***BLANCHE BLANCHE BLANCHE are ZACH PHILLIPS and SARAH SMITH, non idiomatic lyricists and chief practitioners of the OSR label’s backronym namesake, “Open Session Rock”. This is BBB’s ninth album after releases on NNA, Night People, Feeding Tube, La Station Radar, Adagio830, Wharf Cat and OSR. Initially conceived as a collaborative double album premised on a methodologically extreme tracking and mixing process, Hints To Pilgrims ultimately turned out to be a collection of concise, contrived novelties, and the doubly-damned possibility to either challenge or serve the zeitgeist’s internalized expectations, it’s an album of BBB’s purest collaborative writing and stands as the most straightforward expression of their (our) modus operandi. Instrumentally, Hints To Pilgrims’ arrangements are typically either limited to piano and bass or guitar and bass. The hyped Beat-lyric “punk” songs are missing drums. The psychedelic “ballads” are missing the traditional array of effects augmentation. No synthesizer, computer processing or outboard effects were necessary to serve these songs and preserve their identities. Included as a cipher for the album is a tonally and rhythmically exact cover of Syd Barrett’s “Let’s Split” from his final collected album, Opel. Recorded to tape in Brooklyn, NY, Hints to Pilgrims was mastered for vinyl by independent music hero Kramer in Miami. The album art is a still life painted by Brooklyn-via-Montana portrait artist Alexis Graman, himself a soul marked by the unresolved interval between his activities and the available frames of reference for those activities; the art stretches from one side of the LP to the other.