Gripgevest & Kling - Untitled

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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.

Review: Maan - Khomeini 99

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(Cassette, Smeltkop, 2012)

Maan is a duo of Simon Apers and Tim Depraetere from Ghent, Belgium who definitelly dwell in the darker corners of psychedelic rock. Their “Khomeini 99” tape, released by Ghent microlabel Smeltkop, is a plodding, alienating trip through the industrial daymare, focusing on and exploiting the more negative aspects of human psyche. It’s quite easy to call Maan the urban version of funeral folk collective Silvester Anfang, as in: the negative, psychedelic vibe is still very much there, although the pagan, folklore influences are gone, replaced this time with suffocating concrete and dark urban legends.

The two unlabeled, glow in the dark sides of the white cassette are seeping with industrial waste and rusting cadavers of cars, going straight to the scrapyard with their resigned, vicious outsider psych. Strange collages of recorded sounds and harsh guitar feedback die out to reveal slow burning jams strangely reminiscent of Fushitsusha, down to the cavernous and freely soloing electric guitar, overdriven and heavily distorted and scarce, aggressive vocals that are more barked than sung or spoken, reducing the only human factor in music to a vile, virulent animal trapped in the urban wasteland. A variety of instruments will ocasionally wander into the rusting soundcapes, sounding strangely out of place, like the trumpet or the primitive, tribal flute instruments fighting the cold synthesizer pulses.

There are more ways to the psychedelic experience, some of them lead through bliss and relaxing of body and mind and others can be experienced through difficult, carnal experiences. Maan uncover that ugly, seedy underbelly of psychedelia with all the bad trips it brings and create their own soundtrack to an industrial bad trip with “Khomeini 99”.

Various Artists - Hare Akedod 002

Psychedelic nuggets collected from all over the fertile experimental scene of Belgium, released on cassette by the Hare Akedod imprint. Featuring trakcs by, among others, Hellvete, Jan Matthé, Urpf Lanze, Kosmische Keuterboeren, Razen adn Vom Grill. Cosmic synthesizer noodles meet shamanic Eastern hashish guitar explorations. Kosmische musik and Asian drones in one place. Collected. Condensed. Adventurous. Great compilation, recommended!

Review: Magdalena Solis - Hesperia (Dying For Bad Music, 2011)

The cover of Magdalena Solis’ Hesperia shows a naked woman in a state of ecstasy, most likely orgasming. But this picture of pure pleasure and bliss is somewhat blurry, covered with all sorts of distortions and graphic effects obscuring the full image. This is what the album sounds like - what might appear as bliss and peaceful psychedelic jamming on the surface is just a cover for something far more sinister and distorted.Hesperiais a portal to innermost dark desires.

One of the most obvious influences on Hesperia is the work of 70’s krautrock ensebmle Agitation Free, which often incorporated Middle Eastern themes into their work, with oriental sounding guitar solos. Magdalena Solis goes one step further, fusing the Indian raga sounds (sitars!) with distant guitar carnage, echoed noodlings and percussion-driven quiet jams which always manage to get on this intense, hashish-infused side of psych. The album sounds like a distorted, modern take on music that might have been playing in ancient harems in the old days. The droning jams often break the rock/electronic music boundary and create a formless, mapless psychedelic compositions closer to the works of Ensemble Economique than any actual psychedelic rock band, where the snakelike organs and electronically processed field recordings create a smooth blend with sparse guitar solos and slow, almost tribal drums.

What is impressive about Hesperia is the richness of sound and the number of instruments used to record the music - pretty much every track offers a different instrument from a different corner of the world - be it the “trippy-by-default” Indian sitar (“Cities Crumbling Planets Growing”), traditional string instruments, probably an Oud (“Klara Has a Vision”) or Hammond organs (“Crown Your Whores and Burn Your Kings”), there is always a different, fresh look at psychedelic music. There are even moments when Magdalena Solis breaks out of the murky, psych swamp and hits the purely progressive areas, like the eternally ascending “Propheitc Dreams”, which might have been mistaken for a Pink Floyd B-side circa 1971.

Hesperia by Magdalena Solis is a fuzzy, distorted portal to the desires most of us would like to hide from the world. It brings out the dity pleasures most of us get off to, but prefer to keep it hidden from everyone else so that they won’t be called perverts or deviants.Hesperiais the soundtrack to our deepest, most twisted sexual fantasies. Bondage, harems, cuckolding, voyeurism, you name it. Magdalena Solis knows what you’re hiding. And they’re bringing it out for everyone to see.

Stream the album at Bandcamp

Buy the album from Dying For Bad Music

Review: Bear Bones, Lay Low / Hellvete - Split (SicSic, 2012)

This split between the members of legendary funeral folk collective Sylvester Anfang II is a mesmerizing, hazy and often disorientic ritual mixture which will fill you with smoke of unknown plants and lead you to the unexplored mind jungles. Both sides are somewhat lo-fi in recording, leaving some of their music in the tape fog, to murk things up even further.

Side A, by Bear Bones, Lay Low, the solo project of Belgium-based Venezuelan Ernesto Gonzalez. On one long, untitled track Gonzalez invokes an early Skaters-like primordial jam, based around twisting, distorted synthesizer solos, endlessly repeating and criss-crossing in the background, barely audible yet always present percussions a’la Popol Vuh at their earliest (Affenstunde anyone?). BB,LL has a talent for creating densely textured soundscapes, where the layers of sound and different instruments reach way beyond the “solo project” trappings and makes it a nearly orchestral work, like a work of a big ensemble - nearly like a more lo-fi, and probably less folkish/rockish version of Sylvester Anfang II. With more drone (much more drone) thrown in for a good measure. The huge drone is the backbone of everything else on this jam and the impenetrable wall of sound at the very bottom provides a constant sonic reminder of the altered state the listener found themselves in.

Side B belongs to Hellvete, the moniker of Glen Steenkiste, who is also a regular fixture in the Sylvester Anfang II line-up. With his talents spreading into pretty much all directions at once, Glen has been known to churn out minimal, purely electronic drone zones as well as folk-y guitar improvisations. On this split Hellvete clearly goes for the first type of sound, channeling the heavyweights and the forefathers of drone music: La Monte Young must be mentioned as one of the main influences. Huge walls of minimal, nearly unchanging drone swell, rise and fall in regular intervals, while the soft synthesizer lines create intricate, Schulzean melodies and bringing images of windswept deserts and sunrises among the dunes. With the idea of hiding progressive melodies among huge analog drones Glen Steenkiste places himself in the wonderful crowd of Belgian synth-freaks, the sort of trippertronics weirdoes which create the second half of New Weird Belgium (the other half being the funeral dronefolkers).

The vaguely medical, yet artistic cover of the albums signifies the power of music contained on the magnetic tape: the likeness of the shape on the j-card to the brain makes one think of the brain lighting up either with great ideas, great music, or a great deal of psychedelic drugs. This artwork, along with the meditative sounds on the cassette, makes the listener indicate all three factors as influences in the creation of these two pieces.

Available at SicSic Tapes. Get ‘em!