New solo work from Sam Meringue, aka Explorers, Matrix Metals, half of Yoga et al. Flashback Repository is a crude Xerox-psych take on James Ferraro and Spencer Clark’s Hypnagogic memory-recovery process, positing a universal storehouse where all of the waste consciousness of humanity resides. It sounds like abandoned machinery heard through a fog of tape hiss and dreamtone, with keyboards spooling loops of wasteland texture beneath hallucinatory vocal forms and far-away melodies. The feel is closest, perhaps, to the early Skaters style, with peaking drones jump-cutting into keyboard carousels and flickering dreammachine actions, all rendered in a way that sounds as if its beaming across the decades, from the future as much as the past. A reissue of an obscure cassette from Meringue’s Outer Limits Collective, the LP comes with a stapled together booklet featuring ‘explanatory’ text. Edition of 425 copies. Highly recommended. 

Excellent step into mutant pop from Sam Meringue (Matrix Metals/Lamborghini Crystal/Flashback Repository et al) that works as the perfect fluorescent compliment to James Ferraro’s Night Dolls... LP, extending H-Pop formulas into hallucinatory MTV zones. 

New UK-only 7” from Sam Meringue’s (Lamborghini Crystal/Matrix Metals/Explorers et al) Outer Limits Recordings persona with an A-side that hymns TV hypnosis with a mutant guitar-led pop song that kinda parallels James Ferraro’s work circa Night Dolls In Hairspray and a cover of The Sweethearts’ “Burnin Through The Night” on the flip. 

Necessary vinyl reissue of the debut cassette from the mind-bending duo of Sam Meringue (aka Explorers, James Ferraro’s 90210 etc) and Jason Pearl (Living Tapes): Yoga play a form of hallucinatory 21^st century DIY ritual that filters metal bombast and black psychedelic atmospherics through hyperreal hypnagogic territories and Skaters-style luminal dreamtones.  Parts of this almost sound like Lamborghini Crystal soundtracking some 1980s apocalyptic city-under-siege VHS, but it’s the metal backbone that transports it fully into its own universe, with flashing keyboards and buzzing electro-melodies generating a murky swamp-storm while somewhere in the distance the silhouettes of dinosaurs make a thunderous passage through the skies. Some tracks seem to be made up of a handful of simple sounds, a phased guitar, a keyboard loop, but the degree of F/X and the precise placement of the tones makes the whole deal sound miles deep, like Goblin’s soundtrack to Dario Argento’s Suspiria heard through torrential rain or black 1980s keyboard zones broadcast through ancient tannoy systems somewhere in space.