OPEN MAGIC SYSTEM, Burnt Hills / Headroom (split cassette)
Legendary Albany psych/free unit Burnt Hills had met up every Monday night in their Helderberg House basement since October of 2003. Three years and some change later, the Helderberg House hosted (and since ceased, sadly) 50 shows featuring worldwide likeminded heads (Jake Meginsky, Bill Nace, the Jooklos, Ashtray Navigations, Mike Chapman, Jack Rose, Jon Collin, Yek Koo, MV + EE, Pigeons, Connie Acher, D. Charles Speer, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Tom Carter, the list goes on for a while, like a dream). A fixture of the upstate New York / Western Massachusetts / Southern Vermont free music free people autonomous zone. Party at five, music at seven: this particular evening's bill on a hot August 28th, 2017: the duo of Bill Nace & Matt Krefting, New Haven's Headroom, and of course the house band, Burnt Hills. This was, in fact, the last gig at the Helderberg House, one of the truest manifestations of magic in this Earthly realm while still in operation.
This Burnt Hills set featuring (more or less) the core ten members of the group is rather emblematic of the band's forays. A slow, discordant churning begins and stretches, druggy and catlike, until the turbine swirls and dilates with mechanical and animalic cadence. I remember looking over to a basement cretin's ersatz decibel meter as it registered a solid 136Db. Around the 14 minute mark, one is overcome with the reason why people see this band, and with why the band plays, a real Deliver Me Now Lord moment, this pulsating globular tangle saturating and nearly obliterating the very cinderblock confines of this dimly lit basement, soccer moms and dads in Cabaret Voltaire tees thrashing politely next to the washing machine and the water heater, the noise unfolding, devouring, and regurgitating endlessly not unlike a demented pranic crescendo orphan of the atonal clouds of 1974 Grateful Dead “Dark Stars,” thickly fried Heikotter-esque ramblings, the metallic edges of Yank Crime, organic wisps of Amon Duul, Motorhead, Last Exit-era Sharrock riffage, yada yada yada. You'll be whoopin if you're not already too smoked to move.
Headroom's set consists of four tracks, the first three ripped from that year's choice long player Head in the Clouds (Trouble In Mind). Though the band's sound could be partly characterized as cut from the same contained, claustrophobic sonic cloth as High Rise, Kousokuya, Fushitsusha—and, in fact, this set contains a beautiful cover of fellow PSF band White Heaven's “Out”—there is a generous, gentle, loping amble to these cuts. Devotees of bands of long lost Twisted Village label, for example, find a similar expansiveness to this band's palette not routinely offered in the aforementioned Japanese groups. Calculated and holy, this band, languidly firing smoke rings into the high cirrus of somewhere. There's a redoubling, recursively expanding chase here: Canned Heat played at half speed on YouTube thanks to your pothead uncle, the hippie fractal semi-grooves of prime Träd, Gräs & Stenar and Agitation Free, the Death Star rhythmic launch and chugalug of the great Magic Hour. The errant silences between the set's songs should tell you just about everything you need to know: either those of us in the audience were too baked to clap politely, or we weren't yet back on Earth to register that the song had indeed ended. We'd been launched too high when the fuzz pedal clicked into overdrive, slackjawed and giddy in sound. Oops.
For those of us simple folk, us troglodytes who still fling prostrate at the idiot altar of the electric guitar; those of us who quietly whimper at the feedback's bite, it don't get much better than the hour of sound on this tape. Turn it up and join us. Sounds sent forth with max volume and spare design. "Hey daddy-o, I don't wanna go down to the basement—it's dark down there," or so the punks sang. This was the last time. And, just for this time, fuck em. Let's go.
Open Magic System
Burnt Hills / Headroom split
Edition of 100 tapes
Vibrated into being August 28, 2017
Thanks to the bands
$11, plus media mail shipping
