The first new studio recordings from Pelt in three years picks up where 2005's Untitled CD leaves off--delivering massive slabs of heavy, all-acoustic drone action. "Waning Crescent" is an ominous workout for three large gongs, rich with overtones and subsonic rumble. "Fire Signs Along the Field" offers a slightly jarring quartet of spare string noise, with Nathan Bowles (Black Twigs, Spiral Joy Band) sitting in on double bass. "Cast Out to Deep Waters" is an immense 30-minute epic in the vein of Empty Bell Ringing in the Sky and Untitled's "I" that fits into the archetypical classics in the Pelt canon. The all-too-brief "Crown of Comets" closes the CD with the chiming, overlapping ring of bells recorded in Virginia's Falls Ridge caves.
CD $12.00
06/24/2008
MP3 $9.90
06/24/2008
Now available to all, a new pressing of the extremely limited edition live CD previously attainable only on the band’s 2006 European tour. Contrary to the Grateful Dead reference in the title, Skullfuck is a tight recording of a single, intense November 2005 performance from NYC’s Knitting Factory. The set begins with an epic group arrangement of Jack Rose’s “Calais To Dover,” with Rose’s 12-string shadowed by Mike Gangloff’s fiddle, and the thick drone of Mikel Dimmick and Pat Best’s harmonium and srutis. The three-part “Bestio” suite follows, with the group moving to Tibetan bowls and gongs, building up a huge sheet of sound which peaks in a brief “encore” of wild gong smashing. This new edition is packaged in a gatefold “eco-wallet” with cover art designed by fabric and fiber-artist Emily Keown.
CD $12.00
05/09/2006
MP3 $9.90
05/09/2006
*** (untitled) is devastating set of almost pure white light from the newly upgraded Pelt lineup. The album’s intense drone music represents a return to “sonic-ism” for the quartet of Jack Rose, Mike Gangloff, Patrick Best, and Mikel Dimmick. Like 2003’s effort Pearls from the River, (untitled) is an all-acoustic affair. The group concentrates on producing dense clouds of overtones from guitar, cello, tibetan bowls, gongs, sruti, and esraj. Track one is an overpowering straight line à la the Theatre of Eternal Music, an atmosphere of stasis with gong and bowl flickering subtly over the massive track bed. Track two is a 32-minute epic that begins with the soft strains of Jack Rose’s 12 string, picks up dueling cello and esraj and gradually builds in intensity with the sounds of gongs and other unusual percussion. Track three is the live staple “Sundogs,” where Rose’s Weissenborn lap guitar and Gangloff’s resonator guitar produce a stream of unearthly high, singing overtones in an uncanny acoustic impression of electric feedback. The final track is an epilogue of Best’s keening cello, again ignoring the usual technique associated with the instrument in the pursuit of pure weirdness.
CD $12.00
07/19/2005
MP3 $9.90
07/19/2005
***Containing much-anticipated new music from these brainiacs—basically obliterating their other records with their most all out ultra-sound radiata yet—Empty Bell Ringing In The Sky includes a 12-minute surprise collaboration with Drunken Fish recording artists the rhband, Pelt's complete 35-minute set at Terrastock II (nominated by many, including yours truly, as the highlight of the entire festival and nicknamed "The Hillbilly Theater of Eternal Music"), a magically resonating 17-minute slice from a typical East Coast warehouse hippie party, and finally, a new 18-minute home recording, heavy on the Tibetan Bowls. The live recordings are all of the digital variety and finally capture Pelt's forceful and multi-layered live sound accurately. A live sound which blows the brains out of just about any other bliss, psychedelic or drift musics out there.
CD $12.00
06/01/2004
2XLP $12.00
06/01/2004
MP3 $9.90
06/01/2004
VHF presents the first time on vinyl for Pearls From The River, the all acoustic epics album from the “classic” Pelt trio lineup of Jack Rose, Mike Gangloff, and Patrick Best. Recorded in a single March 2003 session in Virginia by Mikel Dimmick, this was a superb distillation of their interests at the time (both alone and together—Rose’s first solo records, the emergence of the Black Twigs as a busy working band, etc). “Up the North Fork” is a trio for banjo, baritone banjo, and cello—after the snakey bowed introduction, the fast thwacking of the banjos and forcefully strummed cello take over and whip up a storm. The other two tracks are lengthy ragas (one in C, one in D) with the virtuoso modal guitar of Rose front and center. The title track features Rose on twelve-string, dueling with Mike Gangloff on esraj. Best’s thick, sonorous double-bass bowing anchors the duet between the lightning thrumming / plucking of Rose’s guitar and Gangloff’s arcing, sharply bowed half-time melody. “Road To Catawba” has Rose on six-string, with Gangloff moving to tamboura. Best’s bass is again the foundation, with whistling overtones rising from his bow over the low drone. Liner notes by Byron Coley. “Join Pelt in celebrating the ecstatic joy that results from refusing to accept the alleged primacy of shit-culture. It does not exist if we will not believe in it. And we must refuse it on all levels always. The proof of its surrender is at hand. Yr hand....
LP $19.00
08/16/2019
CD $12.00
10/14/2003
MP3 $7.99
10/14/2003
Pelt's mix of traditional (acoustic instruments, folk and ethnic music) and contemporary (about one million super-weird noise and avant garde records) reaches a new peak on their latest full-length CD pronounced "Teyhood." Using tamboura, guitar, violin, tabla, banjo, flute, lap steel, oscillator, voice, organ and a variety of other instruments both conventional and homemade, Pelt issue forth a massive and extraordinary gust of sound. Recorded both at home and live in Washington, D.C., it's a sound extravaganza complete with Indian inspired modal trance, wall-of-sound layered melodica, and tape-loop exotica in the vein of compositional explorers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich.
CD $12.00
01/08/2001
MP3 $9.90
01/08/2001
***Surprise and sudden release of this previously unplanned live CD, hand-selected by west-coast mystic ROB VAUGHN, just in time for PELT's summer 2000 tour. Recorded in New Orleans and Austin on the band's monumental spring 1998 tour (which yielded their masterpiece Empty Bell Ringing In The Sky), Rob's Choice gives you a listen to two nearly complete performances, both superb expressions of the band's higher-ground drone-myth expansion and contraction, uh, that is to say it wails, and who doesn't love that Lowrey tube organ? Plus, there's the very special addition of TOM CARTER (CHARALAMBIDES) on sax and time-lag accumulator on the Austin performance. This thing was supposed to be a CDR, but it's too good, and who has time to burn all of those CDRs anyway? Three tracks, sixty-five minutes. Edition of 500.
CD $12.00
08/08/2000
MP3 $9.90
08/08/2000
FLAC $11.99
08/08/2000