Herbcraft

Herbcraft

Wot Oz

Woodsist

Across four LPs, Herbcraft’s trajectory has taken the form of an open-ended and perpetual trip, covering ground from the pining bedroom odes of Agartha to the psychedelic living room services of Ashram, to the full-band barn hoots of 2013’s The Astral Body Electric. On its fourth album, Wot Oz, the band undergoes another bold reinvention, shifting its locale to the Traummaschine A/B warehouse, where Matt Lajoie met with drummer Aaron Neveu and bassist / organist Joe Lindsey for the trio’s first-ever rehearsal in July 2013. The practice was intended simply as a warm-up for a live gig, but surveillance tape began rolling almost immediately, as the group’s chemistry imbued both abstract sound experiments and primitive rock- and blues-based numbers with the same heady waft of freewheeling possibility.  The needle touches down on a slice of this initial meeting: “Fit Ür-Head” lands at the feral, pummeling nexus of proto- and post-punk; a live-to-tape two-chord gob of lung-tar spat inches from a flea market snakeskin, while voices howl and wah guitar razes every inch of green. From this auspicious birth the album moves through the afterhours narco-haze of “Au’s Nation” to the Zamrock-inspired groove of “Push Thru the Veil,” with Neveu rolling off an endless stream of future-classic break-beats throughout. On the flip, “No More Doors” finds a sunbaked cassette of tabla-and-bass loops melting as the band abandons Earth for hallucinogenic oblivion, and the album’s closing 12-bar blues deconsecration “Bread Don’t Rise” spins a circular framework into a sweaty Fillmore dancefloor-filler...

Herbcraft

Astral Body Electric

Woodsist

Three years on from the initial Herbcraft blurt, The Astral Body Electric sees the sonic seeds sown in previous wax transmissions blossom in full. Once the isolationist bedroom-psych project of Matt Lajoie, Herbcraft has in recent years sprawled out in many different full-band incarnations—duo, trio, quartet, sextet—for tours and heady super-sessions at their HQ in Maine. Their third album finds the most enduring lineup of the band at its peak: songs half-composed, half-improvised, and played with freewheeling first-take intensity.  Recorded direct to tape by Doug Tuttle (Mmoss) in an 18th-century New England barn, The Astral Body Electric captures the Herbcraft soundworld in its most-natural habitat by focusing on analog recording techniques (spring reverb, tape delay, hands-on flange). Lajoie’s unhinged electric guitar swirls around Dawn Aquarius’s wah’ed organ riffs, Nicholas Barker’s kosmische-inspired drums and synth, and Corinna Marshall’s trilled-out flute and circular bass, complete with nebulous group vocals and auxiliary support from Doug and Aaron Neveu (Woods). “Aurally massaged” into the 4th dimension by Matt “MV” Valentine via his signature “Spectrasound” mastering technique, The Astral Body Electric is psychedelic, mantric, free-rock music for the mind and body, and the most expansive, fully-realized, and confident Herbcraft record yet.  “... stunning navigation of druggy Matthew Valentine / Spectrasound-styled psychedelic folk, with a thick smoke of F/X masking some fantastic rural rock that at points sounds like a ’90s underground take on Skip Spence’s Oar or a Dead bootleg on Majora. Either way this is a solid winner.” —David Keenan, Volcanic Tongue...

Herbcraft

Ashram To The Stars

Hello Sunshine / Woodsist

“One of the most gifted abstract sonic pilots from the Vacationland stable, Portland, Maine, artist Matt Lajoie enjoys a larger-than-Sasquatch reputation for his free folk personality and unpredictable takes on Spectrasound techniques. Although he and his merry band are one of the most charismatic tribes of the New England underground—you gotta see them live—they blossom from psychedelic occurrences that lead to bursts of pacifist oblivion which can only be redeemed inside their studio output. The momentum Lajoie deploys in his polar expressions indicates a supply of time-manipulated balance. An accretion of bucket brigades warping wildly at first breath, generally considered a condition of primitivism, this is searchlight abandonment with purely spirited jams more akin to the tapers pit than slam continuance. In fact, the only thing slammed here (other than the muted poetry echoing like buoys in Golowin’s harbor) are the ‘in the red’ meters on fire signs from fire music providing ease with earth, wind and air. Long may we inhale. “This is a heady atmosphere, an atmosphere for heads, and it not only delivers the contempo dreamlike aspect at the apex of its form, but transcends it to those revolving with them. Take this fucker for a spin.” —Matt Valentine, Vermont, 2011   “... stunning navigation of druggy Matthew Valentine / Spectrasound-styled psychedelic folk, with a thick smoke of F/X masking some fantastic rural rock that at points sounds like a ’90s underground take on Skip Spence’s Oar or a Dead bootleg on Majora. Either way this...

Herbcraft

Discovers The Bitter World Of Agartha

Hello Sunshine / Woodsist

***December 2009: Days after returning to Maine following three heavy months on the road, Blows Against the Empire in one hand, Admiral Richard Byrd's secret diary in the other, Matthew Lajoie (Cursillistas) awoke one morning having dreamt the existence of a lost 1973 concept record about the exploration of inner Earth and the advanced civilization thriving at its center--Agartha, the domain of the Arianni. Using Byrd's account as the thematic framework for the album, he feverishly poured forth a representation of the imagined record, writing and recording the entire LP in a single 24-hour period--guided by sonic Ouija. The result is a cosmic antenna with dials tuned to the Planet Earth Rock 'n' Roll Orchestra, obscure psych-prog spacecasts, and classic rock radio, all refracted through the dusty, cracked and scratched Cursillistas prism. Performed entirely on a borrowed thrift store electric guitar and broken microphone, Herbcraft Discovers the Bitter Water of Agartha was birthed in the Now to scatter the seeds of Agartha's message in our Aquarian Dark Age. Limited to 500 copies.