Revolt of the Apes

“Nothing to Say” may be one of the most improperly named releases of all time. Without question, Serpentina Satelite is a band with something to say – what that something is, of course, can only be defined by the listener.

Download “Nueva Ola” from “Nothing to Say” by Serpentina Satelite

That definition may be placed directly in front of us and we don’t yet have the proper knowledge or tools to translate the frequencies delivered by this Satelite. That definition may be in the quiet, haunting whispers that join the opening chimes and emerging drums of “Nueva Ola,” a song that precipitates a new wave, indeed – one that threatens to crest and crash with the force of a million moons. That definition may be in the explosive title track, all distortion and echoes and mad chanting that seems to have bounced down to earth after kicking around the stars above, supersonic stardust without a home, picking up velocity. That definition may be buried deep within the 23+ minute closing adventure known as “Kommune I,” something we hear as a sonic-sister or kosmiche-cousin to something like “Kommunikation.”

It’s a fair enough reference in several ways, not least given our belief that “Nothing to Say” has quite a lot to offer in the form of communication. Are you open to receiving it? Can you adjust your own personal orbit to receive the signals supplied by the Serpentina Satelite transmission?

Listen: The members of Serpentina Satelite themselves could probably offer a definitive answer as to what it is that “Nothing to Say” has to say, although it’s worth baring in mind that this is the same group of astral travelers who believe it’s appropriate to call “Nothing to Say” – which, as has been established, has a lot to say – an EP, despite it’s nearly fifty-minute running time.

It’s also worth baring in mind – and impossible not to, for anyone who has taken the time to send their iconic, supersonic and quite possibly hydroponic modern space-rock classic, “Mecanica Celeste,” into their own personal orbit – that Serpentina Satelite just may be operating from a different level of elevation.

To this listener, theirs is a music built on questions – questions of familiarity, questions of entering realms unexplored, questions that do little to reward those who believe ultimate answers are waiting to be found, but rather rewards those with the patience and the persistence to make the journey.

“Nothing to Say” will be released on vinyl by Trip in Time Records on October 28, 2011. New artwork by Johnny ‘O’ from Rocket Recordings. Limited edition of 500 copies, a 100 of them on red vinyl.

“There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.”

– Anais Nin

At the menacing intersection where ghosts, oddity, and blood-caked drum machines collide, there stands MUTWAWA.

Or so it would seem. We don’t know exactly where – or even if – this ridiculous intersection might exist. We believe it to be somewhere within the confines of our fair city of Richmond, VA, which has a history of supplying its residents and the world at large with ghosts, oddity and a fair amount of noise-making instruments covered in blood.

Download “World_War_3-D” by MUTWAWA.

And while we have no qualms with drawing the connection between the music made by MUTWAWA – especially that offered on the flawless bit of freakery known as the “Mayan Mutations” cassette, available to you as a free download – and bloody-beat weirdness, we’re fairly certain they can’t be constrained to just Richmond. Not merely because we know that at least half of this two-headed dog spends plenty of time in Bermuda, but because we hear the music of MUTWAWA as impossibly expansive, a heart-hiccuping hex that expands to the realms of the international and inter-dimensional.

“Our present addiction to pollsters and forecasters is a symptom of our chronic uncertainty about the future… We watch our experts read the entrails of statistical tables and graphs the way the ancients watched their soothsayers read the entrails of a chicken.” – Eric “Hot Stuff” Hoffer

SWAHILI

One of the most unexpectedly uplifting surprises of the year has been becoming fluent in the language of Swahili – being in this case the extraordinary band of altered-state enthusiasts from the Pacific Northwest.

Learning the language of Swahili – as spoken through synth, drum, drone and the occasional well-placed moan on their spectacular, self-assured, self-titled debut album – requires little advance notice from the listener. Rather, if you are at all interested in visiting the place where rhythm and radicalism (in both the musical and spiritual sense) intersect, you are likely to be captivated from the spine-straightening start of Swahili’s forty-six minute language immersion ceremony.

With our highest possible recommendation, we encourage you to take a language lesson from Swahili in the immediate future, and read the advanced course materials graciously provided below, by band member Troy.

Preview the self-titled debut of Swahili on Bandcamp.

The name Swahili seems as if it could be easily misconstrued or, at the very least, send some would-be listeners down a path of Google frustration. What does the name mean to you?

Swahili is one of the world’s oldest living languages. To us, all communication, whether visual, aural, touch, etc., is language. To paraphrase Terence McKenna, everything we experience is made up of language. The word Swahili can also evoke the archaic, the return to tribal living, and music as the center of communal spirituality. We also considered it a nod to This Heat; one of the big early influences on this band was their album “Deceit.” It’s an album looking back on western civilization’s mistakes and the noise that accompanies such a fall. As a band, we hope to be witness to this decline and provide a soundtrack that inspires people to look inwardly as our society fails outwardly.

Is there a single album or live performance that revealed itself to you as illuminating an until-then hidden path of personal musical exploration? Have esoteric sounds always made such an impact on you? How has your impression of music changed over the years for you, as you’ve transitioned from a music listener to a music creator?

One single experience? No. There are those sweaty basement shows that will always have a special place in our hearts. We’ve all been creating and playing music for a long time. What’s different for us with this band is our creative process. We collectively decided to stop “writing” songs, choosing instead to improvise over grooves and letting the material write itself. This way, there is a sixth, ever-present member of the band making itself known through the language of spontaneous sound. Can made music this way and they remain one of our main influences. The entire latter 20th century move toward minimalist composition is something that fascinates us. Cage, James Brown, Eno, The Velvet Underground, Fela Kuti, and the way their ideas were integrated so effectively into the rock and roll experience have helped shape us.

But these ideas have always been essential ingredients in what we collectively call “ethnic” or “world” music. Our taste for the esoteric I think is a search for something genuine. Your hear those Sublime Frequencies compilations and at first they sound otherworldly and cosmic. We are so accustomed to pre-packaged, fully glossed and ready-to-print music in the modern world, when we hear something so pure it might sound alien but it is real folk making folk music.

Continue reading →

THE RED PLASTIC BUDDHA

It took just over thirty seconds for “All Out Revolution” – the second album by The Red Plastic Buddha – to get its hooks in us. That’s when the simple “oh-oh-oh-ohhh’s” started dancing over an equally simple bass line and in an instant, the revolution was on.

Mixing classically-cultivated psych-rock influences (Zombies and Kinks and Seeds, oh my!) with Zen affirmations, The Red Plastic Buddha walk a tricky line with admirable grace. There’s a certain magic to their sound, which manages to incorporate a little bit of everything, while remaining in the comfortable-as-a-bean-bag framework of that rock and/or roll music we know and love – conscious of the past, while not beholden to it. Timeless? That seems to be the right word. More poetically, as pronounced by the band on the album closing “Waves” …

“Become the truth

Become the path

I’m not the first

I’m not the last.”

Gil Scott-Heron is dead and the revolution will still not be televised. But the “All Out Revolution” can be downloaded at the Bandcamp page of The Red Plastic Buddha. We sought out the bass and voice of the Buddha, Tim Ferguson, so we can read a bit more about The Red.

What can you tell us about the origin of the name Red Plastic Buddha? Is the name meant as a commentary on the disposable nature of spirituality in our present-day lives, a wink and a nod to Buck Dharma and the rock warriors of Blue Oyster Cult, both or neither?

That’s the yang of it, but the name also refers to my covert agenda regarding music. Rock and roll has the potential to deliver a message and do it in such a soft way that it doesn’t feel like preaching. Come at someone with an idea they’re not ready for, or one that runs counter to their current way of thinking and you can start a war. But what could be more innocent and innocuous than a pop song to deliver revolutionary messages like love, acceptance and spiritual evolution? You can overlook that disposable icon, dismiss the silly old psychedelic peacock, but as you walk away, you might find that you’re singing a new song, softly to yourself.

But yeah, Buck Dharma is always on our minds.

Is there a single album or live performance that has cemented itself in your mind as the “defining” musical experience of your youth, or adolescent years? If so, what were the elements that made such an impact on you? How has your impression of this changed over the years?

There’s not just one. It’s really an experience collage more than any single thing. I grew up in the 60s, and music was everywhere. My older sister was always bringing records into the house and she turned me on to so much. I had a little portable paisley covered record player and I’d buy 45s every week with money I’d make returning pop bottles.

The park where I played baseball with my friends was also where all the hippies hung out. Scary older guys just back from Viet Nam. Pot smoke. Muscle cars. I was dressing like a mod when I was eight years old and they liked me. Somewhere in there, I heard “See Emily Play” and it clicked. Looking back, I think I was born where innocence and madness collided.

Continue reading →

THE BLACK RYDER

“Baby’s in Black (Ryder) and I’m Feeling Blue”

We live in a world where The Black Ryder need no introduction – simply mentioning the band by name results in an acquiescent nod coupled with eyes rolling back into the skull, under heavy lids and the trigger of smiling sonic memory.

But as you well know, we do not live in the same world as everyone else.

In our world, Galactus is alive, peace is a possibility and The Black Ryder rule the earth. The first two items may never be achieved in the “real” world, but we have hope for the third – hope heightened each and every time we spend time with the band’s tremendously satisfying debut album, “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride.”

We live in the world that we create – take a ride into the world of The Black Ryder, courtesy of Scott Von Ryper.

It’s approaching two years since the recording and release of “Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride” – and yet The Black Ryder still seems to be gaining new fans each and every day. The album seems to be the equivalent of some of the best cinema from the early 1970’s – a work of art that subtle enough to avoid large scale explosion, but gripping enough to slowly burn a pathway into many people’s consciousness. Your thoughts? What expectations (if any) did you have upon the album’s initial release? What has been most surprising to you in regard to reaction to the album?

Firstly, I very much appreciate the eloquent and flattering way that you have stated that, and that you feel that way about the evolution of this album and us as a group. It’s true and we are very blessed that new people keep discovering this album every day. It’s always nice to receive messages from those people too.

It IS a slow burn thing and we don’t mind that at all. It’s interesting that the discovery of the album is at the same pace that the album was created – slow and steady.  It comes down to this hope: “If you make good music, people will find it or hear about it … eventually”. I wish that were true all the time in general, but it is a hope I have for what we do.

To be honest, the other good thing about being slowly discovered  is that there is no rush placed upon you to make a rushed second album because your 15 minutes is running out after having being the “hot thing” of the month.

I guess our expectations were that people would dig this album, because we did and our friends did. We were both wise enough not to expect too much but we were, and still remain pleasantly appreciative that people continue to discover and appreciate it.

Despite our desire to feel cultured and adult and generally nonplussed about these type of things, we can’t help but still feel giddy about it when a band from Australia actually, y’know, strays so far from home. What are the benefits of forming your initial musical mindsets in Australia? The disadvantages? What Australian bands do you think deserve a bit more attention than they are receiving currently?

When you talk about “straying so far from home”, I wonder if you mean geographically or culturally from an outsiders perception of Australian music. I guess it doesn’t hurt us when people find out that we are Australian, as it’s a little different from the crowd. The U.S. (our current home) has so many bands it makes your head spin if you were to pay close attention to it all, so anything different is generally a good thing. Most folks outside of Australia also don’t really know many Australian bands outside of any BIG commercial success bands, and less of them know any current ones, so I guess there’s a little curiosity there that this music was created by a band from Australia.

It’s very hard to know how our early environment may have or may not have influenced our music. Aimee and I do have a love for open spaces, which we think is something that links to our music, and that could very well be environmental.

In terms of other Australian bands, I must admit that I don’t know many current Australian bands, and by current, I mean new(ish). There are some older bands that I think deserved a lot more attention than they got. One of those is The Underground Lovers. They made a number of very good albums which easy deserved for more people to hear them, but that’s how it goes isn’t it. They impacted myself, and some of my friends that I respect musically, which is more than you can say about most bands. In my eyes, that’s a success.

Continue reading →

HERBCRAFT

The hope persists that we’ll have many more of the type of listening experiences – deep, immediate, strange and lovely – in our lives as we have when listening to the “Ashram to the Stars” album by Herbcraft.

More than once, we have attempted without success to describe the music of Herbcraft. Let’s do it one more time. Or perhaps … let’s not. Listen: they’re called Herbcraft, and their second album is called “Ashram to the Stars.” You’re kind of either in or you’re out with just that much in your dossier.

And if you’re in, you’re in all the way. After listening to “Ashram to the Stars” for the first time, you may find yourself unable to resist listening again, immediately. After listening for the second time, you may find it sounding differently than you remembered. After listening for the third time, you may find yourself contemplating the practicalities of time travel – because you’re reasonably certain that between the dead-heavy bass line march in the opening track (“Fleet Guru”) and the penultimate track, a 12-minute distorted devotional known as “Mass,” you had escaped completely from the illusion of time. 

And after taking a little break, you may find yourself returning to “Ashram to the Stars” yet again. You may confirm to yourself that there are moments within this album that make your eyes well with tears. You may not be able to discern whether it’s the beauty of the music, the utter ease with which it seems to have been made or – a less poetic but no less reasonable reaction – just the way the music reviews and reveals whatever portions of your own head it intersects with from the very moment it enters your big, goofy, growing-older-by-the-minute ears. 

And after listening precisely thirty-three and one-third times to “Ashram to the Stars,” you may decide to ask a few questions of its creator, Matt Lajoie, and thrill to the clarity and honesty of his answers.

When considering your own development as both a musician and a music listener, is there a certain period of time for which you feel the deepest connection? If so, does that period of time coincide with listening to a certain artist or group of artists? Or do you feel you spend more time looking forward as a musician, rather than looking back?

Really everything that I do is in the context of what’s revolving around me and what I’m digging at the moment. I’m constantly searching for new stuff and everything that crosses my path leaves its mark. But there are lots of things from my early childhood that still resonate with me today – my father was a guitarist in bands when I was growing up, and I still remember huddling around record players and tape decks with him, listening to CCR and Beatles and Young Rascals records while he worked out the chords and lyrics. Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac were two artists that I remember my parents playing around the house and in the car a lot, and they remain two huge influences. I was also raised Catholic and a lot of the gothic religious aura that has carried over into Herbcraft comes from the feeling I had as a child trying to understand these huge unknowable sacred concepts. That may still be the biggest subliminal influence on what I’m doing today. The next step in getting furthur-out happened in my early-20s, when I was learning Mbira and West-African and Afro-Cuban music and dance, which also coincided with interning at Time-Lag Records and learning about so much far-out music from Nemo. Those Satwa and Marconi Notaro records he reissued around that time were the most essential platters to my budding interest in esoteric music.

What was your first experience playing music with other people? How do you think that experience – and those that have come after – impact the music you are creating now with Herbcraft?

When I was about fourteen my friends and I formed our first rock band, doing cover songs in the garage, playing summer festivals and stuff in our hometown. It’s a tiny town, so we were really the only young band doing rock tunes. We were really committed to learning songs, like getting the tablature from the internet and playing along with the recordings till we got it right. After a couple years of that, I really wanted to start writing our own songs but no one else was really interested, especially since people in town liked us because we played stuff they knew. So that led to me borrowing friends’ 4-tracks and starting to write and record songs solo with overdubs, even though I was the worst guitarist and worst singer in the band, haha… And that’s really the space that I come back to when the group trip becomes a hassle to organize; the solo mind is my sanctuary. I know the music sounds better when there’s a full band contributing, but it’s tough to organize schedules and I don’t particularly like rehearsing. I think of solo Herbcraft and full-band Herbcraft as two separate things entirely – if i tried to do an album that was half-solo and half-full-band it’d be a disaster.

The biggest difference with Herbcraft compared to the earlier bands I was in is that now I require a heavy quotient of improvisation in both live shows and on record. It’s become the only kind of music that really excites me. Perfection in a traditional sense is the absolute most boring thing in music, it’s the danger and “wrong-ness” of improvisation that makes things interesting.

Continue reading →

Join us as we take a moment to praise The Static Minds and the sacred soul of rock and roll.

We could praise the two things independently of each other, but given their intrinsic relation, why not have them come together? Together, yes – together in the darkness.

Of course, it takes very little in the way of heavy lifting to connect The Static Minds and the sacred soul of rock and roll. The Static Minds are a Raleigh, North Cackalacky-based group of volume veterans, with time served in nearly a dozen bands of various repute to their credit. One might say they wear their influences on their sleeves – though we might suggest with considerably more accuracy that they actually wear their influences somewhere near the left lapels of their respective jackets, most likely in pin or patch form. Maybe a round number with “Rock And Roll Over,” maybe something with the Tyner-fro.

Download “Feel Good” from The Static Minds’ LP, “Electricity”

“Feel Good” is a round number itself, rock and roll that can never be over, maybe something with the life and spirit and bouncin’-and-behavin’ nature of the aforementioned Tyner-fro. It’s a track that does as advertised, from an album – “Electricity” – that does the same.

And we need this “Electricity” to make these summer months more bearable – electricity for the ceiling fans and ice-makers and additional volume for our rock and roll. We don’t say that lightly: we need this.

Maybe you’re different – no crime there. But for us, the summer calls for standing tall, for getting under the wheels, for reminding us that the pop is the way, the truth and the light. The summer calls for electricity, and The Static Minds have the supply.

“Electricity” is available now from Custom Made Music. 

“What does any art have as a reasonable application? Other than to lift our moribund, banana slug-like souls off the floor of the fucking disgusting, desiccated, mushroom-filled fucking forest, and at once take us into flight over the unbelievable periwinkle clouds that harbor and harken the summit of all of our expectations and desires? What other purpose has art other than to ennoble us and make us forget for two fucking seconds that Dick Cheney has six-point-six billion dollars of my fucking money? That’s the practical application of that, Mary.” – Greg Proops, The Smartest Man in the World

Doug and I were trying to start a goth band last year and realized the songs we were writing would translate well as Mmoss songs. We’ve been pigeonholed with this 60s garage revival whatever and this song really bridges our record “i” with what we are really about – spacey shit, not sixties shit.

Moss is the perfect form to wander upon; it lines the forest and many back yards. Mmoss formed in 2007 out of a realization that everything has been done, said and named.  When trying to decide on band names, only hilarious jokes and laughter came out of it and we settled on the word MMOSS and it really is just about symmetry, or maybe a/symmetry.

Continue reading →

It seems effortless, the way in which the slow, sinister sounds of Häshcut manage to fulfill the singular mission of achieving sonic submission.

“Dubbing House,” the first track from their recent demo, sets the tone – and that tone is an eerie drone, just a couple of tension building minutes. And at the end of that moment, the band cuts the cord and gives birth to a riff for the ages, the kind of riff that serves as a universal, trance-inducing mantra of menace, familiar to any among the tribe – the tribe that considers experimenting with playing “Lord of This World” at half-speed a soul-cleansing ritual.

Download “Dubbing House” by Häshcut

And then – something happens. Something small. Something that we believe may speak volumes about Häshcut: they take a break.

Actually, just the riff and the chanting, delay-drenched vocals take the break, leaving the listener to commune with the crashing cymbals and a brief wash of synth. It lasts about three, maybe four seconds, tops. We’re relatively certain we could live in that space.

Listen: Häshcut are among the always-welcome breed of band willing to undertake the search for the sound of confusion, while still genuflecting before a hazy, electric throne. It’s a combination these Apes can’t resist – and we will exert no effort trying.

Sonic submission can be yours at the Häshcut site on Bandcamp – free four-song demo download.

“The separation of science from spirituality was necessary – necessary in order that science could develop to the point it has today. Science is like a child who had to leave his home town for a few years, in order to develop into an adult. Once an adult, he can return home happily. Science is now mature. Science can return home now and takes its place with the rest of human experience. It is in the process of doing so. We can help it along.” – Ben Goertzel

Contrary to a belief held by no one, having the word “apes” in your band name is no shortcut to the mild honor of “Band of the Week.” However, playing magnificent, towering, impossibly heavy space rock with mystic, meandering and metaphysical overtones is such a shortcut. And by all rights, it should be.

Which brings us to Dead Sea Apes. It bears mention that shortcuts are not something for which these U.K.-based volume visionaries would seem to have the patience. The songs on the debut “Soy Dios” EP – or perhaps more accurately and more unusual, the single song given over to three distinct interpretations that comprise the thirty minute trip – are willed into being by Dead Sea Apes and defined by the slow-build and the careful, nearly telepathic manner in which the band determines when to preserve their power while setting forth with a shimmering, reptilian slither, and when the exact moment arrives to replicate total consciousness-exploding, multi-dimensional rocketry, fueled by the twin engines of distortion and riff.

Download “Soy Dios II” by Dead Sea Apes

But what else (not that we require anything else)? What is it that gives the meditations of these Dead Sea Apes such an undeniable emotional resonance?

Certainly these apes (the apes of revolt) would not be able to define the intangible power of those apes (the apes of dead sea), but there seems to something heavy and pure in band’s seemingly quixotic stated ambition of interpreting the film “El Topo” through an astral amplifier assault.

We’re impressed not only with the band’s ambition but also with how astonishingly close they’ve come to fulfilling it on the first launch.

And when it comes to special guests … the apes have it.

“Each human being has something that I don’t have. If I am receptive and I pay attention, I will notice that everything works together with the objective of obtaining this thing that I don’t possess as a gift in front of me. Each human being is a lesson I must receive … it is important to understand that when I do well by others, I do well by myself. Everything that I do to the others, I do it to myself. And the fact that I communicate with the other without aggression, I receive.” – Alejandro Jodorowsky, “Gospels to Heal”