The recently-reviewed Hotel Wrecking City Traders and Gary Arce collaborative 12″ is available for pre-order now. If you missed it, the two-song, 20-minute release will ship at the end of June from Bro Fidelity Records, the label imprint of Hotel Wrecking City Traders, whose crunchy Aussie noise rock is surprisingly well-complemented by Arce‘s wide-ranging guitar sound, known best as heard in Yawning Man, Ten East and a host of other projects.

Topped off with beautiful artwork from Exotic Corpse and text from Ben Matthews (aka Ben Wrecker of HWCT), the pre-order comes with an exclusive t-shirt and of course the record itself, which is heavyweight blue vinyl and limited to 300 copies.

Hotel Wrecking City Traders and Gary Arce (I’ve been referring to the project as HWCTARCE and you’re more than welcome to as well, I suppose) have posted the track “Coventina’s Crusade” for streaming and were kind enough to offer to let me host. Please enjoy it on the player below.

Also of note, Hotel Wrecking City Traders have set up an Indie Go-Go page and are taking donations to help raise the recording costs to put together their next 12″ release. You can see how it’s going and donate here. Arce‘s next release is a split 12″ between his collaboration with British proggers Sons of Alpha Centauri — dubbed Yawning Sons — and a project he has started with Mario Lalli and Tony Tornay of Fatso Jetson (the former also of Yawning Man) called Waterways. More to come on both.

It’s a cross-continental collision of sounds, and aside from being into both the Aussie noisemaking brotherly duo Hotel Wrecking City Traders and the work of landmark desert guitarist Gary Arce of Yawning Man, what most drew me in to the idea of their collaborative studio project was how different the two sides are. Hotel Wrecking City Traders, who’ve been releasing music on drummer Ben Matthews’ Bro Fidelity Records since 2007, are a fittingly tight unit. The sounds on their Black Yolk full-length and follow-up Somer/Wantok 12” were rife with intensity and an impatient mathematical feel. By contrast, Gary Arce is considered one of the founding figures of desert rock. His laid back, airy tone and improvisatory will have been a key inspiration for bands literally all over the world, and when it comes to jams, there are few guitarists out there who can add as much personality to a piece of music as he can. It’s not like one’s playing polka and the other death metal (although I hear those go together nowadays too), but it’s a short list of commonalities between Arce and Hotel Wrecking City Traders. Apart from working instrumentally, they seem to be driven by completely different musical ideals.

And maybe that’s what makes their joint Hotel Wrecking City Traders and Gary Arce 12” (released on limited 180gram vinyl via Bro Fidelity and Cobraside Distribution, who also put out Yawning Man’s 2010 album, Nomadic Pursuits) so damned interesting. The two-song, 20-minute release combines the disparate elements at work in the total three players involved for a double-guitar brew that’s based as much on improvisational noodling as it is on noisy crunch. It works, too, which is the miracle of the thing. The first track, “Coventina’s Cascade” (10:19) is content to wander in its midsection, Ben providing pulsing bassdrum kicks while his brother Toby Matthews adds to the build on guitar and Arce spaces out for what’s probably the busiest payoff on the release. Hotel Wrecking City Traders showed off some atmospheric tendencies on Somer/Wantok, but Arce takes it to do a different level entirely. One can hear during a break about seven minutes in how the duo constructed the track before sending it to Arce to add his guitar lines, but that’s not at all to discount the flow of what the collective trio come out with as a result. As he does in Hotel Wrecking City Traders proper, Matthews proves capable of holding down a rhythm section, and Toby wisely leaves room to allow for interplay with Arce – who also contributes bass to both cuts, adding further dimensionality to both sides A and B.

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Australian noisemaking duo destructo Hotel Wrecking City Traders have put up a page at IndieGoGo.com (not an amateur stripping site, as it turns out) asking for donations to help them record their next full-length album. Now, the thing here is that in donating, you’re basically buying a copy of the album, because I don’t think Hotel Wrecking City Traders have a release out yet — they put out their own material through drummer Ben Wrecker‘s Bro Fidelity imprint — that they haven’t given away for free, either via their Bandcamp site or some other distribution channel.

So if you’re hesitant to donate, don’t think of it necessarily as giving away money so a band can hit the studio, just think of it as preordering a copy of the record before it’s put out on the 12″ vinyl. If past is any kind of prologue, Hotel Wrecking City Traders material is worth the investment, and you get the smug satisfaction of knowing you helped independent artists. That alone is easily worth the 10 bucks or however much you want to give either via Paypal or credit card.

Here’s the link to donate. Have at it.

Because I’m Mr. Has a Facebook Page now (and that would be here), I get to find out nifty stuff like that Australia‘s recently-reviewed Hotel Wrecking City Traders have posted their entire 2008 album, Black Yolk, on Bandcamp for your streaming pleasure. You can go to the page here, or just stream it in the even more immediate using the fancypants player below. Either way, enjoy the tunes and make sure to thank the band for giving away their hard work.

The cumbersomely-named Australian instrumental duo Hotel Wrecking City Traders have been in the business of noisemaking since 2007, releasing an EP and their Black Yolk full-length through drummer Ben Matthews’ own imprint, Bro Fidelity. They’re shortly to issue a collaboration with Gary Arce of desert rock legends Yawning Man, but in the meantime have issued the Somer/Wantok 7” single on their own, which finds the production somewhat stripped down from Black Yolk, but the songs comparatively tighter as well.

Matthews’ snare pops quickly on “Somer,” and the somewhat groovier “Wantok,” and the guitar of his brother, Toby Matthews, is appropriately tight and feels much more condensed sound-wise than it did on Black Yolk, keeping the band’s “one guitar/one drumkit” thoroughly in mind. As the cover suggests listening to “Wantok” first, I took that approach and found myself quickly lost in Toby’s riffs, which come through with a tone not dissimilar from but hardly imitating early Pelican. There is an isolated feel in the music, but more on “Wantok” than “Somer,” there are sweet melodies to offset that loneliness. And for what it’s worth, neither track is long enough for you, listening to it, to miss vocals.

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