Here’s a gem released earlier this year that we neglected to share with our beloved Roadburn readers. Please excuse the oversight! Blame it on festival fever… Praise for Magdalena Solis‘ Hesperia from San Francisco’s aQuarius Records: The sound of Magdalena Solis hovers somewhere between psychedelic space rock and kosmische krautdrone, which means it’s pretty much EXACTLY what we love: Hazy, washed out drifts of dense distorted wah wah guitars, swirling FX, Eastern melodies, hushed angelic female vox, minimal drums, most of the tracks, pulsing and drifting and shimmering, and when there are drums, it’s more sort of a blissed out, percussion laced spacedronedrift.
Take ‘Seven Boys And Seven Girls’ the drums a simple motorik pulse, the main melody looped and cyclical, the whole thing wrapped in effects-heavy swirls of distorted synth and psych guitar buzz, the sound building to a seriously blown out cacophony, only to settle right back down again, leading into the comparatively contemplative ‘Cities Crumbling Planets Growing’. A sitar soaked stretched of billowy low end, and distant sci-fi squiggle, barely there guitars slowly build into something, thick and fierce and spaced out and dreamily distorted.
The whole record is a series of smoldering slow build space drone epics, heavily layered landscapes of swirling synths, wheezing organs, skittery percussion, lush warm sonic swells, all wreathed in thick swaths of serious psych guitar. The sound constantly shifting from tranquil and dreamlike, to blown out and druggy / droney and way tripped out, heady and hypnotic and easily some of the best kaleidoscopic kosmische space / drone / psych we’ve heard.
Most definitely recommended for fans of White Hills, Grails, the Alps, Expo 70, Gnod, Carlton Melton, Bong, Lumerians, White Noise Sound, Spacemen 3 and other droney, druggy psychedelic drifters…
At 40 years old, Aquarius is the oldest independent record store in San Francisco. We try to only carry music we love, and we’re always searching for more new, cool, weird and wonderful music. All of which we then share with you, our loyal customers.
Tags: Aquarius Records, Dying For Bad Music, Hesperia, Magdalena Solis, psychedelica
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 14th, 2011 at 9:54 am and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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