireland’s always dependable Deserted Village. They combine rainy-day strums and fingerpicking with a more damaged improvised delirium that sounds sort of like AMM gone primitive Irish folk. Undeniably human music that ranges from the luminous frozen snapshots of piano and bows on “Ice Forms on Obelisk” (these shorter instrumentals really burrow deep) to the expanded electronics, chimes and scrapes of “Everytime We Find a Dead Viking,” which builds magnificently with ominous echo bass reverberating beneath distant plucks, rabid squawking horns and minimal percussive clatter to meld in a feast of sawing, scraping and blowing aural catharsis.

And then there was Raccoo-oo-oon. It’s fun to say. Fun to listen to, too. There’s more from this Iowan (Iowan?) freak psych combo already hitting the shelves, but I’m going with The Cave of Spirits CD-R, released by the cool head masters at Time Lag Records. These masked bandits got the kind of fire that can only be born from living directly in the middle of the capitalist farm empire that is America. These seven tracks are slamming psych/noise/jazz blasts that run the gamut from spastic skronk (injected with feral massed yelps) to fuzzy garage jazz fusion and spaced out acid rockin’ grooves with thudding percussion and stoned chants blaring overhead. Not necessarily what was expected, but entirely befitting of a band that goes by the name, Raccoo-oo-oon. (Late word has it that while the CD-R version is OOP, the album is due for proper CD release on Time-Lag soon.)

Another really nice surprise jumped out of the void and started licking my earlobes when I found the debut long player by the mighty Goslings nestled in the mailbox. Given the self-released CD-Rs I’d heard before now, the Between the Dead CD is a revelation. How to describe what this Floridian husband/wife duo (trio for this recording) is up to? Torrential scorched earth shoegaze? Psychedelic dirge drone death? How about The End? Hey man, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If the great curtain in the sky drops anytime soon, I may be scared shitless, but I’m not running for cover. I’m getting my Longhorns camping chair and parking it front row and center. As The Goslings know, it’s going to make for one fucked up trip. This is a harrowing record with crackling low end power grooves cut from the same grizzled cloth that yielded the tyrannical sludge of Sunn o))) and early Earth, but this doesn’t sound like anything on Southern Lord. Most of these tracks are more like physical experiences—writhing with sexual heat and blistering intensity—than songs. Still, the guitar squalls invoke the most hypnotic repetitive mind wash (Sonic Youth and Loop come to mind) along with visceral, squealing feedback that leaves me sprawled out on the floor every time. There’s also at least one dreamy guitar drone workout which really is a pleasure to hear and reminds me why I placed this beautiful monster on my best of list for ‘05. Beyond that, The Goslings sort of sound like My Bloody Valentine after she’s had one too many shock treatments. Crucial Blast just reissued their first two long gone EP’s on one CD, but Between the Dead is the best way in.

At some point, the question probably needs to be asked: What else can be done with the acoustic guitar? In the wake of modern string magicians like Matt Valentine and Rick Bishop, and more unorthodox string-benders like Tetuzi Akiyama, what’s left? Enter the inspired 6- and 12-string guitar mastery of James Blackshaw. He’s young, 23 on recording of the Sunshrine CD (Digitalis), released just before his higher profile O True Believers on Important. The title track is a gorgeous musical statement of purpose, 26 minutes of liquid fast improvised/composed acoustic fingerpicking that captivates every second. It opens with a few strums before gently evolving into a winding river of fluid picking, tracing the developments of Fahey and Basho along the way with a grace rarely glimpsed in the form. Blackshaw carefully arranges at least four movements into the extended raga, touching just as deftly on the English string mastery of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn as their American counterparts before it’s through. “Sunshrine” is more than just a piece of music; it’s history unfolding before your ears. Some tasteful insertions of harmonium, bowed cymbals, glockenspiel and more to further blur the edges.

Also on Digitalis comes self titled debut from San Fran avant-noise quartet, Kyrgyz (and yes, Tom Carter is involved), featuring Robert Horton, Carter, Loren Chasse (Jewelled Antler, Thuja, Coelacanth) and Christine Boepple of the Sky Green Leopards Sky Band. Improvised screech—boatloads of guitars, ethnic instruments, recorders and effects, some computer mixing, voices, bells and much more—gives way to formations ripe with squiggly organic weirdness, bows and drones, all moving low over the soil and spreading out as tiny tributaries toward the sea. The overall vibe ranges from murky post-industrial drone to AMM-esque free noise and spacey ghost blues. This is an album for burying your head under the soil and listening closely. It even occasionally rocks like a dilapidated freight train passing by just after midnight.

Now on to Foxglove, the Digitalis in-house CD-R label which releases many more adventurous and often impenetrable sonic artifacts. Foxglove has one of the most bizarre and constant limited release schedules anywhere, and some truly brilliant things have materialized, a few of which are currently in the process of being reissued in more permanent formats. Anything that kicks up Brad Rose’s naturalist noise tendencies is fair game, which brings us to Sculptress, and their This Phrase Appeals to You CD-R. These six tracks walk the line between damaged chamber music, improvised ethnic drones and something more intangible (and electronic). The Tower Recordings and, reaching back a bit further, The Supreme Dicks come to mind, and such comparisons are not made lightly. There is cohesion in this blissful forest dream, as tinkling bells and random clatter metamorphose into blurry flights of ethnic bowed trance. Each track occupies its own developed sound space with economical arrangements and controlled “freak outs”.

Wax Ghost is one Eden Rose (Brad’s wife and partner in crime at Digitalis). She unleashes a minimal folk drone sound sculpture on the Moon and Sod CD-R via flutes, harmonica, bowed strings, piano, various percussion and indefinable rumblings. Them wacky Finns might be an influence on what’s going here, but this is much more somber and reflective with no loops, howls or clattery noise bursts. A few of these tracks evince a handmade psychedelic music box quality with primitive plucks and high pitched tinkling bells, while others are more like chamber folk in the bedroom, struck with a somberness that tends to permeate all life if you look closely enough. The final track is especially affecting, a lonesome little piano piece called “Pancake Breakfast at the VFW.” I’ve been there, and I’d say she gets it just right.

Another new one, Emerald Cloud Cobra brings the transcendental Middle Eastern psychedelic Om, merging in-the-red industrial screech with ethnic drones, bows, acoustic guitars, sitar, metallic gongs, chants, throat singing, spoken word and more on the Red Raven Flower, Night Beneath the Sea CD-R. Totally handmade, disturbed/sacred dream tones that regularly break right on through in a way that makes me think of maybe the Tower Recordings or Six Organs of Admittance after an especially rough week of left-for-dead over-exposure in the Gobi. Burnt to a crisp and highly recommended for reasons I can’t really verbalize; aside from it effectively drowns out the clatter of that little hamster running in place in my skull. Thumbs up!

Gift Horse is the fiddle duo of Jill Kjömpedahl and Hal Hughes with recording help from Robert Horton, whose living room is where these nine traditionals were captured in the heat of mid-Summer, 2002. The liners, by Hughes, tell of the origins and histories of the tracks, half of which are old songs learned from other fiddlers, and half of which were penned by Hughes, himself. Think festive, think Irish jigs and hand-made, sitting on the sofa right there in the same room with sweaty grins and twinkling eyes. Scruffy and lo-fi; you can hear Horton say “rolling” and a few chuckles here and there, but mostly a stark, primitive and altogether lovely dash through the green countryside.

Since Deep Water has been in hibernation, Bardo Pond, a band we value highly ‘round here (our man, Kevin Moist, plays with three of the Bardos in the jazz/psych hybrid Third Troll when he’s not destroying rock ‘n’ roll with The Clear Spots), has released a steady stream of limited CD-Rs on their own Capillary imprint (available via the band’s Three Lobed label website). The first four have since gotten a proper CD “highlights” treatment on the always dependable All Tomorrow’s Parties under the title, Selections: Volumes 1-4, and BP has a brand new studio album on the horizon, plus a soon to be released Terrastock commemorative, Sublimation. Busy bees, indeed! Bardo Pond’s psychic interplay has only improved over the years. When I first heard Amanita (Matador) back a decade ago, I didn’t know exactly what to think. Now, across some five more studio albums and about as many live performances, my mind has caught up to their mode of thinking, and I can honestly say Bardo Pond is one of my favorite murky, drooling uberKraut fixated bands. Good people, good tunes, good dope; you know the rest. Their latest CD-R, Vol 6, is still available from their site, and comes highly recommended if looking for bubbling primordial visions of the dawn of man seen through a prism of melting feedback and lumbering, sprawling grooves. Everything that makes Bardo Pond such a unique, organic-kinetic entity can be glimpsed in these six shimmering tracks of liquid distortion. There’s no such thing as “lost to the cutting room floor” with these folks.

Somewhat related, Fursaxa has gleaned a fair share of positive attention since the issue of the Mandrake CD-R in 2000 (currently available on vinyl from Eclipse). Amulet (Last Visible Dog) is an expanded CD issue of a CD-R from ’04 that finds Tara Burke (who is Fursaxa) in expansive, devotional mode. Burke's vocal on opener, “Rheine,” takes a somber, meditative path as a chant loop that could rightfully earn her another Popol Vuh comparison is slowly engulfed in shakers, percussion, flute and layered harmonies. Definitely one of her most alluring, transportive trips, with that commanding operatic voice in full siren form. In other places we get the kind of strummy lo-fi pop I could procreate to (“Rodeo in the Sky”), organic vocal chants to the heavens (“Crimson,” “Songs for the Cicada”) and more mind-cleansing, fuzz-laden medieval arias, plus guest contributions from the Gibbons of Bardo Pond (told you they were related). Definitely worthy of more than a few solitary late night visitations.

And then there was Tamburo, Mike Tamburo. The Meisha and Arco Flute Foundation member made an impressive solo debut with his Beating of the Rewound Son on the Music Fellowship last year, roving the same sort of raga folk and effects terrain that Jim O’Rourke mined so successfully on his Bad Timing (Drag City). Tamburo started the New American Folk Hero label to showcase some of his own solo creations and the recordings of friends and artists he’s worked with. Screwing Six Bolts Into Last Tuesday is an especially impressive solo piece for piano, vibes, feedback and effects that builds from tasteful piano strikes to a processed cycle of electronics and distortion that altogether makes me think of Steve Reich’s reverberating flights to infinity, with some speed fluctuations and inter-dimensional shifts further adding to the processed build-up confusion. Often quite disturbed and haunted in the same space. Mike also includes a short story, a kind of “chronicles of Tamburo,” this chapter about the death of his mentor and friend, Sayas Ser, which I admit gets me choked up but also adds to the handmade, intimacy of New American Folk Hero, undeniably a labor of love and transcendence.

Keenan Lawler first came to my attention as a member of Keyhole, a quintet that features Pelt and metal worker, Eric Clark. Their two albums on Eclipse come highly recommended for anyone interested in the ever-blurring gap between primitive folk and abstract improvisation. Solo, Lawler forges a deep sound portal via his National Steel resonator guitar, an instrument mostly associated with bluegrass and blues. And Lawler is definitely playing a kind of blues on “The Strange Tale of Eddy Westport” 3” CD-R on NAMH -- even a kind of bluegrass -- but his measured fingerpicking is run through the filter of more unorthodox string benders, resulting in a sound that’s primal and otherworldly, meditative and boundless, across three tracks of immersive plucks and drones. Lawler bridges the aforementioned gap between the most primitive American mountain music and modern day out jazz, and he does it live with no overdubs. Case in point: “Goodbye Lisa Rose,” 90 seconds of lamented bow screech and spectral overtones.

And that brings us to Tomu Tonttu, the solo guise of Jan Anderzén, lead loon of the revered Finnish ensemble, Kemialliset Ystävät, and contributing member of the even more fucked Avarus. Alone, Anderzén conjures some fairly intense caveman loop chaos which ranges from what could be the chatter of bird song (actually vibes, percussion, bells and more plundered from other records) on opener “Maialiman Tappi,” to the vocal chant and echoed percussion of “Se On Velho,” a feverish blast of organic clatter. The Ehdottelee CD-R (self-released) was undoubtedly made for altered states as the abstract possibilities bubble over from every side, but at the same time the music is the drug. It’s as if Anderzén performed all the research, visited all the labs and dropped all the tabs and fused those psychotropic properties into this vivid, head-swimming montage of kinetic energy. Different tonal elements (a fem moan, more bird chatter, a broken ukulele, ambient crowd noise, a symphony of toy flutes) bleed in and out of the mix so deftly, that it’s hard not to be charmed by such a schizophrenic carousel. It’s sort of like a strobe light for the ears, flashing from one universe to the next, from shamanistic mood folk to rubbery electronica, from bad acid tinker toys to home made no wave…from Finland to your ears. This one may be impossible to find, but there’s a new self-titled 12” that just hit the racks on Ultra Eczema.

And that’s all she wrote this time out. Drop back by in a month or so to see what new hidden gems the rake gathers. Hope to see some of you fine folks at Terrastock!

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