Trouble Books have cultivated another garden lush with colorful and odd sounds, loops, and drones to walk through and explore. Handmade experimental pop songs blossom from under synthesizer swells and guitar clouds, later to be buried in noise or drift off into ambient atmospherics.

The sounds on Gathered Tones seem to come from a location far from Keith Freund and Linda Lejsovkas attic or Mike Tolans living room in Akron, Ohio. Instead, the sputtering electronics and analog sequencers suggest a place like the exotic set of the 1972 film Silent Running, where space stations with huge geodesic domes float in orbit around Saturn, filled with leafy plants and small birds. The quietly sung lyrics about daily life and chores bring the songs back to Earth and make Gathered Tones another warm and personal recording from the group of friends. 

Past the New Parking Deck

"Saturday Night Fever" takes the concept of the movie of the same name and stretches the night a bit later, the fever a bit higher to the point where the party ends up blending into something much more sinister and wild. What starts out as a disco drumbeat with funky guitar swagger and melodic horns, may slowly deteriorate into some sort of corroded ambient loop that eventually morphs into melodic horn samples.. Basically every track is subverting it's own gestures, carving out a narrative of interruption and stretching the disco template in directions simultaneously embracing and mocking the form.. In a way, this album is a sequel to "A Republic of Sadness", embracing the criticisms people had of that album and expanding on those flaws. The resulting album sounds like Morley's pulling out some heaping doses of the hermit boogie and Otago funk and stretching it into some sort of Basinskian disintegration loop gone Bernard Bonnier zonked mutant scene.. There are so many moves within each of the four extended tracks, that it feels like that illuminated dance floor is always slipping beneath your feet. I promise it'll be worth the effort, twinkletoes...

- Pete Swanson

Asset

Dreamboat is the collaboration between dream-folk singer / guitarist Ilyas Ahmed and the lunar-inclined analog synthesizer/processed bass clarinet duo Golden Retriever (Matt Carlson / Jonathan Sielaff ). The collaboration between these long time friends began with a shared admiration for each others' work as well as a commonality in approach to making music, which one day begged the question, "What if our individual sound worlds intersected?". The result yielded a unifying love of exploded modal song forms, improvisation as composition (and vice versa), and a desire to interact with traditional song form . The record is a result of intense scrutiny to arrangement as well as a commitment to reckless abandon.

The opening track Aftershock introduces the trio's vocabulary with Ahmed's 12 string guitar and soft vocals floating through the billowing clouds of Carlson's synth wash with Sielaff's processed clarinet cutting through the haze like a knife. The next song Face to Face ebbs and flows like the ocean's wash against the shore, each instrument allowing each other plenty of space until the song's chorale-like outro. Side 2 opens with Mirrored Image which straddles the line between abstraction and free-form chaos, the players careful to walk the line between the two. Album closer Your Sunday Best begins as a near-chamber ensemble piece which segues into the record's most overt "pop" gestures and playing out in a wash of modal hypnosis.

Imagine Tim Buckley sitting in on the first Cluster recording session or Neil Young with the Taj Mahal Travelers as Crazy Horse covering Popol Vuh and you are almost there.

Aftershock / Face To Face

06 Wounded Healer

03 Breaking Sea

02 Ihntza

01 Break Up

There’s a particular twinkle in the great expanse of American songwriting. This has seen countless nostalgic exploitations over the years – collections of popular songs strung together under the banner of the so-called Great American Songbook that have reiterated the form of many of these songs without contemplating their depths.

In terms of thoughtful, emotive synthesis, few have understood it in the way that Cara and Mike Gangloff understand it on this new album. They take have taken older American songs, popular songs that we’ve come to understand as standards, and stretched them out into the rolling hills and vast expanses that gave birth to the nation’s earliest music.

American history is a history of tension. A group of aristocrats saw fit to bestow a limited degree of freedom upon the underclasses. They called this democracy, coopting a concept that terrified them in the hopes that the implications of its meaning might placate the unwashed masses. Within that sliver of freedom, incredible heights were reached. Blues. Jazz. Mountain music. And on and on.

The songs on this record are recognizable. They’re classics. And yet here they play out in ways the songwriters could never have predicted. Cara and Mike Gangloff have married the colloquial with the eternal.

With certain songs, like “Sentimental Journey,” they lift the material out of its saccharine setting and into the troubling and sublime nation from which it springs. “All of Me” is rendered utterly psychotic, teasing apart the song’s desperate, masochistic, violent implications. The songs become essays about themselves, investigations into their own histories of terror and escape. “Mood Indigo” becomes a haunting dirge. “Cry Me a River” is a rhythmically jarring lightning rod of unease. The inventiveness of interpretation is spirit-raising.

The cultural history of the country is one of cosmic entertainment in the face of excruciating injustice. Transcendence has always been necessary. For better or worse, the United States of America is a nation defined by expanse. The negative aspects hardly need be mentioned, but there’s a flipside, a cosmic expanse worth not only celebrating, but exploring further. An expanse that brings honor to the term.

The drone exists in music as an attempt for humanity to somehow meld with the temporal. It reduces music to its most basic elements while lifting it out of itself. An area for contemplation, reflection. An opportunity to exist in space. A friendly reminder that life might possess something resembling a core.

Cara and Mike Gangloff don’t so much reimagine old American music as infuse it with the life it’s always had. A life always just below the surface and a life far beyond the stars.

– Matt Krefting, Holyoke, MA 2016


Cry Me A River

PRE-ORDER NOW. OUT ON THE 2ND DECEMBER 2016, JUST IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS.

In 2015 Hey Colossus released two albums on Rocket Recordings, In Black and Gold in February and Radio Static High in October. Dedicated to Uri Klangers is a look back. It's best summed up by the 3000 words that can be found on the inner sleeve of the record, the tale begins: "The 2xLP comp that's in your hands now was initially released on cassette by S.O.U.L for our 10th anniversary show, September 2013, about 50 tapes were made and sold on the night. We thought a BEST OF would be hilarious. We were average at that show and I'm being generous. I'd give us 5.5/10. A shame. Hacker Farm and Helm also played. It was at The Sebright Arms in London, somewhere out East....."

The cassette sat in the MIE car for three years, soundtracking journeys back and forth across the country. When a new car was bought, criminally minus a tape deck, the decision was made to put it on vinyl.

Included are one or two tunes from all the HC albums released 2003-2013, it also includes the Witchfinder General Hospital track (only 100 pressed on 12"). All vinyl versions of the albums from this era are long gone. The discography is a bit of a mess now, the band doesn't fully know and the Discogs site is not much help - godspeed anyone trying to buy all the back cat.

2xLP, gatefold sleeve, full printed inner sleeves with stacks of photo's and the aforementioned spiel / tale of woe / occasional victory. 500 copies. This record is a fine way to dig into the first 10 years.

November 2nd – Amsterdam, OCCII 
November 3rd – Hamburg, MS STUBNITZ 
November 4th – Berlin, Urban Spree 
November 5th – Liege, Garage 
November 24th – Paris, Espace B 
November 25th – Lille, La Malterie 
November 26th – Brussels, Magasin4 
January 21st – Plymouth, Junction 
February 3rd – Reading, South Street Arts Centre 
February 4th – Cambridge, Blue Moon

Dedicated to Uri Klangers

Hey Colossus -  Fire Up The Tambourine

PRE-ORDER NOW. OUT ON THE 20TH JANUARY 2017.

MIE proudly unveils after long gestation Panisperna, the first practically available long player by Jantar, an outer-borough ensemble historically known for their creeping strain of easy listening most often heard in empty lots and abandoned diners. Chad Laird and Tianna Kennedy have grown an experimental cover crop since 2009, gently cultivating a soil rich in ambient leaf rot and organic artworld chemical compounds. With the addition of Kirsten Nordine, Jantar began to run it through with speculative roots and melodic worms, digesting the tails of lost Euro soundtracks, and ultimately finding in drummer Kelly Rudman the crystalline lattice necessary for vertical growth... And yes, now this broad field is very much in rotation.

Panisperna shoots riffs, stalks and flowers right up out of the ground. From the waves still reverberating from Canterbury Gongs and Soft Machines, Jantar propels green, driving rock forms, and leafs out into repeating rows of complex time and growth patterns. For this first foray into rock music, Jantar has enlisted the assistance of Pigeons Clark Griffin and Wednesday Knudsen, who contribute synth and sax, respectively. Long time ally and champion Jason Meagher (No-Neck Blues Band, Steve Gunn) recorded this music at the venerable Black Dirt Studios.

- Rob Smith

Release Date - 20th January 2017

Mie Music

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