Limited cassette on this excellent new US imprint from a San Francisco duo that go by the names John and, uh, Matt. John plays electric guitar and Matt plays saxophone and the resultant pile-up is a fucking blast, with John drawing huge vectors of feedback and klang from his guitar with a weight of ideas that crosses the post-Hendrix adrenaline mainline of Munehiro Narita with the avant brutality of Masayuki Takayanagi and when Matt’s high, metallic saxophone parts crown the whole deal with blups of severed single-note ferocity it’ll have you reaching for your Takayanagi/Abe discs for a back-to-back blast. Another excellent side from this new imprint.

New sax/guitar drone extremity from this San Francisco duo that collide a non-stop gush of metal feedback and wailing single notes headfirst into saxophone hallelujahs and slow-motion Borbetomagus vibes. 

We were always big fans of Chicago-area drone navigators Number None so it’s a pleasure to reconnect with one of the great gentlemanly presences on the contemporary underground, None’s Chris Miller, as a member of this great trio, Anemone Lodge. Here Miller is joined by Gwyneth Merner aka The Opera Glove Sinks Into The Sea/Byssus and Matt Erickson of Radiant Husk/Sudden Oak. The sonics here feel as if they are more closely related to Tokyo than anything that might orbit Chicago, with a feel for deep dark space and lonesome F/X vibrating in a gulf of silence that mimics what you gotta imagine were the sounds reverberating around Takehisa Kosugi’s brain circa 1969. Indeed, Taj  Mahal Travellers best exemplify the style of minimal droning psychedelic improvisation that this trio excel in, with simple sound events, a violin string, possibly, a slow-spinning globe of electronics, a pin-prick of light, rising like fleets of hungry ghosts in the distance, vibrating names made alien and lonely through the disfiguring use of delay. It’s totally gripping, a form of organic improvisation that is as sensual as it is absolutely dislocated from the physical. If your dream date involves a basement, the sacramental use of psychedelics, spontaneously improvised sonics and the endless application of head-spinning F/X then you might want to marry this little fucker. Just fantastic: “Having lost a member since the initial Anemone Lodge sessions of 2006, the now-trio’d version of Chris Miller (Golden Sores, Number None), Gwyneth Merner (Byssus) and Matt Erickson (Radiant Husk, Sudden Oak) decided to bunker down in Chicago once again, this time in the sweltering July heat of 2009. Using myriad instruments to minimal effect, the trio attempted to navigate the continuum between magnifying slight gestures and constraining more expansive swaths of clatter. Would it be agreeable to claim their intentions to be akin to those of the East Bionic Symphonia, though with only a third of the members and with much of the rough-hewn edges snipped away, only to be gathered and polished into mirror form? Perhaps. Or could one state that what was once a three-hour session of assembly-defined, free-sound troubleshooting has now been condensed, groomed and catalogued into a set of auditory star charts? Indeed. Or could it be that the borders between spontaneous composition, elastic cosmos-echo and the fluid passage of long-tone regeneration were blurred, if only for a temporary moment in a cool basement on a muggy Illinois night?” – BF. 

Hand-numbered edition of 200 copies on Sean McCann’s new Recital imprint that sees Radiant Husk aka Matthew Erickson of Sudden Oak laying out a series of wild overdriven saxophone drone pieces bookended by a pair of stately, almost Nitsch-esque chord organ works. Erickson works by looping and overdubbing saxophone lines that range from single Industrial fog-horns to smoky blasts of vibrating brass in a way that comes across like Barefoot In The Head as re-worked by Terry Riley for maximal all-night flight potential while at points recalling the composer Ingram Marshall’s eerie recordings of San Francisco in the fog. Imagine Roxy Music reduced to nothing by Andy Mackay and Brian Eno or the Sauter/Dietrich frontline after way too many psychedelics recorded in a natural amphitheatre several miles beneath the surface of the earth and you’re close to the kind of fantasy territory this major side traverses.