Bronze

Bronze

Absolute Compliance

Castle Face

The folks at Castle Face dig a good trance. Hypnosis, mesmerization, and brain trickery are some of their favorite results of deep listening and it is a suggestive, ritualistic and dreamlike vibe that Bronze ooze like pheromones all over their excellent new record. Absolute Compliance is a truly hypnogogic group of tunes from Bronze on their best and weirdest behavior and it hits all Castle Face’s favorite things about them immediately and repeatedly: insistently strange synth voicings emanating from Miles Friction’s mad scientist’s lab worth of equipment, controlled by a homemade-looking oversized knob; Brian Hock’s throbbing, woolly, hall-of-mirror grooves; and above it all Rob Spector’s thousand yard croon, the vaguely familiar touchstone amongst these Lynchian, mutated surroundings—these are songs of dreams and nightmares, hidden rituals observed, futuristic coliseum entertainments displaced in time, sci-fi jams of an uncertain future. Bronze are one-of-a kind great and if unfamiliar, go find their other records (including their great live record for Castle Face) and get caught up. They are real-deal weirdo kings of San Francisco and their spell is not easily dissipated once cast.

Bronze

Live In San Francisco

Castle Face

“For nine years they have been slowly simmering in a pot. For nine years I have been seeing them usurp every bill they have been on. I’ve never seen a bad Bronze show…they range from smiling and hypnotized dancing crowds to a man getting violated and urinated on at a yuppie bar (everyone still smiling). “Always the entertainers, always drunk with mad skills; with dashes of John Carpenter, Silver Apples, Liquid Liquid, Birthday Party, Harold Grosskopf, Klaus Schultze, Cluster, and Brian Ferry with a field recorder taped to his tux jacket. Ultra bottom heavy dance beats à la Brian Hock (shirt off / shirt on, it’s all good to me), super hand-wringing oscillations home brewed by Miles Friction and the ever-great Robert Spector delivering homilies from beyond the dimensional wall.  “They bought a limousine to tour in (which may be the raddest fucking thing I’ve ever heard of), but it’s been parked in the bat cave under a car cocoon like San Francisco’s best kept secret. These guys should be on tour, eaten alive every night by ravenous fanatics—but alas, they are like a rare treat these days. So, we’ve waited outside the bivouac for the flap to lift, and after many nights and cold rations they appeared and performed the great and fabled Bronze happening for us to trap to tape. A mix of absolute old faves and new gears grinding; a great night indeed, recorded and mixed by the Castle Face crew, adorned with photos of the...

Bronze

In Stone

Not Not Fun

Few bands perplex like San Fran riddler trio Bronze but ever fewer have managed to hatch and hone such an obliquely singular sound. The group’s third long-player, In Stone, twists and burns through eight new iterations of their classic oscillator-fusion psychedelia, inflected with shades of post-punk raga, skronk lurch, modal incantantion, deep space narcosis, lizard kingmanship, and home-wired industrial dementia. As an album, these recordings skew tenser, twitchier, a touch paranoiac, bloodshot tweakers stalking steep foggy streets. The alchemy of drummer Brian Hock, vocalist Rob Spector, and electronicist Miles Friction is always riveting in the live sphere but In Stone feels like more of a studio document, exploratory and expressionistic, full of ideas and psychic interplay. Bay Area burnout rendered as psychotropic sculptural waveforms. Confusion isn’t sex, it’s something stranger. Black tapes mastered by Ruud 66 with J-cards designed by the band. Vinyl edition on B.F.E. Records.

Bronze

World Arena

Not Not Fun

The West Coast’s weirdest hidden-treasure trio, Bronze, has plied their molten composite of serpentine metro-gnomic drumming, oscillator raga, hash-oil free verse, and pendulum bass patterns for seven shaded years, but sonic documentation remains sparse. The new decade, thankfully, has seen them reversing this deficit, first with 2011’s Copper LP, and now with World Arena, which unfolds another octagon’s worth of their signature spellbound, smoke-ringed, psych-fusion explorations.  Tracked at their Trojan Cavern studio / bunker in San Francisco and mastered in Amsterdam by Ruud Lekx, the record freewheels from tranced, polyrhythmic sequencer meditations (“Played,” “Quality”) to burnt chrome post-punk electronic experiments (“Almost”) to jazzy, decadent mystery rituals (“Dulcinea,” “Golden Handcuffs”). The way they weld home-wired circuitry modulation with lofty poetics and intuitive, live-band dynamics feels finessed and fully-formed—and unusually liberated in today’s world-gone-solo landscape. Live, they’re even more baffling, seesawing from fluid, fog-machine narratives to mesmerizing electro-modal jams, owning all zones. Future intercontinental tours should further bolster their standing in metallic arts communities. The Bronze Age is dawning.