Massively potent set of multi-track psychedelic string wrangling privately-pressed by Willie Lane himself: Lane remains one of the most unique string thinkers to come out of the creative tumult of North Eastern USA, forging links with Matthew Valentine and Erika Elder (whose Child Of Microtones imprint released his classic Recliner Ragas as a limited CD-R), Joshua Burkett, Steve Gunn and Grant Acker from Un, with whom he shares the Slurp Dogs duo. But the solo setting is invariably the one to get your head spinning and this beautifully packaged solo album, the follow-up to his earlier Known Quantity LP, is just ass-flatteningly great. Lane has an odd, skewered vision of the potential for endlessly over-dubbed steel strings to open up new vectors of sound and thought, and here he lays down weird, repeat chord sequences and then bisects them with screaming lead guitar and odd, melancholy night-time movements that will have you pulling out Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack and Misato Minami’s 1971 side The Tropics, cut with Mizutani from Rallizes, in order to get a better fix on the string co-ordinates. As with all of Lane’s material there’s a subtle humour in the titles, “Imaginary Labelmate”, “Spaghetti Eastern”, “Rare Psych For Wayne” but the overall atmosphere is lugubrious, haunted, seemingly bled straight to four-track in the early hours and with a stunning, fuzzy/personal fidelity that Lane claims “listeners with an ear for the veil of haze that clouds-up certain Impossible Recordworks will embrace”. Indeed, the set almost feels like a Japanese cousin of Matthew Valentine’s experiments in Spectrasound, with a tone that matches the raging iconoclasm of Masayuki Takayanagi and Takashi Mizutani while wrapping the whole thing up in a form of supremely lonesome blues and hermetic tone poetry that has little parallel outside of weirdo one-shots like US Saucer’s classic My Company Is Misery album or some of the foggier Loren Connors material. Throw in a couple of sly nods to “Swastika Girls”-era Fripp & Eno and you have all the ingredients for a classic private press LP and a guaranteed future monster. Hand-numbered edition of 350 copies with Folkways-style wraparound paste-on sleeves and pro-printed labels, very highly recommended!
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PAST TIP OF THE TONGUES
