Package deals (be sure to put your choices in the 'note'!)
DNT065 - Edibles "Other Minds meet Inner Space" LP $13/$15ppd US/Canada *international, please order from a distro closer to you or order items from the distro and add this to your order*
Hot off the dub plate and drenched in analog syrup comes the debut full length LP by Portland, OR trance boogie band Edibles. Founded by Dewey Mahood (Eternal Tapestry, Plankton Wat, etc) in 2009, the album picks up where 2010's twin tapes for Not Not Fun and Stunned left off, but doubles the funk with the addition of Dusty 'Beats' Dybvig (Brass Clouds) on live drums and mystic synth. Album opener "Rad Trip" starts like a Sun City Girls ritual seance before blazing into some brown acid Hendrix theatrics. Live set staple "Mind Fry" brings the classic Edibles recipe of dubby bass loop with stream of consciousness guitar and patented fog-chant vocals. "Skyway" and "Parachute Jumpin" add guest collaborator Ben Bogard aka DJ Rumtrigger (and Sonic Lozenge boss) on 70's vintage drum machine and monophonic synth pulses. Goner dub jam "Midnight Movie" comes off like Les Rallizes Denudes getting in the zone at King Tubby's. "Dune Buggy" hits the WARM JETS trail with some catchy pop hooks wrapped in classic electronic meltdown. Album closer "Future Life Dub" sounds like it was transported from the BLACK ARK circa SUPER APE, all roots groove and shamanistic flute song. 10 songs of chill funk and cosmic bliss record at The Owl House, caputured on black wax, and housed in Kickin' It At The Temples Of The Moon cover collage by Dewmah. Edition of 500.
"Dewey Mahood temporarily steps outside his role in Eternal Tapestry to pick up his dub reigns in Edibles. Following two tapes on Not Not Fun and Stunned, Mahood uleashes a humid slice of psych-dub, Other Minds Meet Inner Space for DNT. There are hints of his Tap-era guitar excursions but the record mostly sits in the same swampy waters that have made Peaking Lights' 936 such a staple this summer. The record feeds hungrily on groove, elastic bass and rhythm with Dusty Dybvig and Ben Bogard picking up live drum and 70's drum machine duties respectively. If the gooves are wearing thin on 936 and you're anxiously waiting for that next Sun Araw fix, it's highly recommended that you get Edibles on the turntable as soon as possible. " -raven sings the blues
"Wow, some weeks the calibre of stuff we get in is amazing. Here's the new album from Edibles. They're from Portland and the press release describes them as 'trance boogie', which on one hand is pretty accurate, but also kind of makes it sound like they won't be as good as they actually are. The cover's this awesome collage with a proper 80s-looking dude in a cowboy hat and shades and short shorts with a ghetto blaster hanging out on a tatty sofa in front of what I can only assume is the Temples of the Moon from the fact that the picture is called 'Kickin' it at the Temples of the Moon'. As far as I gather, it's the brainchild of Dewey Mahood, who does darker and more psychedelic things in other bands, so I guess maybe this is his way of unwinding. A lot of it's really stripped back and minimal mellow dub. Basically it's tailor-made for blazing up on a summer evening. It's pretty minimal and soundtracky in places, although it gets pretty psychedelic sometimes too. I think if it was a film soundtrack it'd be a pretty cool film about a guy who goes around being really cool and doing some really cool things, dead casual like he doesn't give a shit, and then goes home and smokes loads of chong. But enough about me...it's good to hear music like this that's not entirely focused on electronic instrumentation. There's a song on the second side, 'Dune Buggy', that sounds kind of like a totally loved-up Raccoo-oo-oon. It's hard to pin this album down but the grooves and melodies keep coming and it never stops sounding like the background music to a good time. Tasty stuff, just in time for summer and all." -Norman Records
***************************************************** DNT063 - Caboladies "Caboladies" LP $13/$15ppd US/Canada *international, please order from a distro closer to you or order items from the distro and add this to your order*
As a pixel leaves the screen, and dissolves back into the field of
visual static, a small measure of air is released in the transaction.
Most often, this newly liberated measure of air will seek either to
expand it's moisture or to expand it's heat. Though, in a smaller
percentage of cases the air will attempt to expand it's
phosphorescence. By reversing it's course and attempting to dissolve
back into the screen, the air endeavors, against all chemical
possibility, to reconstitute with it's severed pixels. What the air
finds, is that the original pixils have themselves reconstitueted with
the realm of natural static. With not a pixel to bond, the air is
thus nudged to remain in the atmosphere surrounding the screen.
A similarly emotional exchange bubbles through the uniquely
hyper-dense surfaces sculpted by Caboladies. Theirs is a study of
fatigued electronic code, magnified and multiplied. A mutant
minimalist calculus of key generated go-zones and opaque technological
patchworks, where machines self-destruct in pursuit of their own
Walden equivalent. As plasma leaks from behind the monitor's buttons,
light reconvenes with the screenless realm.
It is with great pleasure that DNT Records presents the self-titled
long player from CABOLADIES. Recorded by the three piece of Chris
Bush, Eric Lanham, and Ben Zoeller,
this collection draws a narrative thread through their past releases
on Arbor, Students of Decay, Mountaain, and their own Smooth Tapes
imprint. It's not so much a summation of their back catalog as it is
a spotlight on a particularly fluid and holographic area of their
sound. A truly amazing audio experience, whether you're seeking some incredible music to fling on as you Play Poker, or you want to lose yourself in a surround-sound melodic wonderland. The result is a flowing and coherent collection of nuanced
electronic mess. A real trip and an excellent demonstration of the
Cabo ethos. Remastered from the original source materials by Pete
Swanson. Artwork and Design by Robert Beatty in an edition of 500 on randomly colored vinyl. Pro-printed matte jackets with doubled sided 11x11 poster.
"Caboladies specialize in ecstatic electrical jams that have been making the rounds of the various psychedelic-post-noise-zonked tape and cd-r labels (Arbor, Gneiss, Peasant Magik, Digitalis, etc.). And at one time, these two Kentucky ex-pats (now living in Chicago) shared a tape release with Oneohtrix Point Never. They've always been a bit loopier and more shambolic than Oneohtrix, elevating their work to the druggiest plateau of spiralling bloop and eyes-dilated sparkle that you might expect from an Astral Social Club reworking of J.D. Emmanuel. Many of those tape and cd-r releases had disappeared from physical distribution, although some less than stunning sounding mp3s are making their way around the blogosphere. So, it's really great to hear Caboladies on wax, which is certainly the best medium for these celestial crystallizations blossoming from piles of analogue gear. Taken separately, each piece of electronic gear is dialed to a twitchy spasmodic set of bleeps and swoops, that would be ungainly had Caboladies not playfully situated five, six, eight, ten complementary sets of tones that smear together into an ambient shimmer that's anything but static. These irregular vibrations and delirious patterns are alive with psychedelic energy, that you could almost see fitting into some freak-folk nature jam session... but then again, everything needs to be plugged rather heavily into the grid. Great stuff! " -Aquarius Records review
"Something like a “best of”, the self-titled LP by Caboladies collects five of the band’s tracks from five separate CDrs and cassettes previously released on Students of Decay, Mountaain, Arbor, and their own Smooth Tapes. The trio of Chris Bush, Eric Lanham, and Ben Zoeller have hardly experienced want for accolades over their five years of existence, and the regular investment of heavy labels and vinyl pressings (this is their second of three LPs so far) have only fortified the name. Mastered by Pete Swanson, this rerelease can hardly be called redundant, as the warm drones and synthetic ecology of tracks like “Aquarium Railroad” and “Body Tides” require the warm tone and clarity of vinyl. For those unfamiliar with the Caboladies sound, it would seem something charted equally between Taiga Remains, Hototogisu, and early Growing would do. “Psychic Birthmark” is an arbitrary intro, selected perhaps for its budding opening strains where most others begin in an assertion held beginning to end. Each element coming alive in essential harmony with the only sound world there is, the track has the quality of a chant rather than a drone, with each note shaped in an acoustic mouth (human or otherwise), whining, Om-ing. Conversely begun in media res, “Giddy Atonement” is a particularly keen study: bright and granular, the effects are discernible from the sources – voice, strings, knobbly electronics – but the experience is not a painful separation, but an audiophilic delectation of every element melting over the tympanic membrane. Reveling with slightly-less direction than the rest of these largely-directionless tracks, the meditation summarizes well the Caboladies sound: maximal static. Vision quest art by Robert Beatty. Recommended. On colorful spattered-grey vinyl, in an edition of 500 copies." -Animal Psi
"A divine marbled slice of tuneful strobe-drone polyhedrons from a Chicago duo determined to do something more within the genre. Across the board, these guys succeed; this collection of tracks from tape and CDR releases is bursting with strong ideas, melodic collisions strengthened by a layered, vascular approach that allows them to bring in a wide variety of noises and treatments, while keeping it all balanced and natural sounding, the excessive nature of their music coming across as joyful and celebratory rather than overwhelming. Think of it as a more ecstatic take on the earlier Emeralds releases, or Eno’s Discreet Music – or better yet, just enjoy this on its own merits. Great stuff." -Doug Mosurock, Dusted (http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/931)
"Some fantastic minimalist electronics here that have a crude DIY edge that touches on aspects of primitive UK circuit benders like Storm Bugs et al while factoring in psychedelic restatements of reductive 20th century avant classicism and some fully punked kosmische synth." -Volcanic Tongue
"This gets going with synth washes sounding like clouds of pink gas dissolving into the ether, then goes further into marshmallow hallucinations and tropical aquatic electronic climates, all refracted through mirror crystals right into a toucans all-seeing third eye! So basically ultra-trippy synthesizer explorations on marbled jade/dark turquoise vinyl from this crew that have had releases on Arbor, Digitalis and Aguirre. Totally blissed!" -norman records
*************************************************************************************** DNT061 - Family Underground "Demon Parade" LP $13/$15ppd US/Canada/World *international, please order from a distro closer to you or order items from the distro and add this to your order*
"Think I will set up a booth to sell fried infant fat to the evil parade peeps. But as the demons fly & buzz around the street doing they circus stunting, i would lift open a sewer cap with a rusty iron and slowly creep into the sewers cause who the f**uck is gonna wanna sell ANYTHING at a Demon Parade. You just gonna loose, prob. everything. They don't necessarily carry around change in a chain wallet do they? Or want overpriced Demon Cokes? No way hose.' AND it would be mad LATE at night. No thanks.
So, I would gander, the real party (human at least) would be UNDER the demon parade. With total weirdo's. Taking the most of the awful echoey, grating, strange acoustics that lie under the cement streets under the prancing of the demon hooves/feet. I have in my brain an imagine of a m-f duo, comfortable to the street chaos as they are from the free-anarchy of K-town, huddled around the sewer basement by trash can firelight making a slow-MO nerve numbing in tune/outta tune semitone racket to the soundtrack of their busy brain/nuggets. Would sound amazing, slow and mean, thick and meaty but uncluttered, strange and comfortable, KINDA. Like a mystery w/o a mellow ending. Would sound like.....DEMON PARADE. Duh. But like, under the streets to a DEMON PARADE. Cause: See ABOVE.
True Family Underground story: One rainy spring night outside a punk club in K-town, some young freeker jammers punkers were looting brew from a Korean Nail Saloon / Party store right next door that left their door unlocked. As scattering happy punkers were cleaning this joint out and stuffing as many tall boys into band-adourned flannel shirts, the two relaxed m-f members of FAMILY UNDERGROUND thought it would be more kosher to do a super quiet set inside, a challenge to high volume AKA being caught. Me & wolf boys were the only ones in attendance to this theft-gig and were blown away by watching the FU's wave papers, move cutlery around, and get UNSOUND from Korean nail equipment NOT plugged in. It was amazing. It was, in my simple brain, what seeing the mythical SOUTHFIELD CAFETERIA FORK BAND live on the coldest night in winter must've been like. Super kool. After they did this NON SOUND FAMILY UNDERGROUND concert, the duo went peacefully to the cooler, gripped FIVE tall boys and we went black outside, UNCAUGHT. Life on the edge, HOW WE DO IT YO.
So anyway, Dig this LP. Its real frozen/wild/weird. Sounds good pitched down. UNLIKE: the trees, mob 47, or System Fucker. My fave recs. are A: by my friends & B: portals to another wild/weird world cause this plane SUX. But this here DEMON PARADE. ACE." -John Olzone Winter 2010
"Danish farm machinery comes alive and waits outside the shed to murder you and yours on the A-side, and for me that’s been a fairly typical response to most Family Underground product that’s come through here – some funny words to something that doesn’t mean much of anything. The good stuff everyone keeps referring to, the drivers behind how this group managed to bag so many releases in years past, never really materialized when and where I needed it. And truthfully there’s one side of this record with two long pieces of straight pain, either via amp abuse or violin torture. But the sidelong trip on the flip, “Singly Lost, Eternally Gained (Part One and Two)” is the moment where the Fam finally clicked with me, aggressively plowing drone fields to start and finishing off with a thumping, pagan howl of guitar and wordless panic, a dense/intense rattle that shifts into greater malevolence with each passing minute. If this was what I was missing, please, give me more." -Doug Mosurock, Dusted (http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/931)
"Massively dark/claustrophobic set of new industrial ritual from the duo line-up of this excellent Euro commune/drone group. Easily one of the most ‘unnerving’ full-lengths in their catalogue, Demon Parade opens with a power drone that sounds like a lightning strike in a ventilator shaft while hideously modulated vocals flicker in the foreground ala early Whitehouse/Throbbing Gristle circa “Hamburger Lady”. “The Spectral Janitor” extends this mood into a despairing minimalist tone piece with distressed wordless vocals that teases apart the sound of no-mind with the kind of aggressive string sonorities of early Vibracathedral Orchestra plays Heathen Earth. The second side is dominated by a single track, “Singly Lost, Eternally Gained”, that is heavier on the fuzz, with the organic/electronic aspect of MB put to the service of an industrial post-“Sister Ray” mainline. Still one of the best European exponents of the nowhere zone, this is classic black psychedelic punk." -Volcanic Tongue
"This crew from Denmark gives us another dark dose of their drone-rock based nightmares. “Son of the Morning” kicks off side A with a pandemonium of buzzing and humming like a poorly lit generator room where some psycho has stashed his murdered evidence. He lies in wait for you next. Its intensity ebbs and flows and the tortured vocal effects only add to the thrill. Total horror soundtrack. Then this gives way to “The Spectral Janitor,” which makes me think of the spine-tingling high-pitched drone of “The Shining’s” film score toward the latter half. Some of the guitar anguish sounds caught between a symphonic warm up and a set of bagpipes. The leveled vocal drone makes for a nice effect too. The second side is a nice two-part track, “Singly Lost, Eternally Gained.” This one is a less assaulting dronesphere of reverb and more minimal noise. At least, this is how it starts. It builds and is a thick wall of fuzzy noise by the end of Part One. It only breathes to usher you into some harsh, gliding guitar layers for Part Two. Then, somewhere in the middle of this second part there is the effect of mucky, slippery drift with lost, echoed vocals. It comes to a screeching halt and then ends abruptly.
If you like noise laced with a reluctant terror, “Demon Parade” is definitely for you. These little hellions will do a march into your ears and drive you to madness. This is what Ed Gein’s basement would’ve shared with us if it could speak. The stark black and white photography on the cover and the LP labels add to the unsettling feel of this record. I mean, the cover has a woman running away through the woods from some kind of menace. Who knows what was in that building behind her! And the scratched white lettering on the back cover, listing the track titles and such, also adds to the lunacy. DNT did another great job releasing this one, proving again and again that its releases are always a can’t-miss." -Dave Miller, Foxy Digitalis (http://www.foxydigitalis.com/foxyd/?p=3890)
"You can trust this Danish trio when it comes to bringing on the weird shit. With releases on Chocolate Monk, Not Not Fun, Qbico, American Tapes and Weird Forest, they've amassed an impressive bunch of releases over the last 8 years or so. 'Demon Parade' has them working in some bleak alternative reality/black zone, with doomed buzzing feedback and dismembered vocal torment! This should have been the soundtrack to the ultra-freaky bits of the Jacobs Ladder movie. 'Tantalizing Nightmare Visions' resembles Mouthus on a really fucking bad trip." -norman records
"A tenuous link to the recently-reviewed ‘Demon Seed’ LP, the ‘Demon Parade’ LP by Family Underground is a bombastic overstatement when compared to the compositional minimalism of the former. Nevertheless, a likeness stands to be addressed where both releases represent increments on a (centi-) metric scale of abstract music. Split in four over three tracks (the B-side being a two-parter), the Danish trio’s latest (and second consecutive LP for DNT) continues to explore the profits of total drone. Reminiscent of Workbench and related material for Heavy Tapes, “Son of the Morning” is motoric, mottled stuff with a bassy growl and simpering whine - drone queasy and smooth transition into “The Spectral Janitor”, a fly-blown tableau like a Current 93 instrumental without reprise. In smart compliment, the sidelong “Singly Lost, Eternally Gained” lets a bit more daylight into the process, advancing with the same drone-motivation but relaxing (and at times entirely abandoning) its grip on the reigns. Like an exploded drawing, each detail becomes vividly apparent and then, almost rhythmic by the end. Dominated by a convulsing electric guitar, the track’s initial wash parts like an overcast sky to reveal an acidic lead over the woven stutter of an atmosphere so dense that it couldn’t not have been there all along; like Gown with less emphasis on a central instrument, the convocation runs its course freely - yet held in place by the vinyl’s duration - and moves through a handful of timbres in order to squeeze the most out of each sound. As if to restate this, a gnawed tongue moans several verses, not in order to speak, but simply to demo the effects and salute the audience back home. On black vinyl in glossy sleeves with some of DNT’s best art yet." -Animal Psi
"I feel like it's been a while since Danish drone hounds Family Underground dropped a record and considering Demon Parade is one of their best, I'm wondering if they've been holding out on us. What other sounds do they have locked up in the vault?
"Son of the Morning" features what I consider to be the classic Fam Underground sound. Jagged electronic drones, agitation situated within stagnation and slow-motion. Some tones stay static, serrating at an even pace while another tone is gradually jostled back and forth between pitches. There's a dose of unintelligible vocal muck in the midst of it all. You know I've been thinking it was vocals but it may be a horn of some sort, really can't say. The more I listen, the less I know. A strange, plink-plonk melody emerges barely towards the end of the track lending a rigid, rhythmic sway. This track should keep all the fans satisfied but it's the following tracks that I found the most interesting. "The Spectral Janitor" (killer title by the way) is heavy on the violin drones which I am all about. The Family keeps the piece in the pocket, not too abrasive but not too smooth or pretty either. With strange permutations from each sound source occurring throughout, the piece evolves very subtly, with an array of sounds constantly shifting within a certain framework. Nice work.
The second side is two tracks merged as one, "Singly Lost, Eternally Gained Part One and Two." Dark as hell, the thing rolls to a start with a bowed drone, a barren bass pound every 10 seconds and what sounds like a noisy recording of a boxcar. Gradually the plot thickens, more sounds enter and the affair gets noisier but no less bleak. When "Part One" reaches its breaking point and shuffles off into darkness, "Part Two" appears with a slightly more optimistic tone. Whaaa? Are these guys actually going to end on an upbeat note? The distorted oscillations are still present but so is a chiming keyboard part, synth squelch and even some vague axe moves. I'll take it. That's not as surprising as what happens next. Out of the cacophony comes a totally bizarre groove. Like Excepter doing trip hop, maybe? A little? I don't know man, cause it isn't some accidental thing. There's a bass line, a heavily effected percussion track and then a totally sloshed voice comes into focus. Yes, this has happened. Family Underground have made a disco record. Fuck. Yes. Please excuse me while I board this soul train and ride it to the end of the groove. All aboard!
Considering the past couple Family Underground LPs and that Attestupa record, DNT is really holding it down when it comes to dark-ass Scandinavian sounds. Keep 'em comin'. Demon Parade may even be the best of 'em though it's hard to turn down the plague-ridden rage of that Attestupa record.
Sparse and ambiguously great artwork from DNT completes the package. Check this bastard out." -Auxiliary Out
*************************************************************************************** DNT055 - Plankton Wat "Dawn of the Golden Eternity" LP $12ppd/$13ppd US/Canada *international please order from a distro close to you or order records from the distro and add this one*
Debut solo LP by Dewey Mahood of Portland psych-jammers Eternal Tapestry. Ten songs recorded at the Owl House basement last winter on cassette 4-track. The LP encompasses a vast array of sounds and moods, from blissed-out drone punk rippers to super chill deep space folk. Total late night stoney textures, and radiant sun anthems. Acoustic and electric guitar, drums, banjo, mbira, and some singing, all mega tripped with syrupy analogy delay. Really beautiful heavy zoners. Hand drawn covers and insert by Dewmah. Edition of 500 on marbled red vinyl.
"Debut solo LP from Dewey Mahood of psych monsters Eternal Tapestry, with a range of styles that is as beautifully fucked as The Faust Tapes. Some searing lead guitar, some reflective looped string work that has a whiff of Mark McGuire’s six-string alchemy, doomy acid folk and some cranky Kraut grooves, pretty much what you were hoping for." -volcanic tongue
"Here's a bomb. After what felt like an ample hiatus--just starting to mourn the loss in the form of frequent checks to the website--DNT has returned not with a fully loaded batch but with one ultra focused and fondly constructed LP from Dewey Mahood's Plankton Wat project. Probably better known as a member of Eternal Tapestry, Mahood's solo ventures have actually already been captured on the DNT imprint via a cassette from a ways back.
While that one was an ultra-serene pleasure cruise though, this one pushes against the shores a bit more. Opening with the flanging guitar of the "The Magic Citadel," a kind of paired down Burnt Hills psych number with real focus and drive, the piece is a call to arms for the rest of the album, which presents nine semi-miniatures in which one idea is essentially worked out and through and over. The title track, whose clattering free drums and guitar drift splay themselves out like the arched arms of illuminated cacti, segues beautifully into the Delta sproing and pan flute pitterings of "Song of Winter Death," whose Fahey allusions extend far beyond mere use of finger-picking. He somehow conjures the underlying weirdness as well, the uncertainties. "Shrouded Path of Enchantment Occult Blues" is a solo guitar venture that allows Mahood's spare caution to flower into a raga Renaissance blues style whose patient sense of time and restraint display a maturity far beyond the usual in this field, evolving incrementally as each successive leaf drifts to the floor. Closing out the side, "The Exiled Wanderer" finds parallel vocal and banjo lines sliding effortlessly into a sacred netherworld of Tibetan Appalachia, closing the side out with an emptiness immediately filled upon the flip.
"Sphere Within the Lotus," like the opener of the album, harkens in the side with gusto never again reached on the side. Splashes of guitars and frolicking drums mix with bells, vocals and Harper Mahood's flute for a brief cleansing of the palette before "While the Clouds Gather" takes delayed guitar into meditative drone worlds ripe with atmospherics and tender thematic painting via harp-like gracings over the strings. Resonating hairs strum by fingers as it meanders into warm winded vocal glides over the tundra on "Other Realms," building a humble cathedral of its resonant rainfall guitar before teetering inward for a bask in the light projected on the floor. Closing it out is "Voyage of the Night Pavilion," a drone and guitar piece firmly pointing toward the eternal beginning. A beautiful one from DNT and company, and a real accomplishment for Mahood. Killer package all around, glad to have DNT back. " -ear conditioned nightmare
"1-man gtr-psych debut, at its best approaching early-mid Six Organs instrumental styles" -blastitude
"To enter the home of avant-garde veteran Dewey Mahood is to walk into a kind of domestic bliss that is distinctly Southeast Portland: In the basement, he and his girlfriend, Loni, have two separate workstations; she for her clothing design business, he a makeshift recording studio. It was down here, in the winter months of 2008, that Mahood created Dawn of the Golden Eternity, a hazy, blissful, almost entirely improvised album set to be released under his solo moniker, Plankton Wat. While his still ongoing band projects, also mostly improvised, tend toward the loud and aggressive, this is the product of a different frame of mind, one that’s closer to his reality as a father: He would usually record after putting his 7-year-old daughter, Harper, to sleep.
“This is more of a late-night, I’m getting tired, I’m getting ready for bed, so I’ll record for a while [kind of thing],” he says, “once the energy is going down a bit.”
Indeed, Dawn of the Golden Eternity is a record that feels born after-hours. Its 10 tracks, a melding of various instruments including guitar, banjo, African thumb piano, harmonium and at least one flute solo from Harper, coalesce into a heavenly, temple-massaging drone. Sonically, it is a far cry from the sound of his other groups—the revivalist ’80s hardcore of Bloodbiker and the distorted krautrock of Eternal Tapestry—but philosophically, it keeps with what Mahood has been doing since he moved to Portland from Northern California in the early ’90s.
“I was just doing pretty much all experimental, improv-type stuff, which has a good following now, but back then it was the smallest group of people,” the 38-year-old says. “Most people just did it at their houses. No venue would really have you.”
Of course, things change. And for somebody who has been messing with sound as long as Mahood, it’s a welcome shift.
“When I first started doing this and giving people tapes, I’d always get a funny reaction from people. They’d just be like, ‘What is this?’” he says. “Now it seems people are a lot more excited about it.”" - Matthew Singer/Willamette Week
"First of all, I must note how beautiful this record looks. Dewey Mahood (Plankton Wat) contributed great artwork from the sleeve to the labels and DNT main man Tynan Krakoff put it all together beautifully with lovely ruby red marbled vinyl. Damn, I just couldn't believe my eyes when I opened it up.
Last I heard from Plankton Wat was last year's tape on DNT. It was a great psych slow burner but Mahood has tweaked his sound just a bit for this LP and topped himself in the process. The first of ten, "The Magic Citadel," caught me off guard as it's a total fist pumper. Glistening waves of guitar set in with raucous tambourine hits before Mahood just starts burning up the fretboard. It's probably only about a minute and a half but it gets your heart racing. The title track cools things down a bit with airy, looped layers of guitar and free drumming. The drums really control the dynamics of the track cause when they're mellow cymbal rolls it's a pretty piece but when they get hectic so does the whole track. "Song of Winter Death" features more great, and completely different, drumming. Hollow, thudding toms make a semi-hypnotic base for acoustic slide guitar and flute to do their thing. "Shrouded Path of Enchantment" reminds me a bit of that DNT tape with stark and brooding acoustic guitar arpeggios. There's a second guitar that provides subtle plucks of the root note occasionally and it creates a strange sensation, the sonic equivalent of an undertow. A single, skeletal melody is doubled by banjo and voice on "Occult Blues." It's short but pretty profoundly eerie. "The Exiled Wanderer" is an awesome rhythmically driven track. Each instrument is used to percussive ends but Mahood deftly weaves flickers of melody from mbira and other instruments within the tangled web of rhythms.
The second side kicks off with "Sphere within the Lotus" and I'm not sure if it's possible to give a song a more "psychedelic" name. It fits cause it's a squall of a song drenched in glorious, or copious, amounts of fuzz and wah, depending on your viewpoint. Mahood is even rocking wind chimes harder than they've ever been rocked before. Sadly, the piece is pretty short. "While the Clouds Gather" is a mellow number, and there's not too much to say other than it's supremely, if unassumingly, gorgeous. It sneaks up on you. "Other Realms" is the default epic of the side, marking the return of Mahood's wordless vocals paired this time with guitar. The track drifts for a while until a slamming groove comes out of nowhere making everything get real good real quick. "Voyage of the Night Pavilion" finds acoustic and electric guitars making a great team, the former handling the melody and the latter producing a fuzzy fog and chiming in on the melody when it feels like it. Its a perfect outro cause of the gently lilting vibe, though it heats up near the end with a melting guitar lead.
Dawn of the Golden Eternity is another great installment of Mahood's 4-track psych excursions. I like that he kept most tracks pretty short so he could cover a lot of ground, but I wish he'd given the openers of both sides a bit more time to jam it out. If you dig Mahood's stuff this definitely worth the pickup and if you don't know it, this is a fine place to start." -auxiliary out blog
"i’m impressed both by the range (backwards, faust-ian chug & sandy bull-esque raga guitar ... but also 60a-lineage guitar loops & free drums & the kind(s) of muted hand-percussion boggle of the finnish scene) & the quality of playing/production herein ; something of a sampler-pack / dabbler-manifesto, sure, but all done w/ a laudable grasp of each discrete mode’s myriad inflections ..." -mimaroglu music sales
