James Jackson Toth - Waiting in Vain

James Jackson Toth is no longer Wooden Wand, no longer to be in a "freak folk" wagon anymore. Waiting in Vain is the first album that Toth, long a cult figure among underground rock followers, has chosen to release as a solo artist, and it marks a new beginning for him. For several years, he and wife Jexie experimented with a folk-psychedelic rock hybrid, releasing music under many pseudonyms including variations of the name Wooden Wand. For his last Wooden Wand release, James and the Quiet (2007), Toth stated that he was deliberately trying to make an “un-weird” album. This is so much like Toth killed Jeff Tweedy and take over Wilco.

James Jackson Toth - Waiting in Vain

Six Organs of Admittance - Compathía

Compathía, the classic album from Six Organs of Admittance, is so surprising. Ben Chasny, whose largely meditative Dark Noontide proved a major launching pad for this New Weird sound, has toned down the drone and made what is essentially a pop record. It retains the Eastern tinge of past recordings, but Chasny’s voice, and furthermore his lyrics, separate this from anything he’s done before this.

Six Organs of Admittance - Compathía

Indian Jewelry - Free Gold!

INDIAN JEWELRY, who recoiled back to the oil soaked mud of Houston, just finished up their second full length "FREE GOLD!" It is an astonishing album, completely filled with pop singles. Yes, INDIAN JEWERLY are still pissed, but this album has some serious wall-bangers! A digital maxi-single will be announced shortly followed by the release of "FREE GOLD!" on May 20th.

Indian Jewelry - Free Gold! part 1
Indian Jewelry - Free Gold! part 2

Avey Tare/David Grubbs - Crumbling Land

The sixteenth 12” in our split series, David Grubbs v Avey Tare presents two intriguing and highly creative artists whose work is defined in no small part by their desires to continually change and explore fresh territory. Both artists are now based in Brooklyn, NYC, and on this split, both have contributed tracks composed for separate art installations. The two sides neatly complement one another via markedly different sound-worlds, at the same time taking the split series itself into yet new areas. -FatCat

Avey Tare/David Grubbs - Crumbling Land

Burning Star Core - The Very Heart of the World

A student of La Monte Young and Terry Riley's unorthodox school of scathing minimalism, Midwestern noise sculptor C. Spencer Yeh stands at the epicenter of the region's burgeoning noisecore underground. Like most of his noisenik peers, Yeh cut his teeth on a series of limited-edition CDRs and short-run LPs, collaborating with the likes of Thurston Moore, the Sunburned Hand of Man and Deerhoof in a career that is already well over a decade old. Over the past few years he has gained momentum, if not necessarily mainstream acceptance, and his current high standing among middle America's noisy tykes is certainly well deserved. While each of the album's four compositions is built upon layers of mind-melting drone and descending arpeggios, Yeh is careful never to bore his haywire vessels into the ground, adding layers of molten feedback and carefully chosen (if utterly demented) melody lines to weave their way through the debris. "Nyarliathotep" is similar in tone and execution to the works of Matthew Herbert, with millions and millions of miniscule sound bytes coalescing to create a horrifying approximation of a surgeon performing open-heart surgery while eating a turkey pot pie. Though "Benjamin" and "Catapults" were clearly crafted by human hands, they shudder along on decidedly robotic cadences, tossing off unnervingly Coil-esque chunks of frazzled industrial electronics and ice-caked piano lines. The only slight hint of humanity is the scratchy female voice that opens "Come Back Through Me", the album's monumental closer and piece de résistance, but even that is quickly swallowed up by a nuclear blast of sulfur-submerged guitar, and violated synths.

BXC - The Very Heart of the World

Hush Arbors - Landscape of Bone

This is the latest cd from the man Hush Arbors, better known Keith Wood, is a man with his finger in many pies, playing the timber strummer for Six Organs of Admittance, Sunburned Hand of the Man and Wooden Wand & the Vanishing Voice. Across the course of five extended tracks, Wood weaves a delicate pattern of distorted folk and pseudo-country held together by his rather peculiarly beautiful singing and acoustic guitar is backed up by rumbling distortion and echoes of tambourines somewhere in the ether, and Wood's moonlit poems are carried into our subconscious slowly and surely. Landscape of Bone is the latest and greatest from an increasingly vital artist who is sure to continue defying expectations and carving out a well-deserved place among the psych folk elite as long as he chooses to run.

Hush Arbors - Landscape of Bone

Tau Emerald - Travellers Two

This collaborative venture from Fursaxa's Tara Burke and Sharron Kraus came about when the two musicians missed a flight bound for Finland. Instead of rebooking or changing flights the duo decided to spend the week at Sharron's house recording this album. The end product of their endeavours is a three-quarter-hour collection of improvised acoustic psychedelia and avant-folk song crafting. There are comparatively few pieces that would fit into any conventional song template, but the largely a cappella, almost ecclesiastical sounding 'Hensbane' stands alongside the mediaeval-styled title track and the drifting sea shanty 'Mermaid's Call' as examples of what these two can do within the parameters of 'traditional' folk music. Elsewhere, you'll find a varied approach to instrumental music, with some pieces along the lines of 'Evening Wings' propelled by melodious string plucks and sonorous metallic drone tones, others taking the form of pure percussion, as on the magical 'Stoikite' while 'Laureola' establishes a reedy astract drone. With so much emphasis on variety and multi-instrumental exploration, Travellers Two is an album that never fails to maintain your interest, ranking amongst the best work of either artist. Highly recommended.

Tau Emerald - Travellers Two

MV & EE - The Ground Aint Dirty: Ragas of the Culvert

This is a deeply, sublimely, supremely psychedelic album that manages to be at the forefront of the 21st century free-folk avant-garde while simultaneously digging back to the roots of U.S. psych-rock by reclaiming the blues for mind-expanding purposes. The ghosts of Canned Heat and The Grateful Dead are the guiding spirits here, providing an electric, outlaw-blues context for jams that soon drift off into realms of mind-blown, pink-cloud psychedelia—with Valentine’s guitar adding layer on layer of dripping, gut-wrench fuzztone and Fahey-esque Americana—while Elder’s disembodied vocals drift through to us on a whiff of drug-haze eroticism.

MV & EE - The Ground Ain't Dirty: Ragas of the Culvert

Heather Leigh Murray - Devil If You Can Hear Me

Over the past few years, Heather Leigh Murray has distanced herself from the ex-Charalambides tag. She’s expanded her pedal steel approach across solo CD-Rs and group work that drifts from ecstatic, fuzz-heavy howls or sheer drone walls to the clean, non-affected whispers, weather shredding strings like standing six-string players or building instant, miniature drones on the horizontal instrument. Murray’s range on the pedal steel creates a singular, and often non-guitar, sound. The notes sculpted with each pull on “Wrecking Crew” seem transcribed from a trombone or accordion. Where “Porch Fighter” offers more pronounced vocals, here they envelope the instrument in a gauzy layer with only brief moments of focus. Rambles rambles rambles.

Heather Leigh Murray - Devil If You Can Hear Me

Shepherds - s/t

Shepherds are Brooklyn based psych-folk improvisational units that apparently no one needs convincing, but I’ll tell you anyway that this Shepherds is awesome, way better than the real kind. Approximately 35 minutes, this is three tracks of untitled, sufficiently-psyched woodsist electric guitar jams. first track includes some wavering woodwinds and scraping-branch accompaniment in MV & EE fashion, plus an intense little segue of live drumming with electric guitar with clean rhythm guitar plays through a moderate looping pace with tambourine percussion as acidic electric axes in the back flail and crash. Might damage your brain cells.

Shepherds - s/t

The Skaters - Dispersed Royalty Ornamanets

"Staggering low-grade psychedelic murk and splintered free jazz
soul from this new American duo (James Ferraro & Spencer Clark)
who deal in the same kind of densely populated occult space as
Double Leopards, using destroyed vocal loops, cracked stomp-boxes
and endless layers of accumulated fug. a technicolour vortex of
strangulated vocals, teeth-mashing chant and DIY trephining matched
with some the most beautifully hypnotic noise/drone alchemy."
- David Keenan / The Wire & Volcanic Tongue

The Skaters - Dispersed Royalty Ornamanets

Pocahaunted - Peyote Road

Evolving comes easier to some than others. A lot of the 21st century's chief underground ringbearers are happy mining the same psych-ditch for the same warped ore, tape after tape and day after day. But Eagle Rock, CA's Pocahaunted are too restless (and easily annoyed?) to sit still like that, and so spent all of '07 throwing ever weirder new figures and moods into their amplifier family, and "Peyote Road" shows the motion of their transformation agenda. The A side ritual, "Divine Flesh," stirs hand drums and chimes into a bellydancing blur of voice smoke and rhythm before breaking down into its base elements and slowly reforming. The flip side ("Heroic Doses") documents Pocahaunted's set opening for Thurston Moore on Halloween night in the wasted and highly un-mystical California desert town of Visalia. Bobb Bruno and Britt Brown backed up the ladies' blown-out but melancholy wailing wall with electronic drums and drones, and the recording treads a dim, no-fi path into a bleak and holy void. With tribal-psychedelia collage jacket artwork by Owleyes.

Pocahaunted - Peyote Road

Animal Collective ft. Vashti Bunyan - Prospect Hummer EP

Following a hugely successful 2004, Animal Collective return with their first release of 2005 - a brand new four-track EP, which features the sweet voice of the near-legendary Vashti Bunyan. Having long been huge fans of her sole album, the recently rediscovered 1970 gem, ‘Just Another Diamond Day’, Animal Collective happened to meet Vashti when they played in Edinburgh on a 2003 tour supporting Four Tet (Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden had recently played as part of Vashti’s band during her first live set in over 30 years at the Royal Festival Hall). Following this meeting, ideas were hatched and conversations began, culminating in the group selecting these three beautiful songs for her to make a home in.

Acoustic-based and once again recorded by their friend Rusty Santos (who co-produced ‘Sung Tongs’ along with the band), ‘Prospect Hummer’ centres around the three harmonised vocal tracks, ‘It’s You’, ‘Prospect Hummer’, and ‘I Remember Learning How To Dive’, all of which were recorded over three days in March 2004 at Idle Luxury Studios in London, immediately before the band set off on their European tour to promote ‘Sung Tongs’. Weaving their luscious, multi-layered web around Vashti’s singing, these three tracks feature Animal members Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Deakin. A fourth track, the instrumental ‘Baleen Sample’ was completed late last year, and includes samples from band member Geologist, who was absent from the Four Tet tour.

Besides a huge mutual admiration, another link that both artists share is their experiences of people attempting to pigeonhole them both into some kind of folk-ish ideal. Whilst rising to critical prominence around the same time as artists like Devendra Banhardt, Iron & Wine, Espers, Joanna Newsom and Vetiver, Animal Collective have always balked at the idea of being part of some kind of ‘Avant/Modern American Folk’ scene – and anything more than the most cursory listen through their back catalogue will amply illustrate the changing nature, uniqueness and breadth of their music. Similarly, whilst obviously remembered for the autobiographical folk settings of ‘JADD’, Vashti is likewise insistent that her music stands on its own two feet, entirely separate from any scene-creation. - FatCat Records

AC ft. Vashti Bunyan - Prospect Hummer EP

High Places - 03/07 - 09/07

High Places channels the spirit of school bus sing-a-longs, back country camping trips, and first prize science fair projects, while conjuring dreams of faraway places through the use of field recordings, contact mics on houshold items, wind instruments and electronic thingamabobs.

High Places - 03/07 - 09/07

The White Lodge - Endless Wilderness

The White Lodge is Steven and Emiliana, a husband and wife duo living and recording on a farm in eastern Appalachia. Together they have gathered and articulated a bucolic palate of sounds, weaving them into a shadowy psychedelic tapestry around the listener. Intricate blends of room noise and incidental sounds mix with the building tides of muffled drones, flutes, and bells surrounding their gentle guitars and organs. The repetitive quality of their simple, woven melodies and atmosphere create a unique pastoral landscape. They make melodic, lonesome, and pretty music that is as gentle and frail as it is dark and curious. It is a turning of the ear, a 'listening' at the winding path through the woods at night, and the mysterious communication it brings with it. Endless Wilderness is their second full-length, a truly powerful music.

The White Lodge - Endless Wilderness

Clipd Beaks - Preyers EP

Using drums, bass, synthesizers, samplers, and one broken guitar, Clipd Beaks create a thick wall of sound that's backed with pulsing beats and spiked with subliminal lyrics delivered in the tense, ecstatic tones of a street preacher. Their debut EP "Preyers" offers a kaleidoscopic view into their collective mind, a sonic galaxy that ensembles ambient krautrock, noise punk, plus acid-damaged special sounds. Melt your brains out.

Clipd Beaks - Preyers EP

Valet - Naked Acid

A follow-up to her Kranky debut Blood Is Clean, Honey Owens' latest release as Valet pursues a similar line of enquiry to the homespun avant-garde songwriting you'd find on a Grouper or Islaja album. There's a more emphatic psychedelic element to Owens' work (you need only look as far as the outlandish sleeve art to realise that), much of which stems from some searing, freeform guitar work, as exemplified by the spiralling blues jam 'F**k It'. While Owens' voice can sound oddly vacant, drifting with a lo-fi reverberation over the course of much of Naked Acid, those wild electric lead parts really inject a distinct sense of character into these songs. There's plenty of variety on this album too, with pieces ranging from straight-up droners like 'Drum Movie' to loop-based electronic cuts like 'Streets', but for all the album's weirdness the main attraction here has to be Owens' more conventional songs, like the wonderful 'Fire' which condenses the Valet sound to one voice and one guitar. Lovely stuff - Highly Recommended!

Valet - Naked Acid

Jane - Berserker

Jane is made up of Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear of Animal Collective) and Scott Mou, a New York City DJ, the two of them basically jamming together, riffing on a theme until they find something they like, something that speaks to their spirit. When writing of the sessions that turned into Berserker, the first full album from Jane, Noah expresses the following: "...its the dance that gets us going on Jane... mostly it was about hanging out together and talking and playing music and thinking and feeling and having fun and dancing most of all." One would likely be forgiven, then, for approaching Berserker and thinking it's going to be a dance album. Because it's not. Not by a long shot. The only people that would have a prayer in the world of dancing to Berserker are the same people who spend long hours in their homes interpretive dancing to sounds of the rainforest.

Jane - Berserker

Soft Circle - Full Bloom

Hisham Bharoocha was a former Black Dice and Lightning Bolt member, and now he is Soft Circle. Soft Circle’s sound can be rightfully compared to contemporaries like Animal Collective, Boredoms and former band Black Dice, but with all its similarities Full Bloom seems a little too equally contrived a slightly watered down. As a drummer, Bharoocha’s method includes an abundant, restrained use of his drum kit along with swirling guitars and Panda Bear vocals circa Young Prayer. The effect is a sort of ambient spiritualism that you would be likely to find on a White Rainbow album.

Soft Circle - Full Bloom

Why? - Alopecia

Why? started off as Yoni Wolf name for touring his hip hop and poet work. But, by 2005 it became much more than that and turned into a full group. He has always worked in the group cLOUDDEAD as just a few of his accomplishments. This album is one that has blended together so many different genres such as hip hop, folk, indie and guitar pop all into one package.

Why? - Alopecia