Birchville Cat Motel and A.M. (aka Antony Milton) toured together in 2006, and at some point decided to record a few eternal drones together in a studio in Japan. Being ahead of the drone curve as they were (you didn’t see it everywhere until a few years later) it’s amazing how current this tasty lathe-cut LP sounds. Campbell Kneale, Milton, and Kiyoharu Kuwayama achieved a sacred space that oddly seems perfectly suited for the lathe format because there’s no NOT hearing the performance, no matter how much a bit of hiss might obscure it. Soft melodic detritus and deep, uneasy tones gel handily with furious bouts of cello and bowed-guitar, and… frankly I’m not at liberty to tell you exactly what they do to get those shrieking-donkey/rubber-duckie noises, nor those electric crackles (though I’m guessing a guitar input jack might have played a role?), nor a lot of other things I can’t identify. The proceedings get seriously evil about 1/4 through the flip, almost like a Crucial Blast CD-R-only release or Ultramarine cassette. Jesus, the girth of the drone groove is massive throughout, but this nightmare doom on Side B is deeper than a water well; CKAMKK burrows into the skull like a right-angle drill, with ‘CK,’ ‘AM,’ and ‘KK’ killing it on all cylinders. I have a thing for lathe-cuts so, you know, I uh, appreciate that such a great long-running enterprise like PseudoArcana is putting so many out (stay tuned for more on those, including a record by Keijo and 7-inch by Samin Sun; speaking of which, a record I won’t be able to Cerb about, Pororari River Mouth by Paintings Of Windows, also on Pseu-Arc, is fucking brilliant; A.M. strikes again!), though… Sixty copies? That’s not enough, you ragamuffins! Yet it’s somehow appropriate that only five-dozen of us will get to feel what I’m feeling right now.
More about: Campbell Kneale / Antony Milton / Kiyoharu Kuwayama
