“Thoughts on prehistoric creatures? Fossils? Extinct species of cats?”
“I like futuristic magic. Lasers that turn anyone’s skin blue.”
“Cool, let’s start a band.”
Or something like that. Sean Lennon and Greg Saunier dreamed up an improvisational project a couple years back and opened for a Plastic Ono Band/Deerhoof show in San Francisco. They call themselves Mystical Weapons (a reference to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film Holy Mountain, not to the sword of Godric Gryffindor, as I sort of initially guessed).
For a while, Mystical Weapons played live shows based almost entirely on instant improvisation — they’d play along to animated films by Martha Colburn and bang out as much wacked-out explosion and crazy noise as they could. On January 15, they’re releasing their self-titled debut album via Chimera Music, and even though it’s not quite as aggressively off-the-wall as their previous work, it’s still a trip (through space, through a jungle filled with dinosaurs, through a city made of glass, wherever you want). They released “Mechanical Mammoth” as a free download over at Rolling Stone.
Mystical Weapons tracklist:
01. Impossible Shapes
02. Mechanical Mammoth
03. Silk Screen Eyes
04. Whispers fhe Blue Tongue
05. Dirty
06. Goddess Curlers
07. Hostile Takeover
08. Gilbert Releases His Pet Salamander into the Wild
09. Colony Collapse Disorder
10. Distant City
11. Dirty Neon
12. Gross Domestic Happiness
13. Consortium Musicum
• Mystical Weapons: http://www.facebook.com/MysticalWeapons
• Chimera Music: http://chimeramusic.com
[Photo: Devendra Banhart (huh)]
More about: Deerhoof, Mystical Weapons, Sean Lennon