Psychic Sounds Indierock | Alternative 11 Items

As children we are disturbed from inner grace and mused, bored or threatened into awareness of the outside world in these recordings patterns emerge and are interrupted like a conversation in a garden, logic gates, and my directives mingle in importance. Responsibility or force is avoided. Primitive homemade analog computers were used to make electronic sounds and manipulate acoustic instruments in free running chaotically generative programs that are written by patching logic gate clusters with wires. Theres is no machine "memory" aside from the patches themselves, and the equations the circuits reliable math but audio-rate accidents spilling out of hashed streams of data. The same primal state of polarized data pulses build into the complex horrors of culture, finance, and communication we think we recognize on our devices. Yet electricity itself retains it's mystique, animated not by our will but by still poorly understood natural laws that transcend human concerns.

Glyphs & Gods is a “record that came to be through a channeling of sound in which Tristan & Titania were merely the vessels.” Enigmatic Belgian producer Tristan Vloeberghs (Ohm Meta, WAVradio, Friendship Tapes, Modus Operandi/ Out Innerspace) and Eva Van Deuren (Orphan Fairytale) allure listeners by way of illuminating drone and guiding harmonies that harkens in movements of shimmering reverberation, bent horns of hallowed chambers, animal breaths, and voice echos coming together into blissful sounding hazy nights like the the cicadas warming calls. Mother’s lullabies on the child being beckons for lifts & sparse piano riffs into disintegrating tones. Bubbling metallic bowl pangs, talons tapping over bongos of time, and creaking doorways sway in unison to show us a glimpse of their experience. It all has a sense of being a dangerous & soothing expedition simultaneously. So lay back, and let Tristan and Titania dial it in!

Lethal Tender has transferred a heavy sleight-of-hand slab of ’cyber-bounce’ showcased directly to your clickjacked digital dome. Zero-Day is arriving care of blackhat beat shredder 6-Ear and the burning chromecore composer Corum both reporting on American A.I. specters via IDM brute bass & brass, crushing rhythmic density, and flash-funking the firewall for Psychic Sounds & Nonlocal Research. This malvertised magic sonic show, with the tap of a mesmerizing free-form memory stick, delivers downtempo data grunge, bugged-out barbarian browser breaks, Kirby’s Dreamland gone nightmare, noises of new pay prototypes, cloudy robotic chatter, and hip-hopped hacking into a honeypot of hard-hitting neuroelectronics. Rashad Becker, the traditional notional species unfolding master, transposes the complete bio-enhanced bestiary bitrated right before your very ears. Come ONE, Come ALL! Break on through the far-side of abusive luxury licks, revel in virtual revulsion riffs & throb to the enchanted edge of engineered exquisite chaos all conjured center stage within the album of a lifetime unveiled as Empire Illusion.

Corum's work avoids the mere emulation of exotica and it's tropes through the sense of adventure that his landscapes present. This is most evident on Never Use The Same Door Twice, originally released prior to the Beguiling Isles trilogy in 2011. Comprised of six parts, these pieces are heavy with slow-moving tension and fuzzy as though scathed by repeated replication. A compelling listen and an engaging early piece of the Psychic Sounds puzzle."—Spenser Thompson, Wire Magazine

A newly unvaulted Fake Hospital Group Operators band performing Never Use the Same Door Twice in a live transmission celebrating the 10th anniversary release of album by the same. Recorded live & transmitted on radio in Los Altos, California by Kfjc 89.7.

"A gradual arc from low key tropical travelogue into full blown fantasy exotica. Born Of Earth's Torments is the most varied of the three, registering somewhere between Martin Denny and Jules Verne. Tracks such as 'Body Core' bubble and fizz roots and stems of various traditional styles, as though a transistor radio is simultaneously receiving Japanese percussion and music from the inside of a bazaar. Effigy Mounds was created as 'an imagined field recording in a hallucinatory cave, where collaged snippets of tape reveal the gradual opening of a deep portal'. Meanwhile, other tracks such as 'Flight Of The Westward Star' are fuggy and intense, as though early indigenous psychedelics are permeating back through cave rock—a kind of stoned ape theory, conjuring images of eerie Neolithic ritual. Magic Mirror mixes in 1960s sci-fi TV vibes, with tracks like 'Tower Of Preserved Magus In Egg' suggesting unidentified artifacts glistening at the edge of your vison. Corum's work avoids the mere emulation of exotica and its tropes through the sense of adventure that his landscapes present."—Spenser Thompson, Wire Magazine

What remarks can recall the pampered page when the subject shines through so many shaken seams? The remarks are for the producer of Quasimodo The Streetsweeper, the mysterious, though constantly revealing, CF, presenting himself here as Universal Cell Unlock. Christopher Forgues of Brown Recluse Alpha, Mark Lord, Kites, and author of blazetastic comic books—ever checkout Power Masters? What remarks could remain after all that? However, one still finds this fresh pile of inviting and mature music, coated in the haunting haze of digital reverb. What premeditated remark could recharge reminisces of New York more than the city’s newly appointed director of rodent mitigation? The lost legend of Tony Conrad running up the steps of a Manhattan church to meet the mysterious mad one playing the bells in the spire, Charlemagne Palestine. The bristles from the machines of swirling repetition that push parking brush to the side are repurposed here as pluckphonic metal keys, mined for their rich harmonic content. There are strategies taken from the decidedly unfocused on New York musical tradition of American and global capital-N Noise music. An invitation to a closed eye head bob is quickly revoked with a shock call to attentiveness. There’s an attentiveness here. Across forty minutes of percussion music, with some stark electronic accouterments along the way, the focus on the form and compositional aspects is forgotten only to let the sounds build and interact without pesky human interruption. That’s the remark to recall: remarkable music with new surprises pushed through."—Ben Kudler

"Recorded in Brussels in 2019, Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities is Timelash's second delivery of a 4 album projected series. In their debut, A Morphology of Wonders (Aguirre Records, 2021), the duet formed by Embassador Dulgoon (Nonlocal Society, Archimboldos) and Corum (Psychic Sounds) revealed a unique musical journey that unfolds and expands like a cluster of organic matters and mechanical dialogues lit by iridescent fluorescences. Timelash's musical proposal is firmly rooted in retrofuturism, reminding us of exotic and library music artists such as Martin Denny, Egisto Macchi, Bernard Fèvre, and Eric Vann, reaching up to Mark Dwane's cinematic soundscapes, or Constance Demby's Novus Magnificat. Feral Lands and Forbidden Cities digs precisely into what the title indicates: civilizations not yet explored, untraceable ruins, and the unknown. Digital synthesizers, samplers, flutes, percussion pads, and effects are assembled as stirring sprouts of life and evolutionary dream cycles. Spacecraft bustles, strange body noises, tolling bells, plasticine murmurs, and boiling potions ring under harmonic synth soulful crescendos, building up a sense of both machinery and wonder; the emotional significance that the mechanical contains. The tactile quality of detail and the flourishing motifs join and bloom in poignant, even epic manners, as in 'Outside Grottos of Time'. A mood more dizzying and suspenseful speeds up 'Sandrunner's Pass' until the puzzling closing track 'Shadows of the Skyfish' wraps it all up. Chromatic glares, mechanical abstractions, and multicolored visions emerge like fumes radiating from electric dreams; melodic layers drift, rise, and finally lay down subtly. There's a feeling of mystery and motion in several directions, sometimes even simultaneous, although limited, all of them equally full of meaning, since this is a coherent musical tale. The Great Nebula of Andromeda swims like a phosphorescent amoeba. Far away yonder in forbidden cities, foreboding creatures are planning to abduct us while we sleep. In the dark, we cook our macaroni and eat by lantern light. Stars cluster all over our table like fireflies. We watch the turning moon through our little telescope. The unknown stumbles around the dying campfire. As breaths gather firm, an auroral stain illuminates the sky once again. Great geometrical winter constellations lift up over sinuous litmus gleams. We walk under the stars, our feet on the unknown round earth. Our eyes follow the lights of a deep glowing spaceship. Engine tones rise, shrill, faint, finally inaudible, and its lights go out in the southeast haze beneath the feet of Orion."—José Badía Berner. Limited edition pressing of 500. Inclues a large fold-out poster.

Recorded during a week long Midwest summer scorcher, Blazing Worlds expands & contracts with six heavily hallucinatory movements that only hellaciously humid nights could induce and seasoned sonic psychonauts Justin Wright & Grant Corum could venture to manifest. Wright, whom is known for experimental takes on drone & rock in the long running Expo 70 project, and Corum, as a supernatural sonic forager in Million Brazilians, Timelash, and Psychic Sounds orbits, manifest a deep phantasmagoric excursion through brilliant atmospheres in a seamless performance. The material on Blazing Worlds harkens back to Wright’s synth-driven ’Sorcerer of Sound’ full of cosmic tones and other worldliness aura, blended with with Corum’s bent woodwind work & extraterrestrial sounding samples. Where this is certainly a departure from some of their previous work, the two seem to find equal navigation through their evolving compositions morphing into a singular melting chthonic mass, giving the listener an open ended impression of mesmerizingly vast sonic topographies all gleaming with moments of both glimpses of gorgeousness and the grotesque.

Recorded during a week long Midwest summer scorcher, Blazing Worlds expands & contracts with six heavily hallucinatory movements that only hellaciously humid nights could induce and seasoned sonic psychonauts Justin Wright & Grant Corum could venture to manifest. Wright, whom is known for experimental takes on drone & rock in the long running Expo 70 project, and Corum, as a supernatural sonic forager in Million Brazilians, Timelash, and Psychic Sounds orbits, manifest a deep phantasmagoric excursion through brilliant atmospheres in a seamless performance. The material on Blazing Worlds harkens back to Wright’s synth-driven ’Sorcerer of Sound’ full of cosmic tones and other worldliness aura, blended with with Corum’s bent woodwind work & extraterrestrial sounding samples. Where this is certainly a departure from some of their previous work, the two seem to find equal navigation through their evolving compositions morphing into a singular melting chthonic mass, giving the listener an open ended impression of mesmerizingly vast sonic topographies all gleaming with moments of both glimpses of gorgeousness and the grotesque.

"The first idea for this compilation came one night when Tommi text messaged me while I was having a good time with my Raisio-born punk friends. Tommi suggested that I compile an album from my musical history. After considering different directions I went through my archives and found a box of 1980's demo tapes. Some of the tapes were from 1981 and 1982, when we did the punk zine Pöly with my brother Sakke Lintunen. I had totally forgotten about many of them. A beautiful track from a Nurse with Wound demo turned out to be made by a NWW studio technician that lived somewhere in the Canarian Islands in early 2000. He couldn't be found. At first this collection consisted only of demo tracks. Then I got a feeling that I want to include some new tracks too. I asked for a track from Clair whose debut solo is one of my recent favorites. Corumn was another contemporary artist I thought should be there. Jimi Tenor sent me some demos when he moved to NYC in early 1990's. I chose one of those tracks for the compilation. I learned to know Pekka Airaksinen in the early 1980's. He passed away in 2019. Pekka has a big archive of unfinished songs. His wife Maarit gave me some unfinished tracks and Jimi Tenor made a new track out of them. Ddaa sent me a tape in the 1986's. After I asked one of the tracks for this compilation they wanted to re-record the track. And they did so in a very original style. Kostruktivists sent me a tape in 1983 while they were recording Psykho Genetica. All 4 tracks from the tape could have been suitable here, but Opening Signs was the one. Ramleh's Black Ark is a unreleased chapter from the recording of Grazing on Fear in 1987. All of the tracks are electronic experimentations. In early 80's I did a lot of cassette exchange. It was a way of communication in the punk spirit. Everybody knew each other. Tasaday, Odal and Neljän seinän jumalat (my own project) are examples of the active players of the time."—Piitu Lintunen