As previously reported, Kansas City will host its first annual Psych Fest, featuring Expo 70 (3-piece version!), CVLTS, Umberto, Discoverer, Plante, and (non-KC resident) Dylan Ettinger. Nearly every thrilling local act is playing, a wide sonic gamut, and the overall vibe of this event is promising, with live visuals, displayed art, and food carts. The whole thing seems to really celebrate music and the experience of participating in it (as a listener or otherwise), and I suspect it will feel more positive and ommunity-like than most local festival-type events. Full line up and schedule here.

To enter to win passes, simply:

Post about the KC Psychfest somewhere on the internet- Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, your blog, etc. Be sure to include a link to the KC Psychfest website: www.kcpsychfest.com. To submit your entry, send evidence (a link or a screen capture) to psychfestcontest@gmail.com, along with your best contact information

A winner will be drawn at random on Wednesday, May 16th at 11:30 PM.

The album opens with “Sky Burial,” a woozy melange of clanking pipes, subliminal sax noodling and alien choral warbling right out of the German kosmiche music playbook. No dancing here, folks. It’s followed by Toldyall, which is beat-driven but hardly relentless. In fact, the episodic, herky-jerky rhythms present an elusive target. You want to pull the trigger, but everything keeps dissolving in the mist.  “Missed a Spot” starts easing gradually into hypnotic club beats, but with lots of sampled counterpoint (especially vocal loops) and synth washes. Track 4, “Point of Return,” finally commits to a modified but regular hip hop rhythm from the get-go, with a three-chord synth pattern anchoring the piece melodically and lots of other mysterious ear candy layered on top. This might be dancefloor material, but in terms of ambience, it would be well suited for the infamous Star Wars bar band playing in the Mos Eisley cantina on Tatooine. Jimmy Edgar adds some robotic, semi-intelligible pick-up lines on the slow grinding “Lets Work,” while “Better From U” features a heavily processed, evolving repetition of the title phrase, set up against a Jon Hassell-styled electronic trumpet riff. The energy here is jumpy and nervous; dancefloor moves would be largely confined to spasms. Track 7, “Out the Door” returns to the German kosmiche music vibe with two minutes of rolling sequencer pulses before giving way to the gently percolating beat of “Pleasure Zone.”  The final three tracks all feature the same mixture of hard beats, spacey breaks, mysterious vocal loops and unexpected detours.  “Sounds Sane” and the longish closing track, “People,” are perhaps the most rhythmically straightforward tracks on the entire album, and even here, the predictability is periodically undercut by shifting textures and timbres.

I wouldn’t exactly call it a conflict, but the two primary impulses at work on this disk are a vaguely hip hop, dancefloor vibe and something much more programmatic and even cinematic, in the vein of Tangerine Dream or perhaps Klaus Schulze. This may have something to do with the fact that Roy and Rutledge now reside on separate continents (Roy in Berlin and Rutledge in Los Angeles), which meant that the collaborative process was largely conducted online. But judging from the results, Lazer Sword seems to seek out and cultivate musical dissociation and would quite likely have produced a similar, off-kilter result regardless of physical proximity. There’s just too much stuff rattling around in the heads of these two guys – and they are having way too much fun messing with sonic possibilities — to conform to some stereotypical dancefloor formula, or any other kind of formula, for that matter. Memory may or may not be to everyone’s tastes, but it is quite the trip – and definitely not predictable or routine.

Monkeytown Records

I sat on this for quite some time, simply because I didn’t know what to make of it during my first few listens — my experience as a listener shouldn’t be held against RxRy’s intentions, but at times this one felt like a series of excerpts and exercises preparing for longer, extended formats (like a series of C60, or something). BUT, this is hardly a knock on the material, which is mesmerizing and often hypnotic; it’s just that as soon as some grooves get started, or something gets going, RxRy cuts to something else. It’d be rather rude of me to say that this detracts from the material; who am I to say that every time a recording gets into a groove, or gets going, that it needs to last, say, 20 minutes?

What if the moment of that sharp crescendo, or that playful, communicative synth, or that abrupt volume shift, or that blast of perfectly ascendent noise is only meant to be precisely that  — a moment?

One thing to obsess over for this release — more than others — is the unique presentation. There are 5 main grooves on the actual record, but the back of the jacket features a strange list that suggests that 20 individual pieces occupy the wax. Each element of the list is preceded by the letters that spell Alpha, which I interpret as corresponding to each groove on the record. The elements of the list feature words that are as descriptive as they are narrative — A is “Truant,” “Harvest,” “Elusive,” “Frost,” the final groove, A2 being “Scatter,” “Phase,” “Elipsis,” “Beam.” This is a wonderful interpretative tool for the record, and it adds a narrative layer to the music.

Perhaps my initial feeling that the sounds were sketches or exercises, that they could have been extended, was completely false. Really, the short programs are so effective precisely because they are concise, and leave the listener wanting more. The wax opens with ominous ambiance, rapidfire beats, moving just as quickly to shifting, trebly oscillations that swirl and ascend.

One of the most effective tools on the album is the use of filters and decay, where prominent sounds completely drop out and minimal beats, and swirling high frequencies foreshadow eventual blasts of noise, abrupt volume shifts, and stops. Even the dark timbre of some of the pieces feels playful, and after some time, the short compositions seem to dance with and against one another, delighting in their brief moment in their groove.

Sweat Lodge Guru

Historically, the band have always posted most of their live jams on Soundcloud for free but this one was considered good enough for release and upon listening it’s not hard to hear why. A 3 Leafs set is rarely anything less than a mind blowing experience but what sets this one apart from previous releases is the quality of the recording and crowd participation – which from the get-go has a tangible, palpable electricity to it – coursing through the room and touching everyone in it… to convey that on a CD-r to a listener over 8000 km away is a pretty rare thing.

I’d say they were at the top of their game right now. It’s getting easy to recognize a 3 Leafs tune; their signature sound is clearly defined – heavy bass at the fore, squealing synths, sparse staccato fx drenched vocals, free form drumming (including cow bells ?!) and the guitars/oud providing a wealth of washed-out, tripped-out sounds to help bind it all together. With En Super Forme they’re focused, rhythmic, tight and as song orientated as I reckon they could ever be. Their strengths too are in their differences – as where the drums are usually the heartbeat of a band, for 3 Leafs the heartbeat is very much in Diego’s bass playing. His fingers run through each song – marking time – only this time around, injecting a little bit more of the funkadelic. The drums gets a little more room to breathe in the dynamics of this band and the free form solo that closes out Guacamole Window, is testament to 3 Leafs ‘super group’  pedigree – cementing Warren Huegal as something  of a force to be reckoned with.

In listening to the crowd buzz and chatter during the start of As Space As Impossible,  I can’t help but think that a lot of anticipation was riding on this live set (recorded at Amnesia 2011-08-25) and as it progresses, I can’t shake an image of a vampire biker freak out taking place before my eyes – the backward sounding squeal of the synths, sucking up souls and borrowing the crowd – their combined energies feeding that massive 3 Leafs sound. They’re just so damn quite. Mesmerized from the outset. A respite comes after track 3, the funk-fuelled Finaler with the crowd erupting into (brief) cheers and whoops before the band brings it home and jams out with the awesome Guacamole Window from recent LP Canal Smarts.

2012 is already shaping up to be a momumental year for these guys. Seek ‘em out. Grab En Super Forme at aQuarius recOrds. Non physical needs can be satisfied through their Bandcamp.

On to the tape, then, and the over-long, over-wrought opening paragraph will start to make sense. This Is Yvonne Lovejoy, maker (or star?) of the eighth in the Voice Studies series on London label My Dance The Skull, presents two sides of baby babble that varies from contented suckle to frustrated struggle. Aside from the sound of distant sirens and the occasional, hardly-discernible buzz of  a machine, that’s what you’re getting here – twenty minutes of unadulterated gargle, squeak and grumble. Both sides are titled ‘Admit It’, which could be a personal message to my inner curmudgeon. “Come on,” it’s saying, “of course you want children! Jus’ wisten to their wickle cute baby sounds…”

The sounds were recorded, it would seem, by one Seymour Glass and Yvonne Lovejoy (also called Veronica in the info to confuse me even further) is the baby. Yvonne – or Veronica – was very young at the time and the babbling is her only way of communicating as “she can’t do anything for herself”. Whether this is through disability or just because she sounds about a month old is not made clear but the ambiguity is such that at times the experience can be a little disconcerting. At it’s calmest it has an almost river-like quality, a flow that can be relaxing like womb music for adults but when there is the suggestion of struggle and a little consternation in the baby’s grunts then you start to question whether you should be listening when you could be helping.

It will come as no surprise that ‘Admit It’ began life in an art gallery under the title ‘Gestation’. Apparently bodily fluids were involved, as was ‘anaesthesia’ and ‘near-traumatic contortion’. Thankfully I only have the sounds and for that I’m eternally thankful. I can make of them what I like.

My Dance The Skull

Orange Milk

Kurage/Nature Bliss

This interview with the BBC, which takes place at his Madrid apartment, focuses on the author’s work methods and political views, among other subjects.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/4784132.stm