H-o-l-y… Where to start? Every now and then something comes along and leaves you feeling like you got struck by a MACK truck. Well this happened to me just now… twice. First up was the sweet sounding sludge and second, the great label which offers this amongst a series of split 7′s on a subscription service, as a stand alone purchase or a digital download. There’s no excuse not to own this and initially I went straight in for the kill via the FLAC download option.
I like wordplay and Akaname satisfied this quirky curse from the outset just by virtue of their very clever name. They’re a band I haven’t been exposed to but after hearing the near 7 minute balls-out, powerhouse, metal shredded riffing that is Rain Will Be The New Gold, they are a band I’ll be keeping a close eye on for future releases without a doubt.
This split is also a curious one, geographically, in that it marries collabs from 3 very different parts of the world – Australia (Akaname), N. America (Fungal Abyss) and Ireland (Hell Comes Home).
And now the reason I came to hear of this gem (Facebook can be good). Fungal Abyss… FA hail from Seattle and are the psychedelic improv sister group of metal heavyweights LESBIAN. My own opinion is that Fungal Abyss are by far the greater of these two evils and aside from only one other FA release I know of (Bardo Abgrund Temple), this release for some reason sees them billed as Lesbian’s Fungal Abyss which rather ashamedly puts another spin altogether on a rather strange choice of name in the first place… but moving on…
More Teonanacatl fuelled goodness awaits; bound by the constraints of the 7 inch format, which at first I was a little skeptical about. This jam fades out at around the 4 min 30 mark but no less of a jam it is. Curated from the same session that spawned the Bardo Abgrund Temple cassette back in August 2011 on Translinguistic Other, it’s no less soaring and expansive, which may be a wild statement to make as those jams clocked in in some places around the 24 minute mark, but it does trancend enough to make the listener feel as though he were actively engaging in the unfamiliar yet reassuring safety of a lucid dream. I’d go as far as to say it does add another dimension by way of cave exploration and a deep sea (abyss) recce (or recon) for you US English heads.
This is a beautiful thing… Floating up, up and away - holding a mushroom for an umbrella – the curve of the earth is infact one great Humongous Fungus. Precipitation reigns down on all it’s loyal subjects. Acid is king and this is our life, colourful and sweet. Let their drug induced rain, reign on… or reign, rain on? Which ever you prefer. The sentiment is the same.
