Mike Gangloff, Mikel Dimmick, Patrick Best, additional players have included Tom Carter, Amy Shea, Paul Goode, Ron Curry, Phil Bonham, Bill Orcut, Donald Miller, Skip James Connell, RHBand, Thurston Moore, Chris Corsano, Dredd Foole, Nathan Bowles, Jack Rose (Jack Rose), Jason Bill (Charalambides) and the Shakin' Ray Levi's plus others from the hills and hollers of that deep wooded land of Appalachia!
Sounds Like
hot water running through cold pipes, the moment before sundown and the beginning of night, full moon in the woods with deep snow, the birth of mountains, the clear mind before rebirth, moonrise in a grassy valley
Pelt are an abyss!
Recent releases over the last 3 years:
PELT Heraldic Beasts (Eclipse)
If there was ever a band suited to the double lp format it would be Pelt. Their massive drone raga epics can fill a cd in a blink of an eye. Theirs is the sort of transcendental inner space music that you want to drift on for ever and ever. So four side long slabs of glacial buzz and dreamlike drift is just about perfect. Each side a slow shifting swirl of buzz and whir, thick layers of shimmering swaying creakling crumbling colossal sound. Epic expanses of grinding bombinating active ambience. On Heraldic Beasts maybe more than any other Pelt record, the band get seriously fierce, kicking up super caustic walls of gritty guitar and harsh feedback, huge Total like dins that often (but not always) settle down into more familiar moody murkiness. Neo Appalachian guitar hero Jack Rose is in there somewhere, as Pelt is his musical day job, but he's not channeling Fahey here, instead, he's possessed by the spirit of Haino, spitting out huge surges of molten guitar skree which the band then twists into dronelike shapes. Most of this disc occupies the dreamlike raga space we've come to associate with Pelt, but there is most definitely plenty of supercharged blown out psychedelic freakout scrabble and skree, that fans of SUNN, Skullflower, Fushitsusha and the like will find well worth checking out.
Packaged in an ultra deluxe full color gatefold and pressed on super thick vinyl!
Aquarius Records Review
Pelt: Dauphin Elegies
We've definitely mentioned it before, in other reviews, but with every release it does seem more and more that Pelt are perhaps the only group of minimal dronelords truly occupying the dark mysterious sonic space vacated by the long lost legends. Tony Conrad, LaMonte Young, John Cale, Taj Mahal Travellers, Pelt sonically fall somewhere in that list, often leaning more toward one position than another. Sometimes unfurling whispered shimmers and deep crystalline metallic whirs, other times spewing thick sheets of upper register skree, or spreading thick layers of reverberating buzz over Eastern style ragas. Whatever they're doing, and however the hell they do it, the result is truly diving. Especially for the drone obsessed among us.
And here, on their latest, within four long tracks they dabble in all of the above, the opener is all gongs bowls and bells, deep murky metallic sprawls, ringing out, tones drifting into the ether, but with a strange propulsion, not usually found in Pelt tracks, that makes it almost sound like the Necks, if all three of the Necks were playing cymbals and bowls. Dark and languorous and gorgeous. The second track is all scraping fiddles and moaning cellos, bowed and rubbed and sawed feverishly a la Henry Flynt, pizzicato melodies, distant melodies, LOTS of space, dense squalls of malfunctioning string quartet drones, bits of percussion and tinkling chimes, very abstract and obtuse but still quite hypnotic. Up next is the record's centerpiece, 31 minutes of deep multi-timbral drones, thick swirls of harmonium, and according to the liner notes, the only track that utilizes electricity, to power something called the New Jupiter Machine. No idea what that is, but we like it. Fiddles and cellos join the fray, until there are so many layers your ears a gloriously overwhelmed, all the various notes and tones vibrating, beating, interwoven, offering up all sorts of incidental melodies and mysterious sounds that only reveal themselves gradually. So transcendental. Worth it for this track alone. In fact we often say this, but we would have been just as happy if they stretched it out for another 30 minutes, or 60, or 90, well, you know.
The disc finishes off with a brief coda of glistening high end. Sounding a bit like an analog Ryoji Ikeda, all super high harmonics, bells and chimes, all glimmering in the impossibly high upper registers, like listening to ice crystals, or the sounds of stars sparkling, or a recording of sunlight reflecting of the water, or the sounds of dew on morning grass. Delicate, crystalline, and fantastic.
Aquarius
(Untitled) is an album that in terms of feel takes us back to the slowly unfolded, meandering overtones of Empty Bells Ringing in the Sky. Dense clusters of heavily droning and slowly bowed strings and majestic gong kicks off the album, and after letting this one into your skull theres simply no way back. The 32 minutes long second track starts quietly with meandering guitar lines from Jack Rose, but as things progress and instruments are added to the mix everything transforms into something a lot more haunting, intoxicated and amorphous. Track three is possibly the most challenging piece on the record with its sky-high ringing tones bending up and out and around your head, but its also the thing I like the most here. The resonating guitar work and the gritty mantras of aurally demanding drones are simply superb and I cant think of any drone piece that has had such an emotional effect on me this year. That actually goes for the entire album which finds these cats at their absolute best and that is indeed saying a lot. (Untitled) is an incredibly dark and threatening two-headed aural monster thatll keep you awake long after the lights have gone out.
by Matts Gustafsun
I edited my profile with Thomas Myspace Editor V4.4 (www.strikefile.com/myspace)
Hi Hi Hi...
Just wanted to let you know that you still have a couple of weeks to download our new EP, "We Never Like You Anyway", for free off our myspace page. Hope your having a nice chill tuesday.
Peace...
Obedient Waves
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