Sweden’s Mackaper make old school psychedelic music built around the tinny drum beats and vintage tones of old Hammond B3 organs. Originally the duo of Markus Hulthen and Per Nyström from the Concretes, the band has expanded into a six piece and mastered a sound that’s equal parts funky Swedish prog, hypnotic motorik riffs, and wild bursts of free jazz.

Highlights of the group’s latest, When All Is Sad and Dawn, include pseudo-title track “Sad and Dawn,” powered by the jazzy drumming of Simon Stålhamre and a circus-esque organ melody; the pastoral “Tindra,” with its dewy mixture of organ, melodica, and french horn, and the hymn-like “December.” “Tale of Tales,” found below for your consideration, emphasizes swirling, gothic organ melody and wordless, ghostly female vocals to great effect.

When All Is Sad and Dawn can be purchased via Mackaper’s website.

For fans of:  Faust, Casino vs. Japan, Tortoise

MP3 :::
Mackaper – Tale of Tales

Over the past few months I’ve listened to a ton of poorly recorded drone music, so it’s pretty refreshing to hear a beautifully mixed ambient album like loscil’s Endless Falls. loscil, a.k.a. Scott Morgan, is from Vancouver, and this is his fifth album under the loscil name (he also drums in Destroyer). Beginning and ending with the sound of rain, Endless Falls is a dour, contemplative album that uses the tools of dub techno (phasers, heavy echo, flangers) and instruments like viola, piano, and harp (?) to create poignant soundscapes that are both tense and becalming. Like fellow Canadian Tim Hecker, Morgan is a master at creating instrumental music with hidden depths; songs that seemed pleasant on the first listen later sound on edge, and vice versa.

According to the album’s press release, many of the songs are built around samples of rain recorded in Morgan’s backyard. This is most apparent on songs like “Showers of Ink” and “Shallow Water Blackout,” which capture the way in which the rhythm of the rain can be both eerie and comforting. “Lake Orchard,” which I’m including for streaming, has a deep low end that pulses beneath shimmering loops and strings–it’s an amazing track.

Endless Falls will be available March 1 on Kranky.

timelapse1 from loscil on Vimeo.

MP3 :::
loscil – Lake Orchard

Mark McGuire’s new album, Guitar Meditations Vol. II, is two minutes shy of a hundred and twenty minutes of stunningly beautiful electric guitar music. Maybe it if was his first release in a year or two, Guitar Meditations… might seem like an event, but with at least five or six solo records released in the past three years, it just seems like more of a good thing.

With at least two songs clocking in at around thirty minutes, you might think Guitar Meditations… would get boring, but it never does. “Beneath The Bells” shimmers and bubbles like early Tangerine Dream, while  ”Wandering Memory” finds McGuire picking folksy melodic lines over a bed of synths for the first thirteen minutes, then switching to 80s prog-pop palm mute riffs for a bit, before ending with the kind of beautiful, easygoing jangly riffs people only seem love when some dude is mumble-singing over them. “Postcard,” which I’m attaching for download, wonderfully confuses the “overproduced” guitar sound of 80’s soft-rock power ballads with the trebly guitar lines of Yo La Tengo or  The Clean.

Mark McGuire and Emeralds have put out some of the best ambient and drone records of the past ten years, records that belong beside classics like Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works II, Fenessz’s Endless Summer, and The Stars of the Lids’ The Tired Sounds of the Stars of the Lids. Those searching for the proof behind that statement should look no further than Guitar Meditations II.

Guitar Meditations II can be purchased from Volcanic Tongue and Mimaroglu.

MP3 :::
Mark McGuire – Postcard

There’s a couple things you’d expect from a solo album of a member of the Black Moth Super Rainbow: vocoder, funky drum beats , and woozy analog synths. On BMSR’s The Seven Fields of Aphelion’s new album Periphery, you only get the last one. Closer in sound to Emeralds or Stellar OM Source, Periphery is full of gorgeous ambient synth music that would probably have sounded as natural in 1985 as it does in 2010. On tracks like “Sunburst Chemicals,” “Lake Feet,” and “Mountain Mary,” The Seven Fields of Aphelion plays real live piano, giving an added poignancy and emotional tug to the music.

There has always been a warped new-age bent to BMSR (they did live in a commune together) and The Seven Fields of Aphelion brings that to the forefront, creating music that’s serene and reflective, but with totally new signifiers for what’s “peaceful” and “calming.” While listening to Periphery, you could just as easily contemplate the beauty of a dead shopping mall or an 80s cop show as you could a river stream or sunny meadow.

You can buy Periphery from Graveface Records starting Feb. 16th.

MP3 :::
The Seven Fields of Aphelion – Sunburst Chemicals

Duncan Cameron is an alias of Lieven Martens, the Dutch dude behind Dolphins Into The Future. His A Horseback Ride to the Sanctum of Montu, a reissue of Martens’ out of print tape, Tansprocesz, has just been released and it’s supposedly an audio diary of Duncan Cameron’s trip to the Temple of Montu in Egypt. For those unfamiliar with the name Duncan Cameron, he’s a man who claims he and his half brother jumped off the USS Eldridge, the ship supposedly involved in the notorious “Philadelphia Experiment,” in 1943, and time traveled twenty years into the future to Montauk, Long Island, where the government was doing top secret work on psychic warfare.

Basically, A Horseback Ride… is supposed to be the sound of a government trained time traveler/psychic warrior journeying on horseback to an ancient Egyptian temple to read hieroglyphics (!). If you keep this in mind when you listen to the tape, its seemingly strange mixture of bird noises, bubbling brook samples, gamelans, howling dogs, and old school Radiophonic Workshop synths actually makes sense. Compared to Dolphins Into The Future’s masterpiece ….On Seafaring Isolation, A Horseback Ride… is a difficult listen, but the concept behind it is such a perfect storm of underground culture obsessions (time travel, psychics, government conspiracies, Egyptology) that it’s hard not to be won over, not to mention the fact that Martens drops perfect little synth mini-suites at the end of each side of the tape.

A Horseback Ride to the Sanctum of Montu can be purchased here.

MP3 :::
Duncan Cameron – Glyphs [edit]

The second album by husband and wife duo Windy and Carl, Depths, is a total immersion in psych-rock’s love of distortion. As waves of feedback cycle past, you hear maybe two or three notes ring out, fighting their way past the overdriven din.  Unlike My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, which countless critics and listeners got once they heard the melodies underneath, Depths isn’t about using overdriven feedback and loop pedals to transform rock music, it’s about making those things the whole show. And yet there are melodies there, or at least repetitive pleasant tones. If Windy and Carl were trying to make difficult music, they would constantly shift the structure of the music and interject dissonant notes and sounds just to keep the listener off balance; instead they find a few gorgeous notes, then rinse (in layers of feedback and echo and reverb) and repeat.

Because the group uses such simple melodies, interjecting a minor note or chord has a huge impact on the mood of the song. On “Sirens,” a reoccurring minor chord spoils a two note ascending melody line and the whole song becomes tense and scary. And yet, by the end of the song, you’ve adapted to this sound and what sounded tense before now sounds majestic. In a similar way, “Undercurrent” begins as a menacing ballad, with a reverb heavy bass line very similar to the one on Sonic Youth’s “Shadow of a Doubt,” but unlike that song, it never builds into a rocker, content to just be creepy and full of foreboding.

One of the most exciting things about Depths (and space rock in general) is that when it clicks with you (and chances are if you’re reading this site it’s going to click with you), you realize that dynamics in music can be very overrated. Why does a song that starts out slow and calm have to build in intensity? So many musical tricks appear to be utilized for the benefit of someone listening to a song for the first time, and those same tricks can begin to sound stale and unnecessary on the fourth of fifth listen. Claiming music like this “goes nowhere” is to assume that music has some sort of destination and that it will only ever sound fully realized when it gets there.

With song titles like “Aquatica” and “Undercurrent” and “Set Adrift,” Depths is clearly connected to water and thus–horrible, horrible cliche alert–it makes for perfect rainy day music. But don’t read “rainy day” as shorthand for melancholy and sad; what makes Depths such a perfect soundtrack for rainy weather is the way the sound of the rain on your window or the hood of your coat melds so naturally with the music, or the way the music mimics closeness to water without total immersion in it.

On more recent albums like Consciousness and 2008’s Songs for the Broken Hearted, Windy and Carl have begun to clean up their sound a little bit, and as much as I like the way better production has revealed the beauty of their guitar and bass work, I also miss the heavy, frayed at the edges sound of their earlier stuff. There are moments on Depths where you can hear a guitar note bend and break under the weight of distortion, and that for me so perfectly sums up the way space rock fulfills psychedelic rock’s mission of finding beauty in pushing sound to its breaking point.

MP3 :::
Windy and Carl – Set Adrift

By naming himself Run DMT and giving his albums and mixes names like Bong Voyage and Get Ripped or Die Trying, Baltimore’s Mike Collins has done a wonderful job of branding himself. Minute long fragments of sped up African guitar solos, hazy, ghostly Hawaiian luau music, overdriven tropical psych, and mournful drone music cohere together because it’s easy to imagine that this is the soundtrack to the world of a pop-culture addicted, sarcastic-about-some-things-painfully-earnest-about-others, polyglot stoner.

The music of Run DMT (and that of similar sound collagist Dem Hunger) mirrors the kind of ecstatic rush you can get just following YouTube and Mediafire links, jumping from a clip of a Sierra Leone television show to a DJ Premier instrumental to Gary Busey as “the game warden” in a matter of minutes, extracting the “oh sweet!” moments from them and moving on. Because most Run DMT songs are beat-less, the movement through genres and sounds feels easygoing, creating a chill, contemplative feeling, more like looking through a photo album than moving through stations on a radio dial.

Bong Voyage and Get Ripped and Die Trying are both available for free download on Run DMT’s MySpace, and his collaborative mix with Happy Family amanda huggakiss is available on the Wigflip label site.

MP3 :::
Run DMT – Mad Weed
Run DMT – Ramona

Awwwwwwwwwww shit, ya’ll! Growing is back like a Mac Attack. “Hormone” showcases a more choppy, tinty, bit-crushed electronic feel compared to the body buzz-inducing aquatic growl of All the Way. This is the first track released off of the forthcoming Pumps, out April 6. Saying “growing” and “hormone” close together in the same sentence kinda conjures some unsavory imagery, but the beautiful glitch on this track is nothing but good vibes.

Remarkable album cover as well, dudes.

MP3 :::
Growing – Hormone

Time again for the obligatory year end list. However, ours is a bit different than others you may have seen. For example, this list is not enumerated. Empirically ranking albums rather trivializes the music, yes? Nor is the list in any particular order, save for the fact that we assembled it based loosely on aesthetics – meaning, we encourage you to mash on the little javascript media player in the bottom left-hand corner and enjoy our best-of picks as a mixtape or an uninterrupted block of music. Not only is this a fine collection of altered states laments, but each and every one of these albums is better than the Grizzly Bear borecore collection. Believe it!

>>>>> FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2009
The full length jam hives that we found the most innovative, intriguing, enjoyable, or all of the above.

Outside Trish Keenan’s traditional channeling of Margo Guryan and The United States of America and Julian House’s spooky samples, it’s hard to distinguish where Broadcast ends and The Focus Group begins. The collaboration is seamless and ornate, and is a strong addition to the flawless curriculum vitae for both Broadcast and The Focus Group. The Be Colony | Review

Did you know ambient music can be funky? When White Rainbow drops the tablas on his bliss outs, it’s time to hit the floor. All the Boogies in the World [excerpt] | Review

A more optimistic and concise effort, yet still saturated with her signature melted synths, junky keyboards, cough syrup vocals, and general underwater timbre, Hors D’oeuvres finds Tickley Feather as the compromise between Movietone and Ariel Pink. Trashy Boys | Review

Explosive dream pop with a slight electro edge, A Sunny Day in Glasgow burn the best sounds of Flying Saucer Attack and Cocteau Twins together in the same white-washed celestial head stew. Failure

A west coast sludgy summoner of stoner rock, Nothing People’s Late Nite is a less spastic and noisy sophomore effort, straddling the median tremolo-saturated, syrupy acid rock and shoegaze – another definitive post-millennial primer for more ominous trips down the rabbit hole. It’s Not Your Speakers | Review

Songs of Shame is more extroverted and less antiquated than 08’s At Rear House, and is pushed out of the womb with such fervor that I can finally get behind the strained falsetto, Elliott Smith experiencing zipper-trouble vocals. Gypsy Hand | Review

More and more artists are paying homage to Thoreau lately and recording their music in the midst of a hermetic retreat. Many return with nothing more than a bruised ego and a full beard. Damon McMahon returned with Dia after his pilgrimage in 2006 to the Catskill Mountains. Both insular and cavernous, this debut LP is an uninhibited trek through McMahon’s psychedelic mindscapes. Patagonian Domes | Review

The aural equivalent of an Ektachrome dusk, Lockett Pundt proves himself as Deerhunter’s understated force and the the undeniable ying to Bradford Cox’s yang, pinpointing exactly where and how the band gets its balmy, sedated atmosphere. A gorgeous second-wave shoegaze statement. A Threaded Needle | Review

Reverberated fuzzy guitars, punchy rhythm, a shoegaze aesthetic, totally damaging heaviness, and a touch of retro chic on acid – Chicago’s Disappears are everything that’s great about rock and roll. They lit a fire under my ass so severe that I still keep the Solarcaine stocked. Hearing Things | Review

Phantom Family Halo’s sprawling 2LP post-apocalyptic lament is evil and would make you think Louisville is a scary place or something. While the entire body of work can be classified as psych garage rock or acid rock, the record’s all over the place within the parameters of brain melting. A bit of Boards of Canada style ambient explorations here, a bit of krautrock motorik rhythms by way of Faust there… and then insanely reverberated crunchy guitars ascend from the primordial ooze scary enough to make Fever Ray poo her trou. These dudes are sonic warriors. Child of Light | Review

Phased surf guitar working and a dejected tropical attitude operate in tandem with autumnal acoustic overtones and gossamer melodies to produce something along the lines of a slacker Yo La Tengo. Fake Blues | Review

City Center was probably recorded underwater. I’m not sure how Fred Thomas did this without shorting out his gear, but this record’s precise aquatic timbre and dark reverb could’ve only been achieved submerged. Another gold star for the sampsycore camp. Bleed Blood | Review

Ever since Scratch Perry lost his goddamn mind, we’ve needed someone to don the dub crown. We nominate Sun Araw. The Message | Review

New Zealander Annabelle Alpers’ debut for Drag City, and second proper album, has been described by a couple of writers as a sort of quirky “bedroom pop.” I wholeheartedly disagree. My Electric Family is expansive, radical, and ionospheric. Packed with reverb, sweeping moods, and surrealistic lyrical motifs, Bachelorette is way too large for any bedroom. It also has a hypnotic quality so acute and permeating that we can safely say that Alpers has invented “cult pop.” The National Grid | Review

The Columbus total damage trio makes Robert Pollard look like Phil Spector. Punk as fuck. And underneath all the shit – great pop songs. Hustler, Psycho, Son

If there’s anyone that can remove the fashion-conscious aspect of noise-pop that creates filler and polarizes bands like Wavves, it would probably be a bunch of kids in their basement playing to no audience. Recently championed by Psychedelic Horseshit as “the greatest band in the country,” Fungi Girls are these kids, and they’re surprisingly more nihilistic and creeping than most of the recent shitgaze bands who paved the way for them. Crystal Roads | Review

True-to-cannon heavy shoegaze with a cavernous and dramatic eastern flair, all focused through the ominous looking-glass of their native Detroit. Tiger Fighter | Review

Gentle fingerpicking, bright tonal sprays of analog synths, and an impeccable ear for vocal melody holds every song on Childish Prodigy. A disciple of both Neil Young and R. Stevie Moore, Vile’s amalgamation of influences is arresting in both its musical scope and bravado. All the while, Vile’s signature, a bourbon-soaked Avey Tare croon with a shot of impenetrable confidence, steers and unites this eclectic, cohesive work. Inside Lookin’ Out | Review

While the Bolt hasn’t exactly gone verse-chorus-verse on us just yet, the newfound tightness Earthly Delights is much more structured and, at times, almost hummable compositions. That is not to say that LB has lost any edge, but simply that Earthly Delights throws a little Occam’s Razor into the mix. The group’s opting to keep their disposition a bit simpler and less freeform. Transmissionary | Review

Dream folk like “Criminals” makes Logos a good album. Epic motorik anthems mixed in, a la Cox’s collaboration with Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier on “Quick Canal,” make Logos a great album. Quick Canal | Review

While the subterranean groove and minor key construction evoke a more haunting, nighttime-appropriate flavor, there’s also a visceral optimism that runs underneath the LP like groundwater. Perhaps it’s the playfulness between genres and moods, or the freewheeling construction of the songs… or perhaps not all noise/freak psych kids like to make nihilistic records. Not to be confused with The Nuge. Two Hands | Review

While some of her recent work has adopted a more intimate and traditional folk approach, A Ways Away is lush, weird, and engrossing. Psych folk is the closest reference point, yet TJO is also entirely something else. In a way, A Ways Away is a return to form and a maturation. The crafty utilization of space and syrupy slow tempo is reminiscent of the Louisville scene in which she came, while at the same time, TJO is fully owning her sound. The result is a beautiful and accessible work that relishes in desolate sounds and bucolic late night wandering. Beast, Go Along | Review

Strongest effort from this definitive freak folk collective since Cathedral, and certainly the most ominous of his career and a textbook example of brilliant use of sonic space. Sometimes it’s the notes you don’t play. On Beginning

Scary-ass Bjork releases a spacious and minimal analog electronic creeper that’s better than The Knife, and comes equipped with the best/funniest lyrics penned in quite some time. Still can’t listen to this shit at night without getting all paranoid in my head tech. When I Grow Up

Closer in spirit to experimental figures of yesterday like Moondog and Bernard Herrmann than current artists, Marc Richter seems dead set on completely disorienting our frame of reference. Richter does manage to arrive at moments of extremely cinematic avant-garde music that’s unlike much we’ve ever heard before. Rauschen | Review

Even in an increasingly noise-tolerant music culture, this is an adventurous listen, and that alone should have your earbuds watering by now. Auto Dimmer | Review

Ducktails masterfully crafted an album with a lulled but not quite hypnotizing quality, similar to the nature documentary sound that Boards of Canada achieve, with occasional lo-fi tape tinkering like on “Backyard,” with its phased bucket-toms and Robert Fripp inspired distortion shifting. Beautiful. Dancing With the One You Love | Review

Bird-Brains is completely demented and angular, kinda like Xiu Xiu, but without treading the blurry line between “artistic vision” and “sonic bullshit” that Mr. Stewart always straddled firmly. Everything from dub to yoddeling finds itself on what I’d guess you could call a kitchen sink freak folk album. Whatever it is, this shit is gospel. Fiya | Review

We’re very pleased to hear that, seemingly, the band is taking acid again. Worm Mountain

Mind altering modulating jungle boogie bogged down on purple drank and tribal bangin’ replete with sinister ragas and general skulduggery, Mirror Eye is one of the more pleasantly evil releases reared in ‘09. Eyes Closed | Review

Dragon Turtle’s debut, Almanac, is an expansive 45-minute trek that explores an alternating fear and awe of the natural world, and everything in between. They didn’t pack lightly either, hoarding a curious mix of folk, kraut rock, post rock, and small touches of calypso. Belt of Venus | Review

The massive arsenal of antique analog equipment that defined BMSR’s first three albums remains in tact – the vocoder-saturated vocals of Tobacco, the thick and swirling novatrons and mellotrons that cultivated a general feeling of sunshine and old 8mm films about nature, etc. However, Eating Us showcases a more organic band, incorporating more acoustic instrumentation and mellow moods without disregarding the group’s traditional glitchy, Technicolor timbre. Iron Lemonade | Review

The original keyboardist from Broadcast peaks out from his lair to release another fantastic testament for Ghost Box who, like Motown and Creation, created a whole new aesthetic in music. Roj has distinguished himself as the tinty, rhythmic, retro-futuristic sci fi voice in hauntology. What I Saw

Super positive rural psychedelia best experienced with peace pipe in hand and vision quest in front. Made from warm tape excursions from them to you. Feels good to vibe this hard. All the Good Songs Have Been Written

The girls’ new album Fraushaus! has one foot in the shit-gaze movement and another recalling the gleaming-amateur looseness of the Shaggs, complimented by unexpected touches of found sounds and flea-market synths. Round Vox | Review

>>>>> FAVORITE EPs OF 2009
Though no longer than 20 minutes a piece, these nuggets of joy deserve some mention

There are certain sounds synonymous with the Summer of Love, but what about the winter that followed? Bronx trio Pigeons have a decent guess in mind. Their account of classic psychedelia is a much colder affair than most’. Stringing together a bizarrely addictive mix of paranoia, mystery, and seduction, their new tape-splintered 7? Lunettes is something I could only describe as psych-noir. Tendress | Review

No Age demonstrates here, moreso than Nouns, a mastering of their craft in profound ways. They’re no longer trying to capture the sound of My Bloody Valentine’s early EPs. They’re becoming completely their own thing – dream punk. Losing Feeling

The Philly subterranean brooding fuzz plus flute collective does no wrong, and their contribution to the Three Lobed subscription series is no exception. Do you know what a Bardo Pond is? Me neither, but it’s probably where God kills Republicans. The Path

We could tell the girls of Pocahaunted were getting antsy when they started injecting dub and dance hall elements into their trademark campfire drone sessions on last year’s Island Diamonds. To remedy this, they’ve teamed up with members of Sun Araw, Robedoor, Magic Lantern, and Fantastic Ego to ditch the delay pedals in favor of some wah-wah. Honeycomb | Review

Sloppy yet lush psychedelic punk that hits hard. Consider Atlanta’s The N.E.C. the southern response to No Age. Old Medicine

Lush arrangements, non-grating noise walls, and oceanic melodies, Banjo or Freakout is the tech-savvy, post-millennial incarnation of Slowdive. Looking forward for the full-length! Like You

Super retro, super cinematic crunchy garage stomp with interstellar overtones, dramatic turns, and harshed mellows. Blood on the Sand is exactly what is sounds like – beach times gone wrong, Weekend at Bernies style. Blood on the Sand

Ovals & Emeralds is full of disorienting growths of sublime field recordings, toy-chest noises, and coarse synths. Bibio’s signature creekside guitar is barely present, but here he has crafted his ambient work to equal perfection. The sun goes down on his usual idyllic pastoralism to bring out a bleaker landscape with a slightly menacing air to it like the meditations of Wolfgang Voigt. Carosello Ellitico | Review

Not to be cliche, but no other piece of music partied like it was 1879 harder than the vinyl-only issue Among the Gold. Silver Threads | Review

No, The Books didn’t take the bad pills. Lucky Dragons are the jovian trance music of the century after next. With woodwinds. Power Melody

>>>>> FAVORITE REISSUES/COMPILATIONS OF ‘09
Our ten favorite that needed to be heard again

Everything you all do is amazing. Great job! Keep ‘em coming. Fans of weird field recordings and anthropologists owe you a big batch of homemade cookies at the very least. Night Recordings From Bali – Peliatan Night Walk

Honest Jon’s compilation of 1920s Iraqi recordings is truly a gem, but it’s not for everyone. It isn’t the type of “world music” employed for NPR bumper music or in the living rooms of people who like to feel “cultured.” Documenting very otherworldly dance and, for lack of a better word, Middle Eastern blues music, these recordings were remastered from some of the earliest 78s ever pressed. This disc features ardent vocal performances over violin, hand percussion, an occasional lute, and not much else, relying more on raw performances that, at times, resemble a prophetic view of west coast folk and free jazz. Badria Anwar – Lega Taresh Habibi

While their timeline coincides with New York’s no wave movement, their Deutsche no wave is something else entirely. Amalgamating the dadaist cool and nervous energy of Suicide, their homeland’s motorik rhythm, the loud and detuned psychedelics of Spacemen 3 (whom 39 Clocks actually predate), the organ-as-diving-rod experimental pop ethos of Silver Apples, and a Nuggets-ready proto-punk punch, the mensch of 39 Clocks chew up kraut and psychedelic subsets and spit them out into a ball of drug-riddled prophecy and rock and roll shenanigans. Dom Electricity Elects the Rain | Review

A lot of people complain about Kraftwerk, saying “oh, I can do that.” Yeah, well, they did it first, and you didn’t. Everything between Autobahn and The Man Machine rules hard and sounds beautiful, so shut the fuck up. It’s worth mentioning, and perhaps is a bit ironic, that the sound of Kraftwerk is slightly more powerful with the analog recordings, if for no other reason than to provide a timeframe. How ’bout that? Regardless, it’s nice to have all their best work in one place and sounding awesome. Antenna

The landmark 1972 record that should’ve included them in the same sentence as Faust, Can, and Neu, but for some reason didn’t. Perhaps it was because they sounded too much like Blue Cheer? Either way, Kanguru’s reverence is long overdue. Oxymoron

You put Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, and Broadcast on the same release, and it’ll end up on a best-of somewhere on this blog. Like the Movern Collar soundtrack, but without the shitty movie that accompanies it. Boards of Canada – Amo Bishop Rodan

Believe it or not, Califone was Tim Rutili’s calmer project compared with Red Red Meat’s shit-blues zenith Bunny Gets Paid. Rosewood, Stax, Volts, and Glitt

This band was awesome. You can talk about how rad [insert hawt buzzband here] is until you’re blue in the face. But guess the fuck what. The Beatles did it first. Thanks for playing. While the only difference I can tell between the Remasters and the original is the volume, MagiMystour always gets royal treatment on this blog. Flying

The Vaselines were one mighty contradiction – a massive sound crafted by only two people, double entendre lyrics sung with coyness, gritty production and sloppy instrumentation coupled with truly soaring, gorgeous melodies – this duo was a real gem. Lovecraft | Review

A combination of bad timing, arguments with the label over the band’s presentation (namely, well, their name), and a generally ill-prepared state of music allowed this missing-link of punk rock to fall through the cracks until Drag City intervened this year. A remarkably well-aged time capsule of hefty hooks and driving power, For the Whole World to See is a blistering proto-punk artifact. You’re a Prisoner | Review

In the infamous Wire article on hypnagogic pop, James Ferraro had at least two incredible quotes. The first was about his membership in the “first church of Lenny Kravitz”: “My membership there has helped me with this process: trying to download someone else’s headspace–sometimes the most extreme being that of a virtual celeb image–opened up different aspects of consciousness and life potential and interactions beyond my wildest dreams.” The second concerned his interest in so called “trash” culture: “I think aspects of human culture that some people regard as unimportant actually operate within a really deep system of ancient symbolism and human archetypes. Hard Rock Cafes, strip clubs, gyms, celebrities, etc, are all great examples of this, of roadside temples. My albums are like downloads from that body of information…”

Whatever you think of these quotes, you’ve got to admit that Ferraro has done something few artists making new age instrumental drone music can do: create an aura about themselves. You could argue it’s ridiculous to attach all these ideas about trash culture and downloading celebrity “headspaces” to what sounds like a sixth generation tape dub of a “Sounds of the Ocean” meditation tape (or a warped Betamax of a Jane Fonda workout video), but music has always been a conduit for fantasies and meditations. Drone and ambient music have always been difficult genres to describe without resorting to vague cliches like “trippy” or “chill” or “stoned” (something I’m certainly guilty of); that’s why brilliant albums like Infinity Window’s Artificial Midnight or Super Minerals’s Multitudes so easily slip through the cracks–they’re gorgeous, impeccably made instrumental drone albums, but without a larger context (a scene, a sound, a crazy live show) to connect them to, they don’t stand much chance of being heard outside certain small circles. By creating a context within which to hear his music, Ferraro has made sure that his music won’t be ignored.

Released in October and November, The Summer Headrush series so far consists of the following albums: Rerex 1 and 2, Body Fusion 1 and 2, iAsia, Wild World, Son of Dracula (the only one I haven’t heard yet), and Hacker Track. Rerex 1 and 2 sound like Ferraro’s most conventionally beautiful records, Discovery, Clear, and Marble Surf. This side of Ferraro is closest to the new age ambient music of Tangerine Dream or Eno, full of fluttering keyboard arpeggios and whale sound synths. With track titles like “Shemale,” “Angel Alien,” and “Species Within,” Body Fusion 1 and 2 are darker, sounding a lot like wholly electronic versions of Popul Vuh’s soundtracks for Herzog’s “Aguirre, Wrath of God” and “Heart of Glass,” all minor key drones and eerie bell sounds. Wild World, probably my favorite of the series, is very similar to earlier Ferraro projects like Lamborghini Crystal’s Roach Motel, sounding like an unholy version of the music to a 1980s action movie, with seriously creepy audio samples of the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult talking about their group suicide. iAsia sounds similar to Wild World, though the vocoder vocals on “Casino Neptune” are something I don’t think I’ve ever heard from Ferraro before. Hacker Track sounds like a dub version of The Skaters, Ferraro’s long running collabo with Spencer Clark,  adding a ton of reverb and phaser and water-in-a-bucket sounds to that group’s clattering drones.

You can brown Ferraro’s extensive catalog and purchase the good via Volcanic Tongue.

MP3 :::
James Ferraro – Casino Neptune
James Ferraro – 3 [edit]