We were always big fans of Chicago-area drone navigators Number None so it’s a pleasure to reconnect with one of the great gentlemanly presences on the contemporary underground, None’s Chris Miller, as a member of this great trio, Anemone Lodge. Here Miller is joined by Gwyneth Merner aka The Opera Glove Sinks Into The Sea/Byssus and Matt Erickson of Radiant Husk/Sudden Oak. The sonics here feel as if they are more closely related to Tokyo than anything that might orbit Chicago, with a feel for deep dark space and lonesome F/X vibrating in a gulf of silence that mimics what you gotta imagine were the sounds reverberating around Takehisa Kosugi’s brain circa 1969. Indeed, Taj  Mahal Travellers best exemplify the style of minimal droning psychedelic improvisation that this trio excel in, with simple sound events, a violin string, possibly, a slow-spinning globe of electronics, a pin-prick of light, rising like fleets of hungry ghosts in the distance, vibrating names made alien and lonely through the disfiguring use of delay. It’s totally gripping, a form of organic improvisation that is as sensual as it is absolutely dislocated from the physical. If your dream date involves a basement, the sacramental use of psychedelics, spontaneously improvised sonics and the endless application of head-spinning F/X then you might want to marry this little fucker. Just fantastic: “Having lost a member since the initial Anemone Lodge sessions of 2006, the now-trio’d version of Chris Miller (Golden Sores, Number None), Gwyneth Merner (Byssus) and Matt Erickson (Radiant Husk, Sudden Oak) decided to bunker down in Chicago once again, this time in the sweltering July heat of 2009. Using myriad instruments to minimal effect, the trio attempted to navigate the continuum between magnifying slight gestures and constraining more expansive swaths of clatter. Would it be agreeable to claim their intentions to be akin to those of the East Bionic Symphonia, though with only a third of the members and with much of the rough-hewn edges snipped away, only to be gathered and polished into mirror form? Perhaps. Or could one state that what was once a three-hour session of assembly-defined, free-sound troubleshooting has now been condensed, groomed and catalogued into a set of auditory star charts? Indeed. Or could it be that the borders between spontaneous composition, elastic cosmos-echo and the fluid passage of long-tone regeneration were blurred, if only for a temporary moment in a cool basement on a muggy Illinois night?” – BF. 

Excellent solo side from Gwyneth Merner, who previously went under the name The Opera Glove Sinks Into The Sea and who is also a member of the great Anemone Lodge: Byssus play overloaded black psychedelia, generating endless tone forests populated by all kinds of night-time spectra. Indeed, one of the closest parallels would be Double Leopards’ classic Halve Maen, with a similar feel for suspended tones and ancient/future sonorities. Indeed, Nijiumu’s Era Of Sad Wings provides another map-point, with the feel of alien early music pushing the theremins, electric guitars, organs and string drones to the point of devotion. There are gorgeous sequences where the guitars seem to swell in slow motion, positioned deep within the tracks, and it’s as if something has flared up just beyond the horizon, giving the music a wild, orchestral depth and a psychoactive property that is comparable to your favourite deployers of dream weapons. You need to check this out: “During a long fallow period following the release of her self-titled debut on Apostasy Recordings back in 2005, as The Opera Glove Sinks in the Sea, Gwyneth Merner started suffering from abrupt hearing loss ­– tinnitus and crackling in her ears. Though she eventually recovered most of her full range of hearing, this lengthy period of muffled sound greatly altered her approach to making sound. Where her earlier recordings were more reliant on field recordings alongside traces of violin-tinged theremin playing, Merner’s new work under the Byssus moniker explores more seriously the deep basins of her semi-restored hearing threshold. On “Hunting the Bitter Rose,” the theremin is now brought fully to the forefront as a monophonic tone generator, a key holding many potential corridors. The current model, however, is less Clara Rockmore and more “Zeit”-era Tangerine Dream, with a sidelong glance towards Eliane Radigue. This new output could be viewed as an exploration of her instrument’s many permutations of sonic mimicry: elements of scuzzed-out pipe organ, drastically elongated psych-guitar shredding, the long-form meditations of “No Pussyfooting”. Partly a journal of heated melancholy and partly a self-examination of one woman’s inner ear canal, “Hunting the Bitter Rose” is a work that unfurls gradually, revealing a sound puzzle that contains echoes of familiar emotions yet lacks any single defined framework.” – BF.

Can’t decide whether I prefer my Thugs Slim or Raw but I can still recall my first encounter with the Raw Thug at a house show in Kentucky where Taurpis Tula and Flaherty/Corsano were playing and where he was wandering round barefoot and bare-chested and strumming and singing with this beat-up guitar that sounded like a junkyard while making with a vaguely oracular take on osmotic tongue pressure that was straight out of the kind of inspired sleight-of-hand performance modes identified by Richard Meltzer. Which is to say the guy was channelling some seriously archetypal weirdo shit. It has been a long time since then and outside of a CD-R on Tom Greenwood’s U-Sound imprint – always one to document the more cracked fringe dwellers – and a cassette under the name Arsenio there’s been little sign of the Thug across the years. So this great tape comes as a real surprise, a bunch of tracks from Raw Thug that blur idiot-avant strategies that could almost be Japanese with weird stumbling slow-motion jazz that combines a lazy American Primitive atmosphere with a communal free-form appeal, incorporating accordion drones, electric bass, tape work and horns. It isn’t hard to imagine these breathy, free, open air sounds coming out of Satoshi Sonoda’s underground music pow-wows at Meiji University in the late 70s that attracted players like the late Yasushi Ozawa (Fushitsusha) and Chie Mukai but there’s an air of the iconoclastic inventor-composer to the overall arc of the sonics – Partch, Moondog, LAFMS – that is uniquely American: “Bold as it might seem, we feel that it’s safe to proclaim Alan aka Raw Thug (aka Arsenio Zignoto aka Arthur Kalow aka The Brothers San Angeliquez aka…) to be Louisville, Kentucky’s very own Magical Power Mako (from the earlier end of that spectrum, of course). Yes, we all know that in this post-Pessoa musical landscape the usage of shifting pseudonyms and heteronyms are quite the fashion. Who doesn't like sporting a new mask every once in a while, right? Raw Thug, however, is just one of many distinct and self-contained musical cosmologies blooming from this good gentleman’s noggin. Having done time in many of Louisville’s finer subterranean outfits, most notably as a mainstay in Sapat (whose “Mortise and Tenon” LP on Siltbreeze from a while back was a real gem of head-spinning, free-spirit group-think), it’s safe to say that Alan is fully comfortable occupying his own musical territory. We initially met Alan on his first-ever visit to San Francisco, through a mutual friend’s whole-hearted recommendation. Before we knew it, he was sitting on our floor playing computer music that he had made during his multi-day train ride out west that sounded a lot like Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano inside of a deserted Bell Labs basement. After that, we knew it was all sunshine. Eventually, Alan started to send us regular cd-r packages, each being a new window into his creative universe. It didn’t take long before we insisted on dispersing something into the world for a wider discerning audience. “Sugar Pills” indeed has that Mako blueprint of morphing genres within the arc of a song or two (pieces of outer-realm reed playing, laid-back porch-sitter psych, electro-acoustic composition, some near-Parliament funk-modes, etc.), trailing bursts of inspiration and genius modes of keen imitation, though now transported from Shibuya to Butchertown. Though we’ve spent only a couple of days in Louisville in our time, “Sugar Pills” seems to sound the way the town felt to us as outsiders: relaxed and leisurely, distinctive and idiosyncratic, and inexplicably strange in all the very best ways.” – BF.