Wiggwaum / Poor School LP+CDR

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• 33% in stock

Killertree Records

Wiggwaum (Randy Lee Sutherland of Thin Ensemble and Vholtz, Doug Katelus, filmmaker/trombonist Loren Means)
Poor School (Bryan Ramirez of Ex-Cocaine and Universal Indians, Nathan Hoyme, & John Niekrasz)
300lps - screened covers by Randy Lee - bonus CDR of lp w/ 2 xtra tracks.

"The playing is high-intensity throughout, though there are fundamental differences in each group's musical approach. I've come to think of their respective approaches as symbolic of something like post-nuclear morning and evening ragas.

Poor School will wake you up and not take you down. Their modal and thickly drone-based song is awash in a sea of harmonics. Their music seems like a throwback at first, but it's only that there's a timelessness at the spiritual core of it. Ramirez's high-strung electric guitar pyrotechnics most often take the lead in the trio's rock-solid amalgam of ecstatic psychedelic jazz.

Wiggwaum shapes sound inside a nebulous cone of white noise from outer space. Their music might change your evening or your life. While its particles are made up of "real" sounds derived from real instruments, it is pushed to such a level of intensity that only a massive sound entity remains.

Randy Sutherland's drums loosely thrash, crash, explode, and dryly implode within the sonic mush. From Doug Katelus' Fender Rhodes come jangly runs of Ra-like "cosmic tones" or warbly layers of static-y stratospheric dis-chords that shatter and whir upon terrestrial re-entry.

At the center of the maelstrom are the distorted voice, feedback flute, and mutant trombone of Loren Means. You might recall Loren's playing from Henry Kaiser's Ice Death (Parachute 005). Loren's new brass sound is like nothing you've heard, a muffled foghorn to guide approaching aliens. Combining crescendo-ing and decrescendo-ing globs of sound with Martian voice and Theremin-like feedback, Loren's playing gives shapeless shape to Wiggwaum's edgy next-age noise music." - Henry Kuntz