Though a core duo made up of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinley, Starving Weirdos ultimately employ a loose collective of ragtag folks while tripping the light fantastic from the studio ashram of their Northern Californian locale. Free radicals inventing fringe music that tears at the budded sprig of psychedelia, ambient lunarscapes, pastoral jamming, and all manners of categories opaque, invisible and otherwise, the Weirdos do make one brave noise, the kind of unabashedly declarative noise that was a staple of the 60s underground and has found its descendant amongst a similarly inclined experimental hinterland.
Father Guru is just one more piece in an ever-expanding puzzle that is the Weirdos universe, etched out across a broad matrix of grass-roots imprints docked across CD and CD-R alike—good for us that the folks at Azul Discografica grok the Weirdos’ kaleidoscopic versatility. As the epic “Cypress Groves” unfolds, its lattice of discretely placed keyboard arias rising in pitch amongst a dimpled forest of sparkling music box chimes, the well-attenuated ear realizes that it is witnessing nothing less than the birth of an Anglo kosmische music for the millennium. While the sounds patiently, gradually soar out of the starshine, it’s as if you’re caught in the wake of titanic ships passing each other in the inky blackness; there’s the feeling of something vast, something gargantuan, approaching out of spiraling nebulae, deeply resonant sonic vibrations that instill a strangely calming yet palpable awe. “Trancin’” adopts a wholly different tactic, its’ densely struck guitar storms suggesting a defanged Glenn Branca conducting his multi-string symphonies under the fug of clandestine hallucinogens—as the tones decay, they appear to melt into the studio’s very walls. Finally, the closer “Mist-Shrouded World Pt. 2” recovers the previous track’s throbbing ache, burying it below interstellar feedback, periodic darkside Moog quivers, and myriad thwacked percussion, the sounds of a universe on the verge of collapse. If this indeed is who represents what some have tagged the “new weird America,” watch out: here come the evolving cosmic couriers, surfing on waves of sine, bluster and brio, preparing those unaware for close encounters of the next kind.
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