Weed Temple

Ye Holy Gods! Among all the fine outer limits music outfits that perform at Primavera Sound every year, James Ferraro’s set must’ve been one of the most hypnotic and dazzling. A strange combination of heavenly drones, New New New Age synthesizer noodling and a contantly looping somewhat IDM-ish mutant beat that has no end. Even though Ferraro was well into the “Far Side Virtual” era at this stage (2012), he managed to perfectly blend his earlier crystal healer ambient with the newer vaporwave phase of his oeuvre. 25 minutes of trippertronic bliss. Highly recommended!!

Remember Hear Hums from a while ago? Fuck you, you don’t. Shame on you! There’s a fresh new project by Gainesville resident Mitch Myers, who made the sound as delicate as the fresh spring growth. This time the vocals are added to the carefully arranged and meticulously composed pieces, creating a floating, ornamental tapestry of sound that engulfs and transports you. Do I sound fucking stoned? Highly recommended.

Cameron Stallones’ Sun Araw has been pumping ultra-lazy/hazy psychedelic dubby blues since 2007 and with every album he tries to reform his sound without losing the gently flowing tropical aura. “Two From the Desert” is a documentary of two concerts that took place in the sunburned flats of the Yucca Valley in October 2012 as the Sun Araw Band, with two additional members enhancing the vision in the scorching sun. Impressive, trippy and lengthy live performance recorded with great quality. Available for just 3 dollars. Recommended!

Niechęć (Polish for “dislike” or “aversion”) is like one of those idealized old-school mafiosos: they’ve come to beat the fuck out of you, or even execute you, but they are wearing tailored suits, have perfect hair and have arrived in an elegant land yacht - so you find comfort in your inevitable fate and submit to it, knowing that there is no way of stopping them. Highly skilled, semi-improvised jazz fusion music that is ready to punch you in the face while retaining a master-level skills of their musical instruments. Dynamic yet controlled, furious yet stylish. After all, they didn’t name their album “Death in soft fur” for no reason. Highly recommended.

Amsterdam, Netherlands based bard Joonatan Elokuu conjures magic with his bucolic string ballads with a certain penchant for Christian choral music and bits of Gregorian choirs. It’s delicate as a flower on the cover, touching psychedelia gently, coloring up the song collection hidden within. Too hear his more abstract, ambient-oriented work, check out “Earth, Sky, Moon & Sun” ready to swallow you whole, Brian Eno style.

Sometimes the simplest things are the deepest and the most effective of all. A Simple Sadness, a split between Milwaukee units Apollo Vermouth and Skamp. The first one does a heavenly, minimalistic wall guitar drone while the latter play deconstructed punk with a neurotic math rock edge. It’s fiuckin messy and lo-fi as shit, as it’s supposed to be. As Apollo V. reminds us on their 15 minute monoliuth epic: DON’T BE SAD!

Chilled as fuck, lazily flowing psychedelic Germanik autobahn musik, picking up a frenetic pace on the course of the near 14 minute krautrock journey “I N T O / We Are the Jungle”. Gently flowing between guitar-susatined ambient atmospherics and plodding sludge rock into a rainforest like foggy heat haze. The album cover is a warning. But don’t be afraid to swim in deep water. Highly recommended!

Chris Cubbison, describes the music of his solo Done project under extremely laconic terms: “drone usa”. But despite this lack of specific information, “Territories” isn’t as flat and monotonous as you might expect from a bedroom artist putting his music on the net for free. Actually, there’ s a lot of work involved: there are ofen vocals, sometimes distant and moaned, otherwise sung or at least intoned to some ghostly melody. There are some percussive sounds, some rhythm and of course some drone - sometimes it’s soft and silky, existing in the background, sometimes it grows to become harsh and unpleasant like that of Ajilvsga.  Doomy slowcore meets guitar noise. Worth checking out.

If you listen to this album more than three times in a row, chances are you will turn into the man from the cover: a wise, soul-travelling shaman with a large beard, slightly deranged, but enlightened. Like the bastard child of sound collage makers and Flying Lotus. Insane plunderphonic IDM excursions from the Russian wilderness.

Seria Numeryczna (“The Numeric Series”) is the ongoing digital single series from the Polish record label Oficyna Biedota. Even though the label usually focuses on the more experimental and rebellious side of rock music, the three (so far, I guess) Seria Numeryczna singles dig deep into cold electronic paranoia, taking inspirations both from drone music as well as dark ambient and industrial atmospherics. Dig deep into the numbers and receive nirvana in return.

Here’s a real treat for fans of widely-understood ambient music and cassette labels in general: one of the strongest players in the scene, Kevin Greenspon’s Bridgetown Records, have uploaded pretty much all of their catalog to Bandcamp, so now you can stream and listen to every cassette ever released by that imprint, but also buy the tape (if still availbale) or digital version for a really cheap price. 5 years. Over 60 releases. Go for it!

Bridgetown Records on Bandcamp

The title of this curio might be the way UK’s Pascall Ansell (a.k.a. Panelak) treats his guitar in the creative process: he strips it of all dignity and forces it to crawl through the mud and the deafening clatter. Strings are violently plucked, there are violent washes of electroacoustic, noisy collages in the vein of John Wiese, and there is a whole lotta harsh drones, guitar torture and contact mic sounds that you just keep wondering where they came from. Everything is up in steam, you can barely make out the shapes, yet you know some incredible carnage is taking place.

Monumental, all-enveloping work from the looming, heavy Los Angeles post-smog cloud Notthere, exhausting both in lenght of pieces and the number of them, elegantly topped with a fittingly minimal and apocalyptic cover. Sleepy ambient (sometimes straight up dark ambient!) blends perfectly with occasional harsher, cinematic drones. Will drift you off to sleep on a rainy day in no time. Highly recommended. For the cloudier days.

Deeply underground hasheeshian communal exploration from the newest cosmic nugget in the Hare Akedod roster by the Antwerp psychedelic duo Gripgevest & Kling. The cassette is a recording of several live improvisations played during concerts and festivals in Antwerp and it seems that the live setting suits them: the paganic explorations filled with lazy synths and ritualistic flutes and drums propel forward the sloppy, molasses-like atmosphere steeped in druggy mist and the tropical fog. Let the magic work for you.

One of the more frenetic and open-structured statements of the free improv movement, this three personnel album is a rollercoaster-like ride through jagged stabs of fractured pseudo-melody, percussion kling-klang and analog synthesizer circuitry fuckery. Abstract, aggressive, mind-boggling, transforming at a blinding, heart stopping rate. No wonder the synth somewhere on side A sounds like an ambulance taking you to the hospital. For the improverished ones. HA, get it?

It’s time to celebrate our 1000th follower with a debut album by a freewheeling Chicagoan free rock team Crown Larks. Offering a healthy dosage of calm, melodic psychedelic rock with a slightly experimental edge, this album is an answer to the growing need for string-based blissfullness after a winter of electronic, synthesized drones and ambient soundscapes. Under a modest cover hides an explosion of Technicolor colors. Kinda reminds me of an LSD-soaked version of Polish band Myslovitz.

Deep, psychedelic four-track attack from northern Poland, where dense post-rock atmospheres meet the kaleidoscopic, shimmering classic acid rock and krautrock influences to create an ambient-infused, sprawling narcotic vista for the endless summer evenings. Some of the strongest trippy music from this country since Same Road’s stoner journey “Sensem przekaźnika jest przekaz”. While waiting for the new Ścianka album (which is taking forever), check out this third eye, mind-opening free download offering from Toruń’s Innercity Ensemble. Highly recommended!

(Cassette, Wounded Knife, 2013)

It seems that we’ve got some friendly rivalry to the already pretty well-known Sangoplasmo label on our small, yet fertile Polish experimental scene. This time it’s the Warsaw based imprint Wounded Knife, beginning modestly (like almost every brand new label), yet impressively with two hazy, drone-laden cassettes with some very nice packaging.

The very first release is a solo recording by Artur Rumiński, a guitarist from Sosnowiec - that’s in Silesia, a part of Poland known for its numerous coal mines. It’s actually a really lovely area with some rich nature, but some people tend to think it’s a bleak industrial wasteland where not a single sunray touches the earth, unable to penetrate through thick smog and soot. And Rumiński’s untitled tape makes us think so. He plays the guitar in experimental black metal/noise unit THAW, so his solo work won’t fall that far from that, except with a far more drony edge. The two side-long compositions, “Allen K. Drone” and “KBOw” are dark, atmosphere-heavy excursions through thick, cold guitar sludge, looped and ambientalized with some paganistic drumming scattered all over the place. It’s a bit like a darker, more pessimistic version of High Aura’d. Listening to this tape is like crawling through a seemingly endless tunnel filled with cold muck with just a tiny spot of light at the end. You just keep crawling toward the light, because the tunnel is so tiny that you just can’t turn around. You feel that the light won’t bring the escape; even worse - that the light is something evil, malignant. But you have no choice. The ordeal just goes on and on.

Echoes of Sunn O))) strike all over the album, setting the frozen guitar ambience against sparse, yet powerful guitar strums, almost tectonic in nature. Cymbals crash in the darkness, giving an illusion of rhythm once in a while, only to dissolve in the fog. Just like the mysterious light keep drawing you in, despite you knowing the consequences very well, “Untitled” will keep you listening, despite the unwelcoming, unhuman environment. Recommended.