Rag Lore - Sabah el Mitragyna Reveries

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Almost 60 minutes of purely American primtive lapsteel guitar magic from Matthew Boteilho, who’s about to make a big move to Cairo, Egypt from Houston, TX. Lengthy, healthy improvisations where the shamanic string licks meet eternal drones and psychedelic atmospherics to fill your head with cascading aural orgasms that just keep coming and coming. Available on cassette from Space Slave and on CD from Dying For Bad Music. And also in digital form, completely free from Bandcamp. Highly recommended.

Clipping - Midcity

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Ow, my ears! Los Angeles trio Clipping take off where Dälek landed. Harsh noise rap. Is this even possible? Everything is. Angry lines over fragmented, mangled and mutilated glitches and walls of hyperdistortion. Sounds like bullshit? It’s not. Despite taking influence from the most unwelcoming, anti-musical genre there is, “Midcity” is brutal, yet strangely melodic (at least sometimes) and it doesn’t make you turn the music off after 30 seconds. Probably because it uses noise as building blocks for some bitchin’ beats. Recommended, and truly unique.

Naomi Chomsky - Iron Bird Meditation

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Man, I could’ve been driving past this beatnik’s house last summer when I was in the UK. The provocatively named Naomi Chomsky may be coming from London or its whereabouts (I don’t really care), but his music is way beyong the urban congestion and urban leanings of that city. Instead, we get an exhausting, sun-gazing psychedelic ruminations that bring the brilliant beings of Alan Watts or Sandy Bull to mind, lulling you into a trancelike state with motorik guitar semi-improvisations and trippy minimalism. It comes from England, it sounds like a lost gem from the late 50’s/early 60’s Cascadian/Californian forest, recorded in lo-fi conditions with a healthy aid of the then still legal LSD-25 or a nice dose of psilocybin mushrooms, back when nobody has heard of terms like “psychedelic” or “trippy”. Primal and authentic, Recommended.

UUUUUU - Cossacks in Fields of White Roses

Following the smeared, disintegrating loops of William Basinski, Scotland’s ambientalist Derek McArthur’s newest work focuses on piano at its quietest and most introverted: it takes emotional, sad pieces and loops them over and over; overlapping, modifying, amplifiying, silencing and re-shaping the original experience in different manners. Ambience meets conceptualism.

Sunken Seas - Null Hour

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From the exotic & prolific New Zealand soil comes the feedback-laden psychedelic blast from the dynamic trio Sunken Seas. Rising from its post-punk beginnings, the members of the group gaze at their footwear while remembering to wear flowers in their hair. “Null Hour” is a blasting, fuzzy and healthily amplified collection of alienated anthems and soaring jams with some post-rockish space to breathe every now and then. A slow burner, sinks in slowly. Highly recommended!

Machweo - No Way Out EP

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Indian Gold Records starts to become one of my favorite netlabels, not only because of the quality of music they offer (first SLZR, then Rancho Shampoo), but also because of how open they are to the music from outisde the designated “psychedelic” comfort zone. “No Way Out” EP from the Italian electronic youngster Machweo is not psych rock, but might be just as trippy. It treads the ground somewhere between slowed down, deconstructed hip-hop filled with dark undertones and field recordings to the cavernous, star-gazing minimal techno in the vein of Pantha du Prince. Plus lots of scary, super-echoing vocal samples, Holy Other style. The two remixes are ace too. Recommended!

Rancho Shampoo y la Indian Gold Orchestra - El Vuelo Del Golondrino

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This Mexican psychedelic “supergroup” is hellbent to transport the listener into the heart of the dense, intense psychedelic experience. Headed by the mysterious shaman Rancho Shampoo, the group travels the musican world, throwing dancey tribal workouts, dubby bassy bliss, fuzzed out desert rock and a pit of a religious ritual mysteriousness into a trippy, mind-expanding mix. Highly recommended!

Rakit Dibs - Human Energy

Multicolor, kaleidoscopic trippertronics from Perth, Australia on a more melody-oriented and less intense side of the man behind the Salamander project. Like a more psychedelicized version of Peaking Lights without the vocals. But the dubbiness and the summerlike atmosphere is still there, together with some head-bobbing beats. Highly recommended for the upcoming summer (well, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, sorry Australia, you already had your turn)! You can also buy the cassette if you enjoy the digital stuff.

Kevin Greenspon - Paradise A.D.

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This exhaustive (65 minutes!) compilation of music from 5 cassettes shows the ideas and the creative processes of the West Coast’s ambient explorer Kevin Greenspon, who effortlessly slaloms between somewhat sandpaper-like synthesizer based textures and gentle, subtle guitar-driven vistas in the likeness of the great ambient masters of the decades past. “Paradise A.D.” is a gallery of moods crafted for every occasion. Recommended! If you like this, buy the CD from the artist himself.

We Are the Wooden Houses - Murrain Pica Mast

A 30 minute long jam broken into two 15-minute pieces from the Cumbrian wilderness (that’s in the north of the United Kingdom, for the less geo-savvy readers) based label Treehouse Orchestra Recordings. The first track is a sitar-tinged, Easterny psychedelic folk jam which picks up the pace with some cleverly sampled and looped live drums for a full-on psychedelic freak out (well, maybe not that amplified, but still very trippy!). The second track is steeped in angelic, krautrock-influenced guitar ambience that spreads into infinity - think Manuel Gottsching and his modern-day equivalent Mark McGuire and you’re pretty much spot-on. You can also buy the cassette if you like - it’s got some beautiful packaging!

Download via Mediafire