Edition of 330 copies from this mysterious one-man project with links to the whole shady Outer Limits Recordings cabal. Bermuda Telepaths is/was the fleeting pseudonym of a publicity shy American multi-instrumentalist - Sam Meringue -  with an umbilical connection to the soundworld of James Ferraro. Indeed, so close is their working relationship that Ferraro even passed off one of his releases as a James Ferraro album. The 90210 disc released on New Age and previously attributed to Ferraro himself was actually a collaboration with this guy who, like James, continually changes his identity from release to release. Explorers presents his first vinyl album and it’s a beauty. Whereas James’s creations are densely populated with the ghosts of hyper-real popular culture, complex loops and ascensions of cheap keyboards, Explorers’ vision of Hypnagogic Pop is much more lonesome and alienated. There’s an emotional distance to the music that is quite affecting. The murky, boombox fidelity is a major part of the sound, further degrading the whole Xerox-psych feel of The Skaters to the point that the keyboards are smeared into deep washes of celestial shortwave, broadcasting from just beyond the veil of memory. The sound is keyboard dominated, with loops of twilight effects bolstering the alien aspect of the music and the use of primitive tape-edits effecting jump-cuts from one soundworld to the next, all seeming to rise out of primordial electronic soup. But it’s the way the melodies are partially occluded by the fidelity, barely able to escape the gravity of recollection, that gives the set its powerful sense of poignancy. Bermuda Telepaths is always just one crucial step beyond full articulation, existing on the very cusp of consciousness, a dreamtime that is forever out of reach. Fantastic primitive Hypnagogic psych and one of the most haunting/haunted releases of the year. Highly recommended.

New solo work from Sam Meringue, aka Explorers, Matrix Metals, half of Yoga et al. Flashback Repository is a crude Xerox-psych take on James Ferraro and Spencer Clark’s Hypnagogic memory-recovery process, positing a universal storehouse where all of the waste consciousness of humanity resides. It sounds like abandoned machinery heard through a fog of tape hiss and dreamtone, with keyboards spooling loops of wasteland texture beneath hallucinatory vocal forms and far-away melodies. The feel is closest, perhaps, to the early Skaters style, with peaking drones jump-cutting into keyboard carousels and flickering dreammachine actions, all rendered in a way that sounds as if its beaming across the decades, from the future as much as the past. A reissue of an obscure cassette from Meringue’s Outer Limits Collective, the LP comes with a stapled together booklet featuring ‘explanatory’ text. Edition of 425 copies. Highly recommended. 

Excellent step into mutant pop from Sam Meringue (Matrix Metals/Lamborghini Crystal/Flashback Repository et al) that works as the perfect fluorescent compliment to James Ferraro’s Night Dolls... LP, extending H-Pop formulas into hallucinatory MTV zones. 

New UK-only 7” from Sam Meringue’s (Lamborghini Crystal/Matrix Metals/Explorers et al) Outer Limits Recordings persona with an A-side that hymns TV hypnosis with a mutant guitar-led pop song that kinda parallels James Ferraro’s work circa Night Dolls In Hairspray and a cover of The Sweethearts’ “Burnin Through The Night” on the flip.