Totally fantastic LP from this solo American psych/synth/dreamtone project with connections to Ariel Pink: imagine James Ferraro’s Lamborghini Crystal plays the first Red Krayola LP and Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. This is fantastically organic-sounding psychedelic music, with songs that develop in blooms of submerged, hallucinated melody, Spacemen 3 style fuzz, 70s/80s synth exotica, drugged lounge, primitive beatbox programs and the kinda amorphous structures that could almost have been directly lifted from “Transparent Radiation” or “Pink Stainless Tail”. The recording quality somehow confuses a weird lo-fi/hi-fi feel in a way that is genuinely dislocating and combined with the kinda alchemical approach to imaginary teenage cartoon realities of Ariel Pink (who co-produces the album) and James Ferraro it makes for one of the most genuinely far-out and oddly beautiful releases of the year, one that’s much more authentically ‘garage’ and ‘psychedelic’ than a long bob and a set of purple loons. In some ways it ties-in with the more outre DIY minimal synth releases that are currently so de-rigueur but the overall atmosphere is so completely singular, so out-of-time that it could just as easily come out on International Artists somewhere between the Elevators and Golden Dawn sides as it could’ve bled from a shortwave radio circa 1975, 1984, 1996… It’s that unique. If this hadda been ‘discovered’ on some weird private label it would be an all-time monster by now. Highly recommended.
Subject: Gary War – New Ray The Onport 
Sat Jan 02, 2010 4:50 pm
