|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
FTR 742LP
|
"Beautiful third LP helmed by multi-instrumentalist/tape manipulator, Brian Lucas. Following up on 2021's The Incandescent Switch (FTR 606LP) and 2022's The Air's Chrysalis Chime (FTR 675LP), Quartz Hive is a post-pandemic swirl of cloud sound based on the kind of music that makes all your inner walls melt like wax. Lucas has a wonderful way of creating clusters of texture that circle the room, slowly accreting bits of lovely ambient sound that transform themselves from vague suggestions into full-blown songs without adhering to any logic other than their own. Some of the players colluding here are Old Million Eye vets, like Steven R. Smith, Sheila Bosco, and Kevin Van Yserloo. But there are many new heads on the scene as well, like harpist Ceylan Hay (Bell Lungs) and saxophonist Zekarias Thompson (Agnes Martian), who adds a distinct Canterbury flavor to the tunes on which he plays. Like Lucas's other current outfits, like 43 Odes and Dire Wolves, Old Million Eye makes psychedelic music that glides through your head with startling originality. There's very little here that hews to stereotypical psych formulae, but its tendrils still manage to engage all your dream receptors with delicate power and grace. Music as deep as any tab in any ocean. Quarts Hive is a sonic delivery vehicle of singular beauty. Gorgeous stuff." --Byron Coley, 2024
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
FTR 675LP
|
The Air's Chrysalis Chime is the second LP from Old Million Eye, primarily a solo project of Brian Lucas. This beautifully transcendent and deeply explorational album sees Lucas widening his spectral and woozy palette to include musical contributions from Gayle Brogan (Pefkin/Burd Ellen), Steven R. Smith, Sheila Bosco (Dire Wolves), and Jeff Jefferson (3 Moons/The Lodestones). The album's darker more drifting songs, "Ruby River" and "Tales from Copperopolis" feature the vibrational voice of Georgia Carbone, erstwhile vocalist of Dire Wolves. Lucas and Carbone's eerie vocal duet on the lengthy "Ruby River" is stunningly haunting and unexpected. This mysteriously anomalous album utilizes such elements as tape collage, improv jazz type drumming, clarinet, Brogan's melodica, intertwining basses, piano, treated violin, and Lucas's Scenes from the South Island-like plaintive skeletal guitar playing that is sure to tickle the ear into quiet hysterics, if not downright rearranging the ear to accommodate a new form of hearing. The listener should expect the usually oddly crafted and layered sound combinations as evidenced on previous OME releases. These sonic elements are a vehicle for Lucas's softly placid tenor, but with added dimensions his purely solo work only alludes to. This album isn't "psychedelic" in the sense of spacey, wah-wah riffs: it's far more subtle, detailed, and delicate in terms of its transcendent properties, but the invitation is there to climb into the chrysalis and be transformed.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
FTR 606LP
|
"First LP, after several fine cassettes & CDRs, by this psych project helmed by Brian Lucas. Lucas is best known these days for his bass work with Dire Wolves Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band, but he has a hand in many other California psych outfits. The Wolves have been quiet vis-a-vis new recordings lately, but Old Million Eye has been pretty busy. Often the OME moniker represents solo work, but this time Brian has recruited Dena Goldsmith-Stanley (3 Moons) and Steven R Smith (an old band mate from Mirza) to assist with his journey. And the results are beautiful. The most basic elements of The Incandescent Switch are swirls of kosmiche keyboard, with vocals buried in the clouds, melodic bass lines moving through like slow-motion lightning, and various instrumental events darting hither and yon. The overall feel is something like a collision between a mid '70s album on the German Sky label and a '68 Bay Area acid-flash sensibility. The one track featuring both Goldsmith-Stanley and Smith, 'I Labour Upwards into Futurity,' is especially neat. The dynamic shifts between the three players give it an organic, interactive breath-shape that really makes me want to see them work together in a live setting. But even when he's working alone, handling guitars, percussion and who knows what else, Lucas creates fully inhabited dreamscapes of sound. I, for one, cannot wait to trip while spinning The Incandescent Switch. It seems like a very winning combination." --Byron Coley, 2021
|