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

Night Recordings From Bali [Sublime Frequencies]

The island of Bali is Indonesia's most popular place. With the modern beach resorts at Kuta and Legian, the lovely, tropic interior of palm-covered hills and rice paddies, and a rich variety of art, dance and music, it is a destination of choice for travelers around the world. But, regardless of their increasing role of servicing an ever-demanding tourist industry, the Balinese are a strong-willed and tight-knit society. The island is a tiny enclave of Hinduism within a massive nation of Islam, yet, their Gamelan music is faster, tighter, and louder than their mighty neighbors to the west, the Javanese. Balinese Gamelan stylings and the Ketchak dance are legendary throughout the world and have been immortalized in sound recordings and on film for decades. But, beneath the creeping exterior of a pseudo-western culture slowly overtaking an amazing tradition of unique human expression, the moods of the island are governed by magic and superstition. The hills, forests, rivers, and crossroads are alive with tales of demons (Leyaks) and a flesh-eating Ogress (Rangda). A lesser-known darker side of Balinese life secretly balances the lighter side "tropical paradise" of tourist brochures. This CD is composed of field recordings from August and September of 1989. The majority of the recordings were made at night in and around the villages of Peliatan and Ubud. Amidst the excerpts from Gamelan performances, rehearsals, and Ketchak, are sounds of the surrounding forests and mysterious crossroads where packs of dogs seem to take on forms of angry demons. Also encountered here are odd folk stylings for flute and drum, outdoor village theatre, and other various sound anomalies from the Balinese interior.

V/A - Night Recordings From Bali

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

Sun City Girls - You're Never Alone With a Cigarette

Recorded in July of 1988 during the sessions that produced Sun City Girls' most popular recording, these nine tracks represent the other half of songs which were originally prepared as a 2LP demo version of Torch of the Mystics for Placebo Records in 1989. The sequencing of all 20 tracks at the time was entirely different with the predominately instrumental tracks in this collection mixed in and around the mostly vocal tracks of what became Torch. Placebo went out of business shortly after this proposed 2LP idea was presented to them but Majora Records quickly stepped in to begin releasing most of the material. Included here are five tracks from early Majora singles: "100 Pounds of Black Olives" and "The Fine-Tuned Machines of Lemuria" (the complete unreleased 12-minute version) from the single "You're Never Alone with a Cigarette" and all three tracks from Record #1 of the double 7" Three Fake Female Orgasms -- "Plaster Cupids Falling from the Ceiling," "The Beauty of Benghazi," and "Souvenirs from Jangare." The short piece "Harmful Little Armful" is from the triple 7" box set Bruce Lee, Heroin, and the Punk Scene (from a Bay Area label Massacre at Central High) and rounding out the set are three unreleased studio tracks recorded the same day as much of the Torch LP: never before heard versions of "Amazon One," "Sev Acher," and "Wild World of Animals." This is the first of a multi-volume set of reissued singles, compilation, and unreleased tracks to be assembled and sequenced to play as full-length records. Vinyl editions may also appear in time.

SCG - You're Never Alone With a Cigarette