Tag: psychedelic music

Alpine Decline – Visualizations – 9th October 2013

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Cat #: 149TZM

In the Spring of 2010, their self-titled debut still cooling on the racks, Alpine Decline left the sun-stained Sierra Nevada to trek through China from the Eastern capital to the Himalaya peaks in Tibet. Returning to the studio – this time working with L.A. experimental artist M. Geddes Gengras (Robedoor, Pocahaunted, The Congos) – the duo poured all the captured spirits of their journey into “Visualizations”, a ten-track-trip that revels in their expanded visions.

Though clearly a rock album, the songs on “Visualizations” seem to emerge from a more fleshed out landscape, with the guitars and drums rising up from a mist of drones that are sometimes ghostly and sometimes the full-throated OM of the otherworld. The songwriting and melodic craftsmanship, with vocals ripped up and glued together on magnetic tape, is more fleshed out than their debut, their identity more firmly realized, from the heart-pounding “Enter the Bullet” and “CCTV” to the mournful dreams of “The Fever Subsides” and “Deeper into the Part”. “Visualizations” lets you travel with Alpine Decline through provinces of electronic waste and shadow-warped night markets, dropping you off at the final notes short of breath but exhilarated.

Alpine Decline – Disappearance – 8th October 2013

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Cat #: 152TZM

Something is amiss in the world of Alpine Decline. Just months after releasing their sophomore album “Visualizations”, the band returned to M. Geddes Gengras’s Green Machines studio in East Los Angeles to record “消失/DISAPPEARANCE”. Whereas the previous album found the duo wandering through some ghost world without a map, on “消失/DISAPPEARANCE” they are in control, pulling you down by your ankles into their deep deep sleep. Opening track “The Anesthesiologist” twists radically from bone-crushing guitar and drums into a warped brain-burning seven minute dronescape. When it finally lets you get up, brush yourself off and look around, you are undeniably in uncharted territory.

Haunting melodies, vocals that flutter in the ripples of a gas leak, cryptic guitars, bleeding synthesizers, and hypnotic drumming combine into something both headphone-ready and made to make you move. This is rock music for the mythically inclined. “An Accident” and “Now You Believe in Vanishing” are radio singles for an FM that never existed, and the band fearlessly steer the ship into the polyrhythmic got-down-on-the-one bump of “The Other Side” and the strobed-out hypnosis of album closer “Frontier Religion”. By now, putting on an Alpine Decline album has become a kind of ritual passage, stepping into a space both instantly familiar and completely otherworldly, but when the tape reels stop spinning and the machines cool down, the band is nowhere to be found. Before the album hit the pressing plant, Alpine Decline themselves had disappeared, not to resurface again for almost a year in the rubble and chaos on the outskirts of Beijing. 

Alpine Decline – 7th October 2013

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Cat #: 145TZM

From the opening strains of “Encounter”, the first track on Alpine Decline’s self-titled debut, the listener is guided across the chasm and into a narrative just beyond comprehension. With a more immediate and bracing sound than the albums to follow, “Alpine Decline” draws attention to the band’s ability to craft unique melodies while bloodying your nose with buzzing guitars and twenty-ton drums.

From their previous incarnations in various L.A. bands, the duo doesn’t so much rise up from the ashes, but rather smear the ashes on like war paint and go marauding into the night. From the spaghetti western kill guitar and church bells of “The Pilgrim Got Drunk” to the blissed escape of album closer “Stole Away”, Alpine Decline’s first foray is here and gone in seven tracks that lay the blueprint for the work to come.

Imported under license from Alpine Decline. We’re all in this together!

Proximity Butterfly – Reprieve – The Auspicious Occurrence of Dr. Chen’s Past Lives – 1st December 2011

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Cat: 088TZM

Proximity Butterfly melts together with ancient Chinese instruments and cutting edge-rock layered with psychedelia. Established in 2003 by Joshua C. Love (America), Chenduxi (China) and Heather Judson (Canada), Proximity Butterfly landed in China 9 years ago – since then, the tales of performance, power and the world’s unknowns have shaken the space that makes this band so unique and full of genuine expression. The band currently consists of guitarist/vocalist/producer Joshua C. Love, bassist/vocalist Heather Love, guitarist Lenny (Robert Tanner), and drummer Wang Yong. 

Their music is mixed with a complex variety of elements, including the retro atmosphere of Led Zeppelin through complex jazz time signatures, Pink Floyd’s psychedelia and strikingly poignant lyrics, an unidentified aspect of aggressive rhythm structures and an ethereal tactfulness only to be compared to the likes of Jane’s Addiction or Sigor Ros. Creating an almost circus-like attraction to what songs they’ll play next, Joshua C. Love describes it as, “looking for the timeless, a series of works that can be heard in a 100 years and people will say, yeah, I know that feeling.” 

“The live shows are like a ceremony. Not religious, but so full of passion and attention that the energies tie the room together.”