Bandcamp’s outer limits continue to be a rewarding place for psychedelia, experimental club music, noise, vaporwave, and other sounds that are wholly uncategorizable. In each edition of Acid Test, Miles Bowe explores its far reaches to dig up hidden gems and obscure oddities. This August, we explore a searing free jazz duo, an unearthed ‘80s planetarium concert, and a brilliant album from earlier this year—now compressed into a pair of unrecognizable dance tracks.
Austyn Wohlers
Bodymelt In The Garden Of Death
Cassette
On the stunning Bodymelt In The Garden of Death, Austyn Wohlers conjures a series of moving soundscapes. Opening tracks “Grasshopper Heaven” and “An Angel’s Emerald Wing” layer electronic drones and chirping field recordings to form an atmosphere as lush and as still as a garden at night—before a blast of heavy synths come crashing like a meteor shower. Tracks like “Preagricultural Summer” and “How Heavy The Slow World” are filled with noise and haze that gradually brightens them, bringing to mind the equally grim and tender folk duo Natural Snow Buildings. It all makes Bodymelt In The Garden of Death a haunting, heartrending highlight of the late summer.
Shelter Music
Sky
Compact Disc (CD)
Sky by the quintet Shelter Music captures a mercurial series of improvised recordings that never stay still. The album begins with four sprawling untitled pieces that merge spectral electronics and guitar noise, prickling contact mics and drifting saxophones. It’s not until the fifth track, “Workshop Celebration,” that Shelter Music turns towards shorter, more kinetic pieces. “Cobb Hut Summer Music” rides bubbling synthesizers and percussive rumbling before splitting open into a rush of water recordings, while “Song Network” and “Yurt Experience, Morning in Quilcene” let brief murmurs of dialogue peek through. It makes for an album that never seems to stop unfolding, while still remaining deeply mysterious throughout.
Marshall Trammell / Rob McGill Duo
Fire Falling From The Sky
Compact Disc (CD)
Percussionist Marshall Trammell and saxophonist Rob McGill collect two kinetic improvised performances on Fire Falling From The Sky. “The Deader, The Better” kicks off a 28-minute free jazz odyssey with absolute fervor as McGill and Trammell deliver searing performances, each building the other up to a roaring peak before settling down like embers. “Close Cut” offers an excellent flip-side, blending Trammell’s hypnotic percussion with McGill’s performance on sheng, a traditional Chinese wind instrument that creates fluttering harmonies. With unpredictable percussion, shifts between sheng or sax, and one well-timed yell, it makes a perfect counterpoint.
Gregory T. S. Walker
Minstrels and Minimoogs
Vinyl LP
The latest album Freedom To Spend has plucked from obscurity, Minstrels and Minimoogs collects Gregory T. S. Walker’s compositions for a 1988 multimedia performance at the Fiske Planetarium in Boulder, Colorado. Across four tracks that weave atmospheric electronics, blaring synth melodies, and acid-drenched guitar work, Walker and his band create moments of total surprise—like the operatic peak of “All Fall Down” and the fiddle that cuts through the electronics on “Deus Ex Machina.” The performance goes out with a bang, too on “A New Medallion For Egypt,” a bright, almost New Wave-y closer that all these years later truly feels like lightning in a bottle.
Maral
Edits 2014-2019
Compact Disc (CD)
Maral has honed her utterly unique blend of dub, trippy noise, and traditional Iranian music across both DJ sets and albums like Push and Ground Groove. Her latest release, Edits 2014-2019, acts as a catalog of snippets, quick edits, and experiments that collided to form her breakthrough mixtape Mahur Club. It overflows with ideas—from Jersey club remixes of Iranian classical in “Ancient Avaz (Parvin Edit)” or the 13-second “Jooni” to the grungy slo-mo grooves of “Datsmybestfriend (Sludge Edit)” to an early appearance of the Push highlight “Sweet Thing.” As both a look into Maral’s creative process and a treasure chest for other DJs, Edits 2014-2019 makes for an extremely rewarding collection.
Vic Bang
Brass Woks
Earlier this year, bassist Martina Berther explored evocative drones and spacey electronics on her instrument with the excellent album Bass Works: As I Enter Into. With the playfully titled Brass Woks, producer Vicky Barca, aka Vic Bang, creates a particularly unique kind of remix—if you can call it that—by approaching Berther’s album in its entirety to craft two of her most sublime dance tracks. Berther’s initial album is transformed entirely by Barca, until it feels entirely like expansion of the prickly textures and jittery rhythms that run through the excellent Vic Bang full-lengths, Lira and Burung. As either an album compressed into a single or a single pulled apart into an album, they make a wonderful pairing.
Budokan Boys
Are You Sick?
Cassette
The duo Budokan Boys bring to mind Suicide, Throbbing Gristle, and The Residents’ God In Three Persons on their eerie and airy album Are You Sick? Jeff T Byrd and Michael Jeffrey Lee combine grim industrial percussion, buzzing electronics, and wisps of saxophone to form a backdrop for spoken-word deliveries that veer between the surreal, the funny, and the creepy. Opener “Kiss” builds a romantic encounter only to interrupt it with a coughing fit and paranoid speculation, while the supernatural meeting at the heart of “Demon” is framed like an unhinged breakup. Are You Sick? manages to both unsettle and deflate that unsettling feeling all at once while remaining an alluring listen throughout.
Brian Gibson
Thrasher
Vinyl LP
Brian Gibson’s Thrasher is an awe-inspiring continuation of both the Lightning Bolt bassist’s crushing, hypnotic music and his work as a video game developer of the wondrously hellish Thumper. This might be the most deliriously pretty music Gibson has ever composed. Highlights like “Magenta Machine” and “Mist” ride bright arpeggios that feel like they could ripple out endlessly, but remain tight and propulsive at every turn. There’s an entire video game element to Thrasher still to come, but Gibson’s music is a sensory overload worth appreciating all on its own.
