mp3: Herbcraft

"No Hope for Mankind"

Until I heard Herbcraft, I never thought William Blake's "The road of excess leads to the palace of Wisdom" quote was very righteous. It always seemed like a cop out for hedonists claiming to have infiltrated a more pure and genuine world. But, in delving into the depths of meditative psych, Herbcraft proves that not all excess is worrisome.

Expansive and explosive, the jams on Herbcraft Discovers the Bitter Water of Agartha cascade into one another like ripples of memories forming in and out of each other. Loose raga's and interwoven psych guitar dirges provide the path, which may or may not lead to a mythologized utopia somewhere in the darkness of Aroostook County.

Herbcraft begins a short East Coast run today in Philly with Bobka favorite Sacred Harp. The pair will be in Brooklyn Friday, July 2nd for a show at Silent Barn, along with Plankton Wat.

No Hope For Mankind by Herbcraft

Road To Agartha by Herbcraft

video: Games "Everything Is Working"

"Spend the Night"

Nod your head and wink. Pass the chocolate dipped vanilla cone and let the rest seep in. Or...What?! I first envisioned "Everything Is Working" as a lucid slo-jam creeping on the down low while leaning hard. This video takes a different route, eliminating the sensual in favor something more...well...you'll see. Look for a 7" on Hippos in Tanks very soon.

Northside: 6/26 Ducktails & more @ Shea Stadium

LIVE AT SHEA STADIUM

Despite what Bruar Falls and Oh My Rockness Say (no idea how they got this information), there is no Fluffy Lumbers, Family Portrait, Archers, Dana Jewell, No Demons Here show Saturday Night at Bruar Falls. But there is something similar, and actually way better, going down at Shea Stadium. Same, same, but different:

DUCKTAILS (backed by Big Troubles!)

ANDREW CEDERMARK (1st NYC show in a while)

WOOM (ex-Flying, just finished European tour with Xiu Xiu)

BIG TROUBLES (Debut LP out soon on OESB)

ARCHES (1ST SHOW EVER!)

DANA JEWELL (RARE EAST COAST APPEARENCE)

NO DEMONS HERE (FULL BAND!)

POST-USA VS. GHANNA BBQ TIL 8, show 8PM-1PM. $9 at Shea Stadium

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO HAVE FUN ON YOUR SATURDAY NIGHT, THIS IS NOT THE PLACE FOR YOU.

video: Woodsman "Insects"

"Smells Like Purple"

Exploding out of a magenta sunset setting over the New York skyline, Woodsman's first adventure in NYC was a psych-monster that set the tone for a sweaty evening. An onslaught of drums propelled the night into a red flurry of shadows and body heat, while mischeiveous cats meandering in the distance, trying to break on through "to the other side." Pretty cliche, but when its 120 degrees in a basement and there are a couple hundred peeps mulling about, transcendence is motivation to move beyond the presence and into the ether. Ian Perlman's video of Woodsman playing "Insects" should help you remember what it was like.

video: Wild Nothing "Bored Games"

"Can I Come With You?"

A wash in a glow of sweat and awe, Wild Nothing rolled through a set of extremely tight, for lack of a better word, power pop. Jack Tatum has the uncanny gift of a young American to actually communicate emotions without sounding like a total wuss. On record his shy guy songwriting shines bright, but live, he's no quiet lil boy. Standing atop the stage at Monster Island, Tatum, who just completed a whirl wind run around New York City, was as composed as a man who'd been singing to crowds for 10 years, which is pretty amazing considering he's a wide-eyed southern boy in the big city. If you live in NYC and didn't catch Wild Nothing this wknd, chances are your next opportunity will be at a much bigger venue, as the band, captured here by Ian Perlman, is about to blow up.

video: Pocahaunted at Pianos

Not Not Fun

Sometimes the 4th dimension isn't so sublte. Advocates of the Spirit Molecule break down this artifical barrier daily, while the majority of others only ever witness a glimpse of what lays below the surface. Hunting and gathering, foraging, peeking under caves and ancient rocks, one gets the sense that what our eyes allow us to see is only a icing on an extremely lavish and incredibly dank cake. Pocahaunted, known for spell inducing rave ups and communal freak-funk, hinted at the nether world when they were recently in New York. Psychotropic visual artist Ray Concepcion, whose always working in the shadows, captured the group jamming inside the hyperdimensional helix.

video: Pigeons "Fade Away"

I've been greatly anticipating the release of Pigeons Si Faustine since the band released the Lunettes 7-inch last year on Soft Abuse. The crimson noir of Wednesday Knudson's seemingly timeless voice is a mesmerizing entity capable of seeping into the psyche like a long-lost relative skirting across the floor boards and into your bedroom to pass along advice from the nether world. The tambourine jangles brightly in the corner of Si Faustine, its shadows breathing on the wall with every beat. A fire grows in the hearth, as lost spirits scatter to find the keepers of their misfortunes, the lone soul who can flesh them from purgatory and send them into eternity. "Fade Away," built around repetitive hand drums and Wednesday's intoxicating vocal, possibly birthed from an ancestral encounter, is the unceremonious passing of knowledge from a being to a vessel. When full of understanding, the vessel, propelled, in this case, by a whirling dervish of reverse-delayed guitars and meditative hand drums, glides off into the atmosphere, before dissolving into the purgatorial realm.

Pigeons Si Faustine will be released on OESB on June 28th and is currently available for pre-order. In other Pigeons news, the group recently put together a release for the Curatorial Club, which will be out this week. Until then, check out "Wrong Man," a new track from Si Faustine, of which a live rendition will appear on TCC006.

Pigeons "Wrong Man" by OESB

video: Woodsman "Balance"

"Collages"

When lines are fine, balance helps us navigate our way home, levelling the playing field in order to ensure safety, while constantly hinting that unforeseeable danger is right around the corner. Woodsman know a thing or two about lines, as the Colorado quartet rides a deceptively thin line between technicolor jams and tonal ambiance. Their newest video for "Balance," off the forthcoming Mystery Tape, mines pixel-washes and instructional video footage to create a uber-dimension where focused indulgence and mindful yearning are the figurative "gate keeper" and "key master."

Woodsman will be hitting up Brooklyn this Friday for a show at Monster Island with Ducktails, Wild Nothing and Velvet Davenport. The band will also be jamming at Co-Op 87 Saturday afternoon, and the Sunday Brunch Radio program from 2-4 next Sunday.

mp3: Matt Mondaile & Julian Lynch cover Neil Young

"Look Out For My Love"

Late last year a good friend told me about a good friend's fell into a dark alley after misjudging a step on a roof in San Francisco. As the story goes, J.M.W., noted board freak, chief and axe shredder, sustained major injuries (fractured skull, internal bleeding, shattered wrist), but it could have been much worse. While the state of California helped gratefully in J.M.W's recovery, mending on a no-frills budget isn't the easiest thing in the world. That's where his friends came together. One night, while sitting besides their narco'd frien, they knew there must be a way to help. While none could afford to contribute what pocket change laid around, they each had a song. Soon after that, a collection was born. In the spirit of J.M.W., each of those tunes happens to be a Neil Young cover. Produced for the A Fundamental Experiment compilation, a limited edition (300), silk-screened LP, from which all proceeds will benefit J.M.W.. Purchase the LP here and contribute to J.M.W's recovery. The phenomeal set includes tracks by Sun Araw, Stag Hare, Sam Goldberg (of Emeralds), as well as Matt Mondanile and Julian Lynch, whose versions of "Look Out for My Love" and "Sedan Delivery" are below.

Purchase the LP here.

SIDE A
1) Julian Lynch - Sedan Delivery
2) Metal Rouge - Helpless
3) Sam Goldberg - Transformer Man
4) Swanox - Thrasher
5) Sun Araw - Barstool Blues

SIDE B
1) Stag Hare - Cortez the Killer
2) Laurentide Ice Sheet - Southern Man
3) Trevor Healy - Round and Round
4) Avocet - Expecting to Fly
5) Matt Mondanile - Look Out For My Love

Matt Mondanile- Look Out For My Love

Julian Lynch- Sedan Delivery

video: Tennis "Bimini Bay"

"Baltimore"

First shows are a strange beast. Usually, they suck. In the pre-digi cam world, this didn't matter all that much. Nowadays it's hard, damn near impossible to play a show without some jibroni filming it with his Sony cybershot and uploaing it to YouTube by the time the show is over. Neath the pessism is truth. Every so often a group of ragtag youngsters join together to create something new and this "new" creation is both genuine and pure, lacking toxicity and a saccarine sheen. Tennis epitomize this honest reality. A young (and, may I say, damn good looking) married couple playing straight ahead pop songs written on a maiden voyage on the high seas. This version "Bimini Bay," presumably written while the founding members were sailing the globe, was recorded at Tennis's first show. If it's any indication of the future, I bet we will see hundreds more videos of the band over the next few years.

Tennis are about to release a pair of 7-inches, one courtesy of Fire Talk, the label founded by fellow Denver residents (and Tennis homies) Woodsman, and the other from Underwater Peoples.

tape: The Savage Young Taterbug Boys of a Feather

"Free Your Head"

Wildly scampering through a cattle field after a rain storm, one young man is home. The iridescent sheen on untended grass glistens with pre-dawn sun, as the homeless man, whose home is everywhere, plops to his knees and begins ravaging cow pies. It's mushroom season. Within an hour, the young voyager has a trash bag full of moist post-manure boom booms. The sun is creeping up, and just as the explorer hops the chicken wire fence, a farmer comes rustling out of his cottage, shot gun in hand. Two blasts in the air and our feteful voyager is long gone, down the road, and, in all honesty, feeling pretty damn good as those fresh shrooms kicked in before he was half way over the fence, watching bullets pierce the morning sky. This is how I picture Taterbug in Iowa. Freewheeling and dealing, endlessly living, and laying down pitch shifted vocal soul in the mean time. The "Boys of the Feather" C20 on Night People captures his spirit in bursts that are as languid and boggling as they are true; a psychedelic warrior with the spirit of Daniel Johnston (or the Devil.)

The Savage Yougn Taterbug's Boys of a Feather is available from Night People, as are a handful of other Taterbug related tapes. Highly recommended.

The Savage Young Taterbug- Side A of Boys of a Feather

new: Velvet Davenport/ Moon Glyph comp

"It's Alright"

Purveyors of prosperous peace & luminous light, Minnesota's Moon Glyph have been on an extra terrestrial hot streak lately. From the bubbly "Beach Boy" dreams of Buffalo Moon to the lysergic jangle of Velvet Davenport, whose "Lemon Drop Square Box" cassette (one of my favorite releases of the year, so far) is aptly described by the label as "the story of someone opening a box of candy to find baby venus inside and then this fortunate soul must take care of the goddess," the label continues to cull the fruits of Minnesota's psych scene and this season's harvest is plentiful.

Straddling the same windowpane Syd Barrett and Olivia Tremor Control rode until spontaneously combusting into water molecules, Velvet Davenport are modern psychedelic shaman clued into the quixotic ways of inner-world. "I trip, it's aight, babe." Walking the fine line between blissed out paisley pop and raga-influenced DMT zoners, Velvet Davenport prove more than simply post-psych fetishists on their new shdwply records 7", which, if you haven't heard it yet, features both Gary War & Ariel Pink. Velvet Davenport teamed up with the pair again to record "Surfer Girl," which will be released on the forthcoming Regolith Vol. 1 comp on Moon Glyph.

Velvet Davenport will hit Kings County next week, where the band will play a Bobka show at Monster Island with Ducktails, Wild Nothing and Woodsman on Friday June 18th.

Velvet Davenport- Lemon

Leisure Birds- Burn the Beach (from Moon Glyph's Regolitch Vol.1 comp)

video: Oneohtrix Point Never

"Summer Time"

In the digital ether, fiction often trumps reality. Trapped in mid-mir, light is a luxury rarely earned and only seen one day a year: the vanishing. Digital gepetto Oneohtrix Point Never resides in the temporal darkness, sharpening his synthesized ginsu's with mirrored flange and tarnished lasers left over from the emoticon convention of 2005, pre-Mars landing, and wayy before Earth was settled by demonoid numskulls who traded Sunlight for eternal pleasure and immortatlity, only to find that no such thing exists with out the glowing star. OPN, confined to a fallout shelter miles below the great red spot, where circuit boards and memory cards are devoured like rice cakes, is a digital pioneer on the lam, sequencing data moshed tirates into synchronized anachronistic robo-toys, a gift to the children of the post-Google future. Captured in hi-definition by Ray Concepcion.

mp3: SLEEP ∞ OVER "Outer Limits"

"Sun Spots"

The Austin trio SLEEP ∞ OVER, who may guide séances on the side, are releasing their vinyl debut on Forest Family later this summer. "Outer Limits," from what may be best described as a double A-side (my words not theirs) is the most sensual SLEEP ∞ OVER song to date, with harmonies that could seduce a vampire out into a high noon light. The girls will be playing all over the great island of Manhattan and Kings County this next weekend, (Philly too!) including a show at Pianos on Sunday night with LA psych-magnets Pocahaunted and Paw Track's newest signees Prince Rama. I'll be DJ'ing pagaen vibes all night too, if that's your thang. Taste SLEEP ∞ OVER's latest below.

SLEEP ∞ OVER- Outer Limits

mp3: Pario Marty "I Will Be"

"Plymouth Rock Roll Over"
(Art by Brittany Botz)
Wild Animal Kingdom Records just reissued an early recording by former Olympia resident and current Real Estate front man Martin Courtney IV. Floating in a nostalgic dreamscape is the vibe on "I Will Be", an eerily tranquil soft excursion with nods to Taking Tiger Mountain-era Eno and Brian Wilson, who actually appears for a short moment during the outro. Check WAKR for more details soon.

In other news, WAKR head honcho Dana Jewell will be hitting the East Coast in a few weeks and will be playing the Bobka showcase at the Northside Festival. Highly recommend coming out for this very rare show by Mr. Jewell. Also on the bill; No Demons Here, WOOM, Big Troubles, Arches, Andrew Cedermark and Ducktails. Saturday June 26th at Shea Stadium. Come Early, stay late.

Pario Marty- I Will Be

tape: Cascaders "Skybridge"

"Don't Want It"

(ED Note: This week I will be debuting new releases on The Curatorial Club. Pre-orders are currently available and will ship beginning June 8th. Check The Curatorial Club for more information.)

High above careening cliffs and the crashing white river rolling beneath, a samurai must balance his qi. Mind and body must work together to cross the ravenous ravine. Once in the middle, the wooden footpath shaking beneath, it is impossible not to look down. The samurai doesn't look down. He looks forward. Eyes on the prize, before, slowly, making his way to the otherside.

Much is the same with Cascaders, a project that owes as much to patience as it does minimal synths and drums. Permeating from the depths of Slob City, Cascaders projects the buzz of a late night TV drone onto lucid dreams inspired by Iasos. The musical project of Jamie Granato (Men & Women, Co-Founder of Group Tightener) is a luminous meditation on modern living in urban society, where the space floating between fits of consciousness is more telling than the random bits & pieces of memories left scattered on concrete streets.

Cascaders debut is a 4-song, 2-sided adventure in submergence. Preview the entire release over at Cascaders MySpace. While the digital sounds are tight, nothing compares to how the hypno-ambiance play out over 25 minutes on analog tape.

Cascaders- Skybridge

Pre-order Cascaders contribution to The Curatorial Club (TCC004) below.

Shipping

Domesitc $6.50 International $8.50