Bones From the Garden

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.

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.

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.

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.