The Glimmer Blinkken - Bernard Ruix Wedding Album

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This heavy, hard hitting piece of psychedelic nuggetry is best described as “stonerdelic” in the most classic, lo-fi sense of the word. This free rock sextet from Dubuque, Iowa featuring the folk weirdo Bobb Bucko Jr among the members takes a joyous, circus-like and a rather tongue-in-cheek ride through the history of psychedelic rock, setting shorter, more anthemic pieces against Sunburned Hand of the Man style weirdness and krautrock jams. Delicious homegrown lysergic bliss from the American midwest. Available on cassette from Ruix Records.

Peace Arrow - ↑↓↑↓

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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.

Sun Araw Band - Two From the Desert: Yucca Valley 2012

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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!

Apollo Vermouth / Skamp - A Simple Sadness

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!

Done - Territories

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.

Bridgetown Records on Bandcamp

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

Notthere - Suspense and Denial

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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.

Crown Larks - Catalytics Conversion

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.

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.

Review: Ill Professor - Wire & Air

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(Cassette, Constellation Tatsu, 2013)

The Chicago based band Zelienople have always appeared to me as an overlooked, always a little under the radar musical mystery (and a gem) of the 2000’s. Their combination of drone music, slowcore and dusted, slow jazz gave psychedelia a new meaning; full of dark corners and foggy mazes - perfect listening for the more introspective, melancholic moments. The band enhanced this image of mystery and melancholy through their black-and-white, often blurry, album artworks.

Ill Professor is not very different - this side-projects sees two thirds of Zelienople combining forces. Brian Harding works with Matt Christensen here, evoking the ghostly spirit of Zelienople, expect in a less song-like, “fully grown” way, but rather as a set of anti-studio, bedroom-friendly sketches and lo-fi loner ballads bordering on ambient and drone music rather than the jazzy, slowish psychedelia of the full band. If the cover photograph is any indication, no explosions of joy or moments of sudden energy are expected to happen here: it’s a slow, lethargic ride through that strange mid-state between waking life and dream world, where everything seems strangely real, yet blurry and heard as if it were a mile away; the highway here would be the smeared guitar ballad “Slate Line”, the piece most similar to Zelienople in its full line-up, with the string plucking leaving distant echoes, pregnant with melancholy. There are moments of slo-mo narcotic bliss, like in the ambient-ladden super slow “Saturday End of September”.

Everything here is in sepia. Everything is a remnant of an emotion or an event that happened a long time ago, maybe even in the previous life. Zelienople (and Ill Professor, naturally) have built their trademark sound as an attempt to capture those small, fleeing emotions or to give a new life to the scraps of memory hidden deep in the unconscious until now. It’s a bit clashing that an album like “Wire & Air” gets released in the Spring - because it seems like a perfect late autumn listening album. When everything around comes to life, these guys want to cover everything in snow, with only small bits of life remaining, but remaining on the verge of falling into hibernation. It’s almost painfully introvertic and inner-self gazing music, but it works. It bears a load of emotions. When the cold, rainy autumn days come in a few months, I’ll remember what to listen to.