♫♪  Katrina Stonehart - Katrina Stonehart (excerpt)

Chicago by-way-of-seemingly-everywhere-else resident Drew Gibson has always had a way of achieving a height of sound greater than the bedroom pop ceiling. Like tracking the path of guitar cords through the mountain of effect pedals and still finding yourself baffled by the sheer weight of sound coming out of the speakers. It’s a mystery that’s carried him through four Katrina Stonehart cassettes on the Lillerne Tapes label alone, in addition to a wealth of other solo material and his work with the always excellent Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk trio.

Nearly two years after its initial release, Gibson’s self-titled fourth tape on Lillerne as Katrina Stonehart is seeing a welcome re-release. Often referred to as the “Gumby” tape (see: cover art) each of the tape’s sides stretches near-shoegaze tendencies into unrecognizable shapes as they approach the boundaries of unexplored noise; the gentle, buried strum of an acoustic guitar the only guiding light through the previously uncharted territory. This time around, the release is accompanied by an appropriately eerie video directed by Kyle Drouin which follows an excerpt from the untracked B-side of the tape through a kind of psychedelic urban swamp, not unlike the Evil Dead creature-cam filming B-roll of the blown LSD trip near the end of Easy Rider.

Katrina Stonehart is available from Lillerne Tapes now in an edition of only 75, and a few friends and I have already called dibs on some of them, so it’s probably more like 68 at this point. Time’s a-wastin’ grinders!

• Katrina Stonehart: http://katrinastonehart.bandcamp.com
• Lillerne Tapes: http://www.lillernetapes.com

Chocolate Grinder

CHOCOLATE GRINDER is our audio/visual section, with an emphasis on the lesser heard and lesser known. We aim to dig deep, but we’ll post any song or video we find interesting, big or small.

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