Anti-Gravity Bunny

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Lüüp make some charming folky weirdness in a way that the “new weird folk” or whatever the fuck it was called could never possibly come up with. Lead by Stelios Romaliadis, the new Meadow Rituals album on Experimedia is filled with almost 20 people bending genres in a way I’ve yet to hear. There’s no map for the place they’ve gone, somewhere off in the New Age classical folk drone land.

Not all of the tracks appeal to me, there’s lots of vocals & flutes giving off a fantasy vibe that just doesn’t rub me the right way, but “Cream Sky” is a perfect example of where they dance line, staggering ever so closely to the dreaded cheese zone but ending up with something totally fucking great. There’s plenty of classy instruments, making a warm and airy atmosphere, then tossing in some reversed sounds to spice things up. The deep resonant vocals eventually come in, flowing like silk through the forest, a wondrous & light hearted dream, and finishing with looped hand claps and mouth clicks. Super cool stuff, especially when heard in the context of the whole record.

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There are some instruments that I instantly go weak for. And then when there are records made with only one of those instruments, I tend to lose. my. SHIT. Nathan Bell’s echoey banjo pluckin @2640, for example, or the one off OrganOrganOrganOrgan. Awesome stuff. Now here comes The Voice Rolling, an all harmonium record that, even better, is the craziest harmonium record ever.

Mind Over Mirrors (solo project of Jaime Fennelly of Peeesseye, Acid Birds, etc) takes a harmonium and fucks it up with all sorts of pedals & FX, making it droooooone in the most beautiful way possible. You think harmoniums are naturally good-lookin? Just wait and see what Fennelly does with ’em. Stretched out gauze floating through pink/grey bliss, endless layers of reed textured harmonies, all of the fantastic things about harmoniums but given a new life through Fennelly.

On “You Ain’t Reeling” he pounds out a Zomes like techno loop with a chopped up beat that could get your Blade Runner dance mix up and running, the nearly 12 minute long “Point Hammond” takes a toasted feedback sound and psychs it up into a mournful slow burner, like some lost guitar in a vast sea of golden mist, stuck in a static wasteland dirge, rummaging through bottled up gloom, “Coaling” is a deep thunder rumble, rupturing black smoke and tearing holes in the sunny sky, “Round, Around” is a peppy pop tune, panning and waving a subdued rager, glistening in the pulsing wash, but all of this is is just child’s play when compared to the real action on the expansive “Barely Spun” which again takes a loopy beat driven approach, a warped Giffoni-esque acid synth jam on ecstasy steroids, building into a heavenly grit so monolithic it’ll blind you to the fact that you just creamed your pants.

The amount of pleasure I get from listening to The Voice Rolling is almost incalculable. Fucking free reeds, man. They just do it. They make the drone that is the ESSENTIAL drone. And when they’re put in the masterful hands of someone like Fennelly who can make them do whatever the hell he wants, the result is a record that’s pure fucking bliss. Best of all, it’s getting the vinyl treatment very soon thanks to Digitalis.