The Acid Eaters

Presented without comment.

Sun Araw

feelin' a little Sun Araw today, sun-bleached...

if you don't know Sun Araw then you should... you could argue that there's others out there ploughing the same lo-fi spangles but, really, Sun Araw keeps coming up with the goods...

you already know that I listen blind to mostly everything.... just load it up and let it fly from my iPod, letting the complexities of the Shuffle Al Gore Rhythm bust a gut as to the mood... I rarely even look at the track titles / artists... preferring to let things blow... a lot of the music washes over me... but every time a Sun Araw track comes on I find myself caught up.... it's devastating music.... guitars swirl like nothing else... percussion sounds like skulls or chemical containers... and it swirls... in a very psychedelic way... the voice, the guitar, even the drums swirl... dance music for Ayahuascans, for Magic Mushroom Modettes... it's music that vocalises the unvocal, that tries to speak what shouldn't be spoken...

Keep with me here. I know. I know.

Sun Araw - Horse Steppin

Sun Araw - Deep Cover

Music for walking out of the desert. Scab picking psychedelia of the highest order. Music with it's face burned off. Songs that arrive in town over the back of a mule. Creepy as hell. It would make a perfect soundtrack for a Jodorowsky film. In fact, for Jodorowsky filming this little special needer...

(must get round to writing that someday)

Relentless stuff but intoxicating. Hard work like acid is hard work.

You need this.

NYE Amsterdam

Spent New Year in Amsterdam and ended up at the above, dancing like a bag of spastic elbows all night at the mysterious Ruigoord, an old hippie commune / hangout about 22km outside Amsterdam (that 22km seems a long way at 5 in the morning on freezing New Year's day). A great barnstar venue, in a village full of fog and fireworks and odd sculptures and old hippy buses and an old church that they've turned into some kind of psychedelic temple, complete with a DJ mixing dutch folk with tribal techno and oddly affecting Snow Patrol covers. Reminded me a lot of the old Megatripolis nights at Heaven, with any number of people who could be Frazer Clarke's progeny bouncing around like machine elves, tossing firecrackers and generally grinning themselves an injury.

The music was good too: none of yer poncy dubstep or minimal here, just balls-to-the-wall techno and trance - I'm as headnoddingly awed as the next man to the lure of a Villalobos remix (that Fabric 36 album is a killer, isn't it?: constantly skidding along the divide between pretension and genius / delirium and death-eating) - but sometimes (and NYE is one of those times) you just want sound to be energy, you want to feel the drums in your eyes and you want multi-coloured hippy girls dancing around you like their beads depend on it...

I buggered my leg with so much dancing...

NOTE TO SELF: adopt less frantic, less bouncy dance style for next year.

The night ended when we managed to catch a lift back to Amsterdam with some decidely dodgy, bourbon quoffing homeboy ravers in a car that seemed somehow whittled.

Anyway, the pics come courtesy of Rob Triskele's site (most of my pictures look like they've been to the cleaners). I'm in there somewhere!

Buzz Or Howl

Very occasionally, I dream a band into existence, or at least that's how it seems. It happened before with ........................ (brain collapsed, memory failing daily) and now it's happened again. I woke up having seen (I supposed) an imaginary band called Buzz or Howl playing in a kind of 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me' (cf Tricky and Sub Sub's 'smoking beagles' - which might be sleaze encapsulated in 12" form) nightclub somewhere in the woods outside Montacute. The same Montacute that once drew werewolves and finnish kraut metal bands. The same Montacute through the same gauze of dreamsleep, mushrooms and petrol fumes.

I hear Montacute is actually a lovely place to live. Lots of retired Colonels and kindly Aunts who bake cookies for the children and explode crows with yeast and rainwater.

The band on he dream stage played nicotine bloodflow slow electro-acoustic dirges, similar to a beardier, wiggier Matt Valentine with perhaps the barest hint of ZZ Top about the eyes... It went on and on, with various munkins and munties sliding in and out of focus on the dancefloor making odd sigilistic gestures with their hands and talking about fast-track A Level provision.

And then I did a quick google and there they are, more or less as I imagined, at least from the descriptions. Maybe someone out there had blogged them before (Kek? Cloudboy?) and somehow the name had slipped underneath my consciousness. They mention Acid Mothers, Tony Conrad, High Rise, John Fahey etc but I haven't really heard anything from them yet - here's the free mp3 from their site, a 7 min slice of improvisional live performance:

Buzz Or Howl - Smoking Peace With A Burning Crow (Live at The Make Out Room in San Francisco