If you fall, Inc Inc Inc will catch you. Incantation is fluid: a coursing drone flowing from your speakers, pouring into an aural third eye, an analog to a sumptuous inner light, a sunsoaked river down which you drift from one piece to the next. The more concrete sections of the album showcase canticle grids woven out of Strat-wrought arpeggios, punctuated and colored by violin and cello lines that range from the transient to the sonorous, each trill or pizzicato carefully placed, slapback often left out to soak. The pacing is not dissimilar from clouds drifting on a rather low-pressure afternoon, maybe 12 hours ahead or behind where Stars of the Lid usually operated, depending on what side of the planet you’re on. It’s a very consonant affair and it makes staying in reality an utterly intractable proposition; I don’t think 20/20 has put out something so assertively transporting since Dave Heumann’s Cloud Hands and I haven’t been this apeshit about a Baltimore band since Smoke Bellow.
In this liminal hour, when the great star has dropped behind the great curve of our only planet, when the mind ceases to sense the motion, when a stillness comes upon us, when the dust never quite settles in the breeze but rather sparkles in the headlight’s glow as the miles tick up skyward, when in this sigh of dusk it dawns upon us that this swath of highway will soon lead us into a leafy mansion of snakes wherein a thousand times a thousand copperheads wind through the swales and atop the aching levy, shaking their tails as if they could rattle but we pay it no mind as we burn this sacrifice of ancient carbon, the waning candle of our age. And what plays as our stash of snacks and cigarettes subsides? Regal Johnson.
DRUMS OF LIFE IS OUT TODAY.
Happy Bandcamp Friday! Drums of Life’s Live at Metro Baltimore CD is out today. This is the April 2024 concert at @metro_baltimore featuring the core trio of drummers Lowry/Bergander/Kuhl along with several other heavy hitters, those who’ve been making this community scream and shout for decades now, gliding through a tunnel of improvised bliss. Lovingly mixed by Jason Willett across dozens of sunrises. Liner notes by @deeleegee
#bandcampfriday
DRUMS OF LIFE - taking preorders now!
...and here we see the crest, the collective mind slamming stretched skins into a hot froth, shaking the very earth, to rarify the very air we breathed in the Metro gallery in the warm relief and possibility of that evening in the spring of ‘24. Strohmeier’s Farfisa could drag the sea, Dave Heumann’s guitar like droplets off coniferous branches, Ami Dang’s sitar taut and sinewy, the sleek and wild heads of Jason and Katrina in some manner of devotional focus, and Dierker wailing away as if he could scare a Nor’easter back into the Atlantic and spare the good people of Nantucket. These are lives navigated together, in various levels of familiarity of course, but they share these low streets and a common high path. This album comes on slowly and pulls you under with the mercy of some Potomac undertow. I usually release 20/20 stuff just because but, to me, this album documents something more than a totally rad hour of improvised music: the long road, the laughs, the ardor and play.
Viennetta is thrilled to announce that we are releasing our debut EP with 20/20 Records (@2020steve ) on September 5th!
“Since 2014, 20/20 has been documenting music both strange and sublime — mostly from our home city of Baltimore, and often from beyond. They liked us in The Wire, they liked us in Cassette Gods. We’re nearing one hundred proper releases — you’ll know when we hit the centennial.”
Viennetta (@viennetta_the_band ) is a Brooklyn-based art punk trio. Sometimes earnest, sometimes tragically comedic, always deeply relatable scenes are played out through songs that tonally fit on that mixtape you made with ESG, Dead Milkmen, Vaselines and Joy Division on it.
Engineered and mixed by @chris.pace2020 at Smoke and Mirrors Elizaville
Photo 1: @mcboingboing
Photo 2: @chris.pace2020
It’s out. Today’s the day. Greenie, in which Friday Junior transcends the basement pop of Fear Said Admit It and explodes the songs outward from the center, digging deeper, hurtling towards post-hardcore, reaching from anguish into some manner of catharsis. Through faith even the tragic can be put into perspective. This one’s a major step forward in size and scope, a band finding its own reach, an achievement in all manners creative and technical
Baltimore!
Join us at Wax Atlas @instawaxatlas
on Thursday April 17
with @ponythomstevedrone and @mang_rope ⚡
We will have our *Tears of Resilience* vinyls on us 🪬
Record shop open till 6 pm , music starts at 830❤️🔥
$10 at the door 🧞♂️
All Ages 🫂
#digitalsufi #experimental #avantgarde #farawayghost #sunkencages #ponythomstevedrone #mangrope
#waxatlas #recordshop #LP #baltimore
4/17/25 LIVE AT @instawaxatlas (Baltimore,MD)
Farawayghost X @sunkencages (ZELZELEH زلزله)
"Sufi Digital"
we will have our "Ashk haye Moghavemat" records with us
@ponythomstevedrone
"Experimental drone"
@mang_rope
"Art grunge"
Music: 8:30 PM
$10 at the door
All Ages
It will be a wicked night! Not to be missed.
This show is really good for anyone who is suffering from "spiritutitos" which is the disease of having deflated soul
We will give you energy you need ⚡
#baltimore #livemusic #recordshop #waxatlas #zelzeleh #ptsd #rope #spiritual #electronic #sufi #experimental #grunge
@thejesuslizardofficial at the Black Cat. There’s something gentle about the way they play. Precision often sounds studied, contrived. But their music is like unspun silk: yards long, capable of vanishing into something else entirely, unbreakably strong. They include dreamy states with long grooves in long time, Yow will spit onstage to allow the listener to fall into it, lulled into a dull ache punctuated by Dennison’s snapping and sharding, breaking their own creation in moments of satisfaction so crisp and sudden. They wind you up and pull out the rug, they nowhere to be found and your first inkling of their presence is Yow breathing down your neck. I don’t feel “rocked”. I’m on the DC metro and everything feels like a dream. They induce joy, elation, some internal state that spins back out to sonder, a satisfaction that only opens to more curiosity. They still have it. They’ve got more of it. They could loan your band some.
