Debut full-length vinyl from this Northern California “free drift” unit, with one massive track per side. If you caught these guys live on their recent tour you’ll know that their sound has developed from nascent drone rock moves into a more fully orchestrated and all-enveloping free music behemoth, one that crosses sophisticated washes of slowed-down narcotic synth with waves of orchestral machine noise and repeating rhythmic structures. This is the best document of their stunning live form thus far, two epic tracks that feel fully-scored and deliberately sculpted but that capture the anything-can-happen energy and higher-minded free music spontaneity of the group at its best. Comes packaged in deluxe gatefold sleeves with silkscreened art by Nate Nelson of Mouthus/Religious Knives/Crazy Dreams Band. Edition of 470 copies.

Limited album from Starving Weirdos in an edition of 500 copies. Very different from their last few screwed and chopped drone sides, B/P/M is mostly based around the transportive potential of various piano strategies, with the opening track possessed of an aggressive avant garde edge that combines splinters of ivory with sudden percussive thunks. Further strategies include deep-sea key soundings, with haunted melodies bubbling up through an ocean of F/X and some fast, strumming piano minimalism somewhere between John Cale and Charlemagne Palestine before we arrive in more familiar territory with the extended electronic tones of the closer. OOP.

These guys have been busy with a bunch of uniformly great side-projects – Ensemble Economique, RV Paintings et al – but it’s great to see them back with the mothership for this major new release. Here the duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay are joined by a host of collaborators for an album that drifts with alla the allusive logic of dreams through a series of spectral drone works and environmental improvisations. The opening “In Our Way” is stunning, conjuring the ghost of Skip Spence from the kind of tape and electronic fuckery that could almost be Dome. Later tracks have an improvisatory feel that is equal parts ghostly gamelan orchestra, Maya Deren soundtrack and SME circa Karyobin with breathy reed sounds and melodica over fourth world jungle environs and great ascensions of devotional keyboard drone. Indeed, there’s a spontaneous orchestral quality to the music that lends it a particular grandeur, building on the kind of phantom scale that Pyle first formulated on the Ensemble Economique sides, with a scope and a sonic palette that is well beyond your average F/X jamming droner. Modern devotional music never sounded so widescreen. Recommended. 

These guys have been busy with a bunch of uniformly great side-projects – Ensemble Economique, RV Paintings et al – but it’s great to see them back with the mothership for this major new release. Here the duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay are joined by a host of collaborators for an album that drifts with alla the allusive logic of dreams through a series of spectral drone works and environmental improvisations. The opening “In Our Way” is stunning, conjuring the ghost of Skip Spence from the kind of tape and electronic fuckery that could almost be Dome. Later tracks have an improvisatory feel that is equal parts ghostly gamelan orchestra, Maya Deren soundtrack and SME circa Karyobin with breathy reed sounds and melodica over fourth world jungle environs and great ascensions of devotional keyboard drone. Indeed, there’s a spontaneous orchestral quality to the music that lends it a particular grandeur, building on the kind of phantom scale that Pyle first formulated on the Ensemble Economique sides, with a scope and a sonic palette that is well beyond your average F/X jamming droner. Modern devotional music never sounded so widescreen. Recommended.