New split CD release that pairs the London-based Family Battlesnake with Chicago drone duo Number None. One long 28 minute tone-float from the duo incarnation of Family Battlesnake (Bill Kouligas and Harry Astras) and four slowly collapsing galaxies from Number None. Hand-numbered edition of only 200 copies in oversize card sleeves.

We were always big fans of Chicago-area drone navigators Number None so it’s a pleasure to reconnect with one of the great gentlemanly presences on the contemporary underground, None’s Chris Miller, as a member of this great trio, Anemone Lodge. Here Miller is joined by Gwyneth Merner aka The Opera Glove Sinks Into The Sea/Byssus and Matt Erickson of Radiant Husk/Sudden Oak. The sonics here feel as if they are more closely related to Tokyo than anything that might orbit Chicago, with a feel for deep dark space and lonesome F/X vibrating in a gulf of silence that mimics what you gotta imagine were the sounds reverberating around Takehisa Kosugi’s brain circa 1969. Indeed, Taj  Mahal Travellers best exemplify the style of minimal droning psychedelic improvisation that this trio excel in, with simple sound events, a violin string, possibly, a slow-spinning globe of electronics, a pin-prick of light, rising like fleets of hungry ghosts in the distance, vibrating names made alien and lonely through the disfiguring use of delay. It’s totally gripping, a form of organic improvisation that is as sensual as it is absolutely dislocated from the physical. If your dream date involves a basement, the sacramental use of psychedelics, spontaneously improvised sonics and the endless application of head-spinning F/X then you might want to marry this little fucker. Just fantastic: “Having lost a member since the initial Anemone Lodge sessions of 2006, the now-trio’d version of Chris Miller (Golden Sores, Number None), Gwyneth Merner (Byssus) and Matt Erickson (Radiant Husk, Sudden Oak) decided to bunker down in Chicago once again, this time in the sweltering July heat of 2009. Using myriad instruments to minimal effect, the trio attempted to navigate the continuum between magnifying slight gestures and constraining more expansive swaths of clatter. Would it be agreeable to claim their intentions to be akin to those of the East Bionic Symphonia, though with only a third of the members and with much of the rough-hewn edges snipped away, only to be gathered and polished into mirror form? Perhaps. Or could one state that what was once a three-hour session of assembly-defined, free-sound troubleshooting has now been condensed, groomed and catalogued into a set of auditory star charts? Indeed. Or could it be that the borders between spontaneous composition, elastic cosmos-echo and the fluid passage of long-tone regeneration were blurred, if only for a temporary moment in a cool basement on a muggy Illinois night?” – BF.