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Bong Announce New Album We Are, We Were and We Will Have Been

bong (Photo by Mark Savage)

UK drone-trippers Bong seem to be so perennially lost in the cosmic fog that it’s a wonder their material can even be recorded. Like you’d try to put it on tape and the tape would melt. Their discography is a largely-impossible-to-track current of EPs, splits and limited releases, but damn it, Bong just keep going. It’s like they’re mining an asteroid to find a path to the Great Zoneout so we don’t have to. They’re not always heavy in the sense of tonal overload, but their explorations carry weight beyond common measurement, and they’re immersive past the point of no return. If a Bong record is on repeat, you might not escape.

If the hyperbole hasn’t made it plain, I find these to be admirable qualities, even if it means Bong aren’t everyday listening. After releasing their 2014 don’t-call-us-this Stoner Rock full-length, they’ll return with two more side-consuming extended slabs on May 25. Dubbed We Are, We Were and We Will Have Been, it will be released by Ritual Productions, and the PR wire brings album art and details:

bong we are we were we will have been

BONG REVEAL DETAILS OF A BRAND NEW ALBUM, WE ARE, WE WERE AND WE WILL HAVE BEEN

UPCOMING ON RITUAL PRODUCTIONS, 25TH MAY

The fifth album from Bong has been declared and is upcoming on Ritual Productions on 25th May.

We are, we were and we will have been continues the band’s unregulated experiments on tonal prolonging. Solemn in its delivery and frightening in its implications, this latest LP signifies a point of no return from the Pied Pipers of mesmeric drone, its two near twenty minute tracks will surely loop and envelop indefinitely, freeing the listener from this increasingly unfamiliar material world and mercifully trapping them in the weightlessness of Bong’s sonic void.

Microtonal adjustments and invading frequencies are pleated into a tapestry of gooey guitar and midnight-ritual percussion, melting at a glacial pace across ‘Time Regained’ and ‘Find Your Own Gods’. The first of the two tracks creaks under the weight of residual distortion and unfathomable density, while the second opens with the powerful command of the track title, evoking a deity-defying thought process that unravels through the duration of the song, providing the synth-mist and distant rumbles with an origin so ancient it predates comprehension.

We are, we were and we will have been is Bong’s report from their explorations past the point where others fear. Dangerous and sublime, you can sample their findings when the album is released on LP/CD and DL on 25th May via Ritual Productions. The album was captured and mixed in November 2014 by Mark Wood at the Soundroom in Gateshead, and the cover art is from ‘Thomson’s Aeolian Harp’, by famed pre-impressionist painter JMW Turner, picturing an infant London in the background.

We are, we were and we will have been
1. Time Regained
2. Find Your Own Gods

www.ritualproductions.net
ritualproductions.bandcamp.com
www.facebook.com/BONG-DOOM
bong.bandcamp.com

Bong, Stoner Rock (2014)

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