Review: Peaking Lights: Clearvoyant

The moments on this tape I like best are the ones that hint (to my ears) at a kind of crazy crypto-hip hop, where the sounds loop and sway in that way that makes you stick out your neck, reaching to hear more. There are no beats per se, but there's a major electronic element, with everything looping like mad, hypnotic and eternally returning, just like hip hop samples. The toy-box xylophone loops in the third track on side A exemplify this, and the washed-out gutbucket guitar nearly makes it a banger. Of course, everything here is so thin, grainy, and generally lo-fi that it might just be a Metallica song redubbed fifty times - who cares? It's still great.

While the first track on Side A has a certain melodic poppiness, the bulk of Clearvoyant is packed with the brand of minor-key ghostly freakiness that would make Wu-Tang proud. The second track on Side A even provides a kind of creepy homage to the Oriental surf guitar sound that RZA toyed with on Kill Bill - of course, here it sounds like the guitar is slowly melting while feeding back on itself, there are strangely ghostly boy-girl moans, and it's all buried under a scrum of static and tape, making the crypt just shy of palpable. Things get even more awesomely Oriental on side B, in which a single, simple loop spans nearly five minutes, adorned with slow, but still eerily repetitive, guitar strokes. It's like a ragga, and by the end my head was thoroughly blown.

If you don't yet "get" tape culture or lo-fi recordings, check this out. Get high if you need to. It'll take you places.

The only thing I'm bummed about is that there are five or ten minutes of dead air on side B, and I could have certainly used more.

Available from Night People:

http://www.raccoo-oo-oon.org/np/index.html

Review:Truth Syrum/Keller Gould Split CS (Detrivore)

Aaand we're back. I now have a stack of tapes to work through in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.

For tonight, more in the cassingle series from Brendan O'Keefe's increasingly crucial Detrivore. Keller Gould is the not-so-expertly disguised nom-de-folk of a local weirdo guitarist, and it's clear why he's covering his tracks. This side of the cassette represents a foray into new territory, that weird reversal by which playing normal music becomes an experiment. This ain't bad by half, with really nice acoustic guitar work and understated, half-whispered vocals. In fact, nice pretty much sums up this whole business - it's a song about love that sounds like things are okay, and there's even some whistling.

The other half of this tape is Truth Syrum's "Family Matters," and the story couldn't be more different - instead of 'nice,' this is searing, soul-baring, beautifully ugly. There is still a guitar, and there is still a man, and this still might fall somewhere on the 'folk' spectrum. But the sea shanty-hillbilly-Tuvan vocals and their semitone harmonies won't sound quite right to anyone West of Siam, and the blown-out pulsing microcassette guitar sounds just as weirdly exotic - this is the part of the folk spectrum out past 'freak.' But it's more than just weirdness for weirdness' sake; The haunting lyrics and a final cataclysmic crescendo anchor it with undeniable songwriting, making this by far the most essential thing Detrivore has released so far. An absolute must.