Third installment in a new series of releases from Ferraro, part of his Summer Headrush 2009 Series vision. Inspired by “Visualisations that came to mind while receiving self-induced hypocapnia or as it’s commonly called ‘free fall’, the albums being representative of the free fall head space.” Body Fusion 1 presents a themed suite with track titles like "Shemale", "Pregnant Air", "Angel Alien" and "Species Within" that takes off in Multitopia's transformative worlds-within-worlds style. Cut-up throughout with pitch-shift sonic reassignments of she-males and transvestite phone sex lines that promise "fantasy fulfilment 24/7" the music feels like an attempt to mint a form of holy/devotional reverie directed towards the celebration of the gatekeepers of the most primal, transformational sexual urges, with lap-dancing clubs, peep shows, strip bars and chatlines re-imagined as temples to the lifeforce. Featuring some of James's darkest transits, the music is built around huge organ drones that build to the kind of otherwordly ascensions of Popol Vuh's "Vuh" over which he drops in huge crashes of percussion and eerie music box melodies. Full colour covers too. Highly recommended.

Fourth installment in a new series of releases from Ferraro, part of his Summer Headrush 2009 Series vision. Inspired by “Visualisations that came to mind while receiving self-induced hypocapnia or as it’s commonly called ‘free fall’, the albums being representative of the free fall head space.” This second volume of Body Fusion continues the first's theme of body transformation, she-males and temples to the sex urge by combining massed keyboard drones, modal takes on 80s soundtrack melodies and disturbing, modulated phone sex voices where 1-800-Shemale callers are offered dial-in fantasises over ascensions of percussion, cartoon voices and fleets of orchestrated dogs (!?). Ferraro makes particularly profound use of samples of wordless vocals played on a keyboard, creating a form of sci-fi chorale that paralelles the themes of surgical transformation, hypnagogic implants and the desire to exceed and confuse the limits of the body in a form of human/alien communion. It genuinely sounds like nothing else. Titles include "Genitalia Eclipse", "Data Implant", "De Ja Vu Axis" and "Clown Fish Prayer". Full colour covers. Highly recommended.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. iAsia as in iPhone, iAsia presents a future-primitive vision of cyber Asia as broadcast via 107.7 XM Radio Mars, a Sublime Frequencies-style covert vision of a continent plugged into the grid and mutating via endlessly refracted and digitally morphed images of itself. Or if you’re a dumbo it’s a series of keyboard, loops and sample jams that sez future Bollywood = Multitopia. Melodies are devoured and reconfigured from around the world, further confusing the geographical focus as a digitized one world. There are hints of Ferraro’s Polynesian obsession on the second track, “Happy HD Bengal/Casino Neptune”, with tumbling percussive melodies and swells of synth while distant clouds of heavenly vocals bob on the horizon. The rest of the music is threaded with 80s-inflected modal melodies that might have soundtracked a Bollywood space cops drama that visioned 2012 as 1982 with more neon and a power synth backing. Some of Ferraro’s more dramatic Hypnagogic pop inventions.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. Wild World is Edward Flex visits Multitopia, one of the bleakest and darkest of Ferraro’s recordings thus far, as he ties up fantasies of body modification and Hollywood stardom with terrible eschatological visions and cut-ups of recorded testimonies of members of the Heaven’s Gate mass-suicide cult on their hopes for a transport to heaven. His use of minimal musical fragments looped to infinity is at its most twisted and wrong, with obsessive vocal figures played out over leery keyboard parts and snippets of vocal that conflate plastic surgery with pre-lapsarian and post-UFO powers of transformation. There’s often a lurid, cartoon aspect to Ferraro’s amplification of the various desires that contemporary popular culture works as a cipher for but this one feels less technicolour and more desperate, charting the apocalyptic fantasies (via Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson) that find their apotheosis in California’s end-of-land culture through a series of black magical workings. Also features some of Ferraro’s most shredding 80s/90s metal guitar. An extremely heavy installment.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. One of the most minimal, spaced-out and transcendentally beautiful of Ferraro’s recent releases, Son Of Dracula is the sound of waves lapping at the furthest edges of space while someone on a distant planet plays a ghostly Hawaiian guitar and the stars twinkle in high-frequency song. Aspects of Scorces at their most translucent give way to a weird Sun Ra plays the incidental music to a Hall Of Mirrors scene from Scooby Doo feel and an incredible cover version of Elvis’s most spooked recording “Blue Moon” into a haunted, pitch-shift Elvis medley. The pink Cadillac on the front pretty much gives the game away. Totally bewitching.

Part of the second limited batch of Summer Headrush 2009 releases from James Ferraro of The Skaters with full-colour pro-printed sleeves. Warning: Hacker Track™ is an eXtremely addictive cyber drug downloadable online into your brain. Hacker Track is a deprogramming/reprogramming tool created by Ferraro that uses auto-suggestion, hypnotism and sonic download technology in order to re-boot your mind. Hacker Track features some of Ferraro’s most obsessive loop constructs set within haunted laminal structures. The first piece is a murky fog of wave tones and modulated barbarous vocals that aims to by-pass the brain’s rational/language centers and effect complete organic/cyber communion. As the repeat-phrases become more alien and insistent the piece moves into a zone of ‘meaningless’ sound that works as an unsettling transport. The second piece deals in euphoric sonic boom stylings that somehow combine the wartime machinery of the David Jackman field recordings with triumphal organ tones and the expressway sounds of kundalini take-off.  A beautiful brain eraser.