WONDERS OF NATURE (cassette only), Bear Research Group

This is to order the cassette only. Pre-orders will ship in late September.

“Meet Me In The Bathroom” this ain’t quite—or, perhaps simply aesthetically reshuffled to include batik dyed Jerry band tour shirts, a vape loaded with Berkshire sativa, and a four-track. Given the instrumentation (cello, bells, and vocals) and the personnel (veterans of the liminal Upstate New York/Western Mass free people free music autonomous region), one can make some obvious aural likenesses: Taj Mahal Travellers, World of Echo era string rhetoric, US Steel Cello Ensemble drone passages, the cooked vocals of early Siltbreeze, etc. Interspersed cello riffage and solemn drone commingles with persistent bells; the “poetry” here flits between silhouettes of images and phrases and the totally indiscernible, where the voice becomes an additional instrument of bent air. Here is 15 minutes of fried, throbbing, twinkling improv delivered from an 8’ x 12’ pink tiled Albany bathroom, pulsing with both the scorched, bulbously expanding latticework of a typical ‘74 “Playin’” and the claustrophobia of, say, Grandeur of Hair. Of course, heads of top pedigree will tell ya: there ain’t much difference ‘twixt the two. Keep this one around to dislodge yourself every fiscal quarter or so.

$10, $4 shipping. Yellow pro dubbed c20 cassettes with heavyweight fuse green inners. Jewel case. Edition of fifty, co-released with Ramshackle Party Brothers. Designed by The Aliens.