***BACK IN STOCK!!! Featuring two members of the most excellent PELT, THE SPIRAL JOY BAND swells forth from Blacksburg, Virginia, with a follow up to their album Wake of the Dying Sun King on VHF Records. This double LP set features recordings from two eras of the Spiral Joy Band. The first is from 2005, the second 2007. A cacophony of gongs, bowls, bells, chimes, electronics, fiddle, bowed cymbals, esraj, harmonium, sruti and electronics played by MIKEL DIMMIK, MICHAEL GANGLOFF, AMY SHEA and NATHAN BOWLES, along with a guest or two, here and there. Pleasure Is The Headlight features five tracks in total spread over four sides. The first three being long trance inducing meditations recorded in Blacksburg and Ironto. The fourth side features unique recordings, the first is a solo wind chime performance recorded in a gift shop, featuring the murmur of confused patrons and what is likely some truly wonderful AM radio piped in over the store's stereo system. The second track is a slow hazy day at the beach, with gongs, seagulls, and the gentle roar of the ocean. Pressed on 180-gram black vinyl and limited to about 400 copies, this album comes in a custom gatefold jacket with letter pressed cover art and silk screened inside art.
2XLP $26.85
06/08/2009
Little Sparrow is the third VHF release for this Southwestern Virginia ensemble that specializes in transportational sound sheets. Derived from the extended Pelt / Jack Rose / Black Twigs family, Spiral Joy Band traffics in lengthy microtonal explorations rooted in the expansive tradition of beards like Taj Mahal Travellers, Henry Flynt, Theatre of Eternal Music, etc. The four tracks here are an evolution from the trance-like gong and percussion sounds of recent Joy Band releases, with the quartet putting more of an emphasis on heavily bowed string sounds. Mike Gangloff's fiddle, which plays it relatively straight in the Black Twigs (and occasionally Pelt), cuts loose here with some of the gnarliest string scratching this side of Tony Conrad's Four Violins, giving the music a searing, visceral edge. The final track finds the band literally standing in the Atlantic Ocean, with their gongs and Tibetan bowls shimmering out a gentle lullaby. "No overdubs, no amplification, no effects." Little Sparrow has been printed in a very limited edition, with an elegant heavy card wallet featuring illustrations by Emily Keown.
CD $12.00
05/12/2009
MP3 $9.90
05/12/2009
Wake of the Dying Sun King is the second full-length of epic meditative drone from this Southwestern Virginia collective. Like Pelt (with whom it shares several members), Spiral Joy Band uses mostly acoustic instruments to create slow, building pieces rich with human detail. The steady rolling of multiple Tibetan bowls, bowed and struck gongs, hypnotic fiddle, sruti box, and other instruments are recorded live in continuous performances that frequently stretch beyond an hour per piece. The performance aspect is key to Spiral Joy Band’s aura - the variations in approach, force, etc. with which each tone is played, and the clear, open recording (mostly in Blacksburg’s Glade Baptist Church) highlight the subtleties of the music. Wake is a much more percussive set of music than Spiral Joy Band’s previous Lullabies for Jeff Dean CD (VHF#94), with Nathan Bowles’ expert percussion lending a lot more clang to the mix. Cover paintings by Emily Keown.
CD $12.00
09/18/2007
MP3 $9.90
09/18/2007
*** This long running but until-now-undocumented Virginia group was founded in 2001 by Pelt members Mikel Dimmick and Mike Gangloff with Karl Precoda (Last Days of May, The Dream Syndicate). Their debut CD concentrates on live performances featuring marathon, unorthodox drone treatises for acoustic instruments, including Tibetan singing bowl, gong, sruti, and esraj. The bowed, rolled, and (usually) gently struck metal percussion anchors the sound with rich, resonating tones. The music is a cousin to Pelt’s explorations on (Untitled), and Keyhole and Keyhole II (Eclipse). “Lullaby 1” is built almost entirely on the gongs and bowls, a slowly building narcoleptic trip. The forty-one-minute epic “Lullaby 2” begins with Gangloff on esraj, building up a trance before the shenais and sharply struck gongs take over at the climax of the piece. “Lullaby 3” throws some surprisingly melodic and active piano into the mix, evoking a long-form version of Popol Vuh’s “Die Nacht Der Seele.”
CD $12.00
11/08/2005
MP3 $0.00
11/08/2005