Category: psychedelic

TRACK | Dinero Romero – Laser Beam of Consciousness

5/5 golden merles

“Laser Beam of Consciousness” from Louisville’s Dinero Romero was a central piece of the last mix. With much warmth and warbling, the track is a kind of psych rock which evolves like a placid fever dream, methodical and yet genial in its delirium.

The song in no way begins to address the question of whether it’s performers are… “either people dressed in regalia to look like spirits, or they are spirits.” It’s anybody’s guess. But they are employed, with heads filled with fog and in a stupor on the trip home. A nice, dreamy track concerning how you spend your time and to what do you devote the few brief moments of coherent focus.

It can be bought for an increasingly devalued buck.

TRACK | The Shivas – Beach Heads

5/5 golden merles

“Beach Heads” is a track both levitating in a vacuum and yet bound to the surf. The breadth of it’s soundscape is the width of radius between the earths crust and the outer exosphere.

With most tracks you’re lucky if you make it within a country mile of the mesosphere. Meanwhile this tune is demonstrably adrift, both pristine and coated in sand.

For the first minute exactly there is nothing but the ba’s. And they’re very fine ba’s at that, probably the finest since Ben Kweller fell through that very same aether packed envelope in the year 2000.

The views that are expressed thereafter appear to embrace uncertainty, a kind of doubt that is plotted on the horseshoe of future expectations somewhere between enlightenment and resignation. Time is rapidly expiring but panic won’t help. Calmly survey the expanse for some kind of clue as how to proceed.

TRACK | The Numerators – Dead

5/5 golden merles

“Dead” is Psych-Surf circa 2013. With a loping start that builds into a veritable gallop, the essential elements of the genre are soon assembled into a, to mix the metaphors, well-earned avalanche. Why didn’t I just say stampede, hm? No.

A little hard to place in the homestead: maybe equal parts garage and bedroom. It features a bit of the grit and pulp of either.

Full of texture and heart in a way that resonates with my cultural conditioning, the track reverberates in the manner only matter can seem to muster. By which, to add to the confusion, I mean energy condensed to a relatively slow vibration. But, fortunately, its output is one within the audible range of our lowly species, the decline of which the song itself laments and celebrates in equal measure.

When it pours from the speakers there is a comforting nuance to the noise, the distinction a product of tens of thousands of hours you and I have spent consuming similar external stimuli. And within all that experience, narrowing and selecting, “Dead” is plotted within the very narrow percentage of what I arbitrarily consider to be Good. Credulously, gullibly, naïvely I take it to be an earnest testament. And if it isn’t, so what?

TRACK | Samuel Campoli – One Eye

5/5 golden merles

Samuel Campoli’s “One Eye” is a delicate and multidimensional track, something who’s size is difficult to assess. It is a kind of glittering aura phasing through a rift seen from great distance.

Parts psych-folk and freak-folk, there is within it an array of quasi-familiar attributes positioned on a foundation of vibration. The concerted warble feels equal parts ornate and obliterated.

Still, the sway has a good sense of purpose to it and in this weaving course we are united. When the drums pick up the ponderous becomes quietly devastating. The feeling reminds me of a quote from Tarkovsky’s “Stalker”:

For softness is great and strength is worthless. When a man is born, he is soft and pliable. When he dies, he is strong and hard. When a tree grows, it is soft and pliable. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Flexibility and softness are the embodiment of life. That which has become hard shall not triumph.

Glacial and gracious, it can be purchased here.