Brad Frye will release his debut solo album, Reverberations From the American Southwest through his own Desert Records on Aug. 7, and yes, you should take the title literally. While it’s his first solo outing, the 39-minute 15-tracker isn’t Frye‘s first foray into drone, as his duo Droni Eye Omi released the studio outing Liminal Mass (review here) and a subsequent live album in 2025. But for Frye, who’s best known as the guitarist/vocalist of desert doom rockers Red Mesa and who last I heard had moved out of the American Southwest from whence these reverberations come, the mission and experience of making the record is obviously crucial.
Easy enough to imagine Frye with the guitar, amp and a pedal board in the car, driving out into the desert around Albuquerque, finding his spots and hopping out to do a bit of self-recording. Making it up as he goes. Maybe taking note of where he was so he could remember for song titles later. Some of what’s captured on Reverberations From the American Southwest has outside noise — it’s listed below, but with the birdsong and such, there’s no attempt here to remove the art from the landscape that inspired it and in which it was made. To do so would be ridiculous. That noise is part of what Reverberations From the American Southwest is built on, and as Frye strums morose Morricone-isms in “Ghosts Along the Bosque” — not to mention the cleverly titled “The Good, the Brad and the Ugly” — and brings a minimalist creep to the later “Crossing the Malpais,” it is central to the atmosphere that in turn is central to the album.
“The Good, the Brad and the Ugly” is one of the longer pieces at 3:38, and most of Reverberations From the American Southwest clocks in at the two-to-three-minute range, while only the penultimate “Upon the Bones Cholla Cactus Sat Vultures” tops four. Immersion happens regardless of how long a given piece is, from the rumble and sprawl of “Cactus Wrench” and “The Immense and Bloodslaked Waste” through the harmonica interludes “Three Gun” and “Stone Hut,” placed for departure one on each side. And even that stark arrangement shift doesn’t necessarily pull the listener away from the collection’s evocations of place, so much as add a human element to them. The careful strum of “Celestial Skies” just before “Three Gun” gives over to a quiet rumble and “Three Gun” reminds that there’s life all throughout that barren-seeming landscape while giving preface to “Desert is as Desert Does,” which is among the more active inclusions and which you’ll find premiering on the player below.
According to Frye, the title “Desert is as Desert Does” comes from a Red Mesa review on this site. I’m not lying when I say I can’t find it. I checked all the reviews, and there were plenty to check. No dice. Maybe it was with a video or a news post or something, I don’t know. It sounds like something I’d say, but I’m not going to take credit for it without confirming I did. There’s still like three or four blogs left in this podcasty age, and I’m not looking to step on toes. In any case, it pairs well next to “The Good, the Brad and the Ugly” in the album’s cinematic middle, and stands on its own without giving away too much of the ambient sprawl that Reverberations From the American Southwest casts. Again, the key is immersion, and “Desert is as Desert Does” represents just a sliver of the world the album unfolds.
You’ll find it on the player below, followed by more from the PR wire. As always, I hope you enjoy:
Brad Frye is known as the owner of Desert Records, founder of Red Mesa, and half of the duo Droni Eye Omi.
In the spring of 2025, Brad Frye set out to self-record his first solo album. Armed with a Reverend baritone guitar, a Fender Champ tube amp, a solar powered generator, and a pedal board, Frye hiked out to remote locations around Albuquerque, NM.
Frye set up a Zoom H6 recorder to capture the ambient natural sounds of the New Mexican landscape. Birds, trains, rivers, wind, insects, and animals are heard throughout the songs.
Drone meets spaghetti western. Partially composed, but mostly improvised, this is hypnotic and mesmeric instrumental electric guitar music.
100% recorded outside in the high desert…. A love letter to New Mexico.
Tracklisting: 1. Cactus Wrench 2. The Immense and Bloodslaked Waste 3. Ghosts Along the Bosque 4. The Raven Sees All 5. Merciless Sun 6. Celestial Skies 7. Three Gun 8. Desert Is As Desert Does 9. The Good, the Brad, and the Ugly 10. Crossing the Malpais 11. Drone of the Spotted Towhee 12. Temazcal 13. Stone Hut 14. Upon the Bones Cholla Cactus Sat Vultures 15. Gila
Releases August 7, 2026 on Desert Records.
Written, Performed, Recorded, and Produced by Brad Frye Guitar, Harmonica, and Field Recordings by Brad Frye Mixed by Ronaldo Baca at Orange Cat Studios Mastered by Alan F Jones at Laminal Audio Photos by Diego Pani
Posted in Whathaveyou on July 14th, 2026 by JJ Koczan
There are three of the total 15 pieces streaming now from Brad Frye‘s first solo album, Reverberations From the American Southwest. Set to issue Aug. 7 through his own Desert Records label, the offering stands more in league with Frye‘s drone duo Droni Eye Omi than the desert-heavy doom rock of his main outfit Red Mesa, being comprised as it is of baritone-guitar adventures in open spaces, with field recordings and organic ambience threaded across the songs, as much as part of the music you’re hearing as anything running through an amplifier. The concept is right there in the title. Frye is speaking to and of the desert landscape. He calls it “a love letter to New Mexico,” and fair enough.
Kind of funny though that you could call the entire genre of desert rock ‘reverberations from the American Southwest’ and not be wrong. The individual pieces thus far posted are relatively short, but I think you can get a picture of the kind of immersion Frye is going for, so by all means, dive in. The following came from a Bandcamp update via the PR wire:
Hi everyone! Been a while since a Desert Records release announcement.
Excited to announce my debut solo album, ‘Reverberations from the American Southwest’.
In the spring of 2025, I set out to self-record my first solo album.
Armed with a Reverend baritone guitar, a Fender Champ tube amp, a solar powered generator, and a pedal board, I hiked out to remote locations around Albuquerque, NM.
I set up a Zoom H6 recorder to capture the ambient natural sounds of the New Mexican landscape. Birds, trains, rivers, wind, insects, and animals are heard throughout the songs.
Drone meets spaghetti western. Partially composed, but mostly improvised, this is hypnotic and mesmeric instrumental electric guitar music. 100% recorded outside in the high desert. A love letter to New Mexico.
Tracklisting: 1. Cactus Wrench 2. The Immense and Bloodslaked Waste 3. Ghosts Along the Bosque 4. The Raven Sees All 5. Merciless Sun 6. Celestial Skies 7. Three Gun 8. Desert Is As Desert Does 9. The Good, the Brad, and the Ugly 10. Crossing the Malpais 11. Drone of the Spotted Towhee 12. Temazcal 13. Stone Hut 14. Upon the Bones Cholla Cactus Sat Vultures 15. Gila
Releases August 7, 2026 on Desert Records.
Written, Performed, Recorded, and Produced by Brad Frye Guitar, Harmonica, and Field Recordings by Brad Frye Mixed by Ronaldo Baca at Orange Cat Studios Mastered by Alan F Jones at Laminal Audio Photos by Diego Pani
Posted in Reviews on November 18th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Tell your normie friends you have a doctor’s appointment or something, because the Quarterly Review is back with day two of five, bringing another round of 10 releases to bear in succession rapid enough to be modern without, you know, actually being written by a computer. Unless you consider the entire universe a hologram, in which case, technically, everything is done by a computer. Processor sucks though. That’s why you get lags. And fascism.
But enough of that. More of this.
Quarterly Review #11-20:
Primordial, Live in New York City
A Primordial live album? Fine. Recorded in New York? Fine. Whatever. Just hook it to my veins and be done with it. The stalwart Dublin post-black-metallers have long since established their mastery of form, and frankly, the more examples there are of them doing the thing, so much the better for future generations to learn from. That’s only funny if you think I’m kidding. The 99 minutes of Live in New York City are a document of Primordial not at their most furious or unhinged, or at their most atmospheric, graceful or doomed, but they are stately in “The Golden Spiral,” “As Rome Burns” and the ever-epic “Bloodied Yet Unbowed.” I remain a sucker for “Empire Falls” and “No Grave Deep Enough,” that era, but newer material like “How it Ends” and “Victory Has 1,000 Fathers, Defeat is an Orphan” resonate well alongside what to my mind are classics, emphasizing the vitality and stage presence that remain in Primordial. If it’s a victory lap, or contractually obligated, or whatever, I don’t care. It’s Primordial. There’s no stronger endorsement you could give it than to say that.
Cattlemass have a live lineup, but the studio debut from the band was written, played and tracked by Chris Price, and the eight songs of Alpha 1128 (shades of THX 1138 in the title) would seem to be harnessing his vision of a mostly mid-tempo doom metal that’s not afraid to break out and rock a bit or dig into a creeper procession like “Infecticide.” Starting with its longest track in “Chant of Cthulhu,” Price enacts a thickly toned nod that holds even as “Eternal Beast” tosses psych flourish into its midsection. Some of the production reveals a background in metal — the muted stops in “Replicant,” complementing a robotic theme, bring the wavform all the way down; stoner recordings leave the amp hum — but there’s attention to atmosphere around that, both in “Intermission” and the instrumental finale “Exit Oblivion” and in the later reaches of “The Wizard” and the largesse that swells as “Nachthexen” rolls through its midsection. I’ll be curious to discover where Price goes from here, and if Cattlemass‘ next LP might be a full-band affair.
Though the intro guitar on “Before the Crash” seems to call out to original-era Mediterranean psychedelic rock, Athenian four-piece Honeybadger are nothing if not terrestrial. Specifically, grounded in desert-heavy and catchy songwriting, with their second album, Let There Be Light coming five years after their debut, Pleasure Delayer (review here), which they spent years supporting. Queens of the Stone Age remain a primary influence, though “Before the Crash” pushes outside this in its melody and “Filth and Disorder” hits harder and “Empty-Handed” is more fuzzed, and as with the first album, there are personality aspects that shine through as “The Green” answers in its riff the call of the opener and the horn arrangement in the closing title-track plays a dirge. It’s been a minute, and the LP feels short at 32 minutes, but the tradeoff is the songs are tight and sharply delivered and I’ll take that every time. Honeybadger took their time to make it, but what they’ve made is a step forward.
Not gonna feign impartiality here, as I consider Blue Heron frontman Jadd Shickler a friend and he’s someone I’ve worked with for over 20 years, but what I will say is that I very much dug 2024’s Everything Fades (review here), and Emulations builds on that with included live versions of “Everything Fades” and “Swansong” (as well as two cuts from the first LP) recorded at KUNM in the band’s native Albuquerque, while pushing ahead with a new original track “Marigold” that’s a highlight, and three covers — Fudge Tunnel‘s “Grey,” Clutch‘s “The House That Peterbilt” and Floor‘s “Find Away” — that emphasize the flexibility of the band around their heavy desert core. “Grey” is vicious at its heaviest, “Find Away” is admirably loyal to the original in its weighted blowout, and the Clutch tune gets a gruff treatment, but the melodies in “Marigold” and the energy in the live takes give a full album’s worth of satisfaction while packaged as an EP to take on tour. Mark it a win.
Stoned Spirit offer big hooks, thoughtful songcraft, progressive arrangements and a sense of the material as an outreach to the listener. It’s my first experience with the band, who also had an album out in 2016, but from the voicing of all “Mankind” in the opener through the uptick in tonal density as the built-into title-track unfurls its lumber, there doesn’t seem to be a moment on Inside Me that one would call ‘unconsidered.’ This is a strength to the listening experience because the four-piece — vocalist Tony, guitarist Marios (also backing vocals), bassist Titos and drummer Chris — kind of sound like they’ve been hammering out this material for nine years. Or if not all nine, certainly some statistically significant portion of that span. That’s a complement to how dug-in Stoned Spirit are to their approach, satisfying in its atmosphere and movement alike, but mature as the songs feel they remain expressive in the stories they’re telling.
The two-song opening salvo of “Red Eyes in the Hollow” and “Oath of the Stream” doesn’t necessarily set you up for the full scope of Ravenswood‘s six-track debut album, Rites of the Let Down, which from those shorter and punchier pieces unfurls four longer, significantly-more-likely-to-be-called-“slabs” of doom leaning into psychedelia. The pairing of those two isn’t new, obviously, but Ravenswood make it feel dramatic as they reroute “Where You Won’t Be” or the willfully choppy title-track from darker processions into tripped-out jams — stark changes that are executed with remarkable fluidity and, in the case of the title-track, patience. “Holler Knows” might be where they find the middle-ground, but it’ll be another record or two before we know if that’s actually something they’re pursuing, and the post-grunge vocal melody and meme-ready last slowdown in closer “Solid Psychonaut” also bode well if we’re looking for things to bode. There’s room to grow and the production is raw, but Rites of the Let Down operates with individuality as part of its intention.
Maybe it’s somewhat counterintuitive, but in the pushing-out extremity of “Solace,” in the slow cinematic drones of “Cold Signtures,” in the synthy expanse of “Null” and the guitarrier (yeah I said that) reaches of “The Solution,” but what might be Sum of R‘s seventh album can be as stark, grim and desolate as it wants in “Agglomeration” with G. Stuart Dahlquist sitting in, and the penultimate “Violate” can hit a crescendo like what if post-black-metal-and-screamo-but-not-awful and it still to me just sounds like a celebration. There’s no getting away from it. Spectral is dark, and it often feels unremitting across its 49 punishment-prone minutes, but all of it is a celebration nonetheless — of creativity, of outsiderism, otherism, of searching for ideals beyond the mainstream and finding depth in places others would fear to go. It almost can’t help but be beautiful, otherwise consuming as the darkness is.
Gritty stoner-doom nod pervades the debut release Saman The Doom from Shanghai-based trio Atomic Saman. Opener “Fuzzonaut” is instrumental, but after the Jeff Goldblum sample, “F.L.Y.” has vocals in its rolling, raw-tracked miasma. The grooves are loose as “F.L.Y.” plods into the bassy opening of nine-minute centerpiece “Torture Machine” (sample from A Clockwork Orange there) and the low-mixed stoner-chant is part of what unfolds, but Atomic Saman run deep in the addled ethereal, and “Torture Machine” and the subsequent, tops-10-minutes “Brain COP” keep immersion central, so it works. Closer “Weedsky (Live in CAVE)” is lumbering enough to make you think they actually went to a cave to capture it, and reveals something of an Electric Wizard influence underlying, but Atomic Saman are less horror and more red-eyed paranoia and that suits the exhausted-with-the-world disaffection as well as the trance factor here just fine.
By the time they’re most of the way through sub-three-minute opener “A New Dawn” and the command is issued to, “Bow to mycelium cown,” I’m ready. With some rolling fluidity inherited perhaps from their countrymen in Dopelord and mellow vocals over purple-hued doomly fuzz, the lumber is strong with Kraków four-piece, who bring ambience alongside crush with the open spaces (gradually filled via tone) of “Glorious Decay,” the brash shove of “Primordial,” the daring toward ethereality of “This Barren Place,” and so on. “Disco Inferno” moves, but “Primordial” sprints, making for an interesting pair late, where back at the outset “Crooked One” and “Glorious Decay” bring moodier engrossing. It resolves, perhaps inevitably, with a 13-minute title-track that is a journey unto itself with multi-tiered solos, progressive expanse and a little flourish of goth in its verses. “Age of Mycology” fits as a summary for the LP that carries its name, with a speedier crescendo waiting after a murky slog to get there, righteously bleak but not hopeless. Dooming on their own wavelength, they are.
A sampling experiment like “Alpine Pop” and the tuning-in-a-radio on “A Nutty and a Texan Bar Please,” the veering from “Saturday Morning” from serene meditation to harsher drone — these are just examples of the many ways in which Wooden Tape‘s Wool basks in the details. Songs like “The Moroccan House” and “Croxteth Hall,” the five-minute “Beneath the Weeping Willow Tree,” etc., have a foundation in blending often-acoustic guitar and electronics/synth, so there’s basically an infinity of room for UK-based solo artist Tim Maycox to explore whatever reaches he might choose. On “Kirby Market,” he imagines a kind of pastoralia with Mellotron and chimes, a thud behind for percussion, whereas it’s raining on “Laundrette Sunday” and the arrangement becomes a jangle of cascading elements, departing the strum of “Crescent Town” and seeming to cap the weekend conveyed through the tracks’ procession by packing a full day in the final 1:42. Some Sundays are like that.
Posted in Whathaveyou on August 28th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Well, “The House that Peterbilt” is a Clutch song, and their version of “Marigold,” if it’s a cover, isn’t the Dave Grohl-sung Nirvana B-side, so I’m guessing that’s original. I don’t know who “Grey” or “Find Away” might be by, but Floor had a tune on Oblation that shared the latter’s title, but I don’t know if Blue Heron are Floor fans. I guess we’ll find out sooner or later who they’re actually covering on this half-covers/half-session release, tracked earlier this year in the studio and at a college radio performance. [Edit 08/28: Indeed, it’s Floor, Clutch and Fudge Tunnel for the covers.]
As announced a couple weeks ago, Blue Heron have their first-ever European tour dates happening this October, and Emulations will follow 2024’s Everything Fades (review here) as the cause they’re heralding. Those dates are below, as well as the preorders for the new outing, which lands the same day the tour starts: Oct. 10.
And I’ll say too that I stopped covering Redux releases because it got to be too much, but I am looking forward to hearing Blue Heron‘s take on “Head Like a Hole,” Author & Punisher doing “Reptile,” and several others. Come to think of it, the self-titled Clutch (from whence “The House that Peterbilt,” again, featured here, comes) seems like another classic waiting to be reinterpreted. Just saying.
From the PR wire:
US desert metallers BLUE HERON debut new single “Marigold” taken from upcoming new release “Emulations” on Blues Funeral Recordings!
US desert rockers BLUE HERON announce the release of their new record “Emulations” on October 10th through Blues Funeral Recordings, to coincide with the beginning of their first-ever European tour. Listen to the first single “Marigold” on all streaming services now!
“Emulations” is an interim release, blending new studio recordings with live-in-the-studio performances captured during a session at Albuquerque’s KUNM college radio station last February. The project was conceived in early 2025, as Blue Heron prepared to record their rendition of the Nine Inch Nails classic “Head Like a Hole” for the forthcoming Magnetic Eye Records compilation, Best of NIN Redux:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magneticeye/the-downward-spiral-redux-and-best-of-nine-inch-nails-redux
Blue Heron singer Jadd Shickler on the new record: “We’re on a streak of putting out something new every year since 2021, so knowing we were going in to record the Nine Inch Nails tune, we talked about what else we could do to get the most of our studio time. We’d gotten the invite to do KUNM and decided to see if we could pull a few things together and add them to whatever might come out of the in-studio session, and maybe we’d have something unique and cool ahead of our European tour.” The result is four new studio tracks (including three covers) along with four live recordings from the radio session, the latter inspiring the release’s title. “The name Emulations came from a lyric in one of the covers, and it fit the concept of a record that’s either us doing other bands’ songs or live versions of our own songs,” Shickler adds.
Blue Heron will bring their blistering desert rock to European stages for the first time this October, including two key scene festivals and nine shows total alongside the likes of Gnome, Mephistofeles and High Desert Queen:
Blue Heron European tour 2025 Oct 10 – Karlsruhe (DE) Alte Hackerei w/ High Desert Queen Oct 11 – Munich (DE) Keep It Low Festival Oct 12 – Arnstadt (DE) Rockjungfer Oct 13 – Bamberg (DE) Live Club w/ Submarin On Mars Oct 14 – Hagen (DE) Werkhof Hohenlimburg w/ Stargo Oct 15 – Rotterdam (NL) Roodkapje w/ Mephistofeles, High Desert Queen Oct 16 – Tilburg (NL) Little Devil w/ Gnome, Tankzilla Oct 17 – Trier (DE) Rothaus Oct 19 – Antwerp (BE) Desertfest Belgium
TRACKLIST: 1. Grey 2. Marigold 3. The House That Peterbilt 4. Find Away 5. Everything Fades (Live at KUNM) 6. Day of the Comet (Live at KUNM) 7. Futurola (Live at KUNM) 8. Swansong (Live at KUNM)
BLUE HERON is Mike Chavez – Guitars Ricardo Sanchez – Drums Steve Schmidlapp – Bass Jadd Shickler – Vocals
Posted in Whathaveyou on August 20th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Mere months after releasing their debut album, Liminal Mass (review here), through guitarist Brad Frye‘s Desert Records label, the drone duo Droni Eye Omi — Frye (also of Red Mesa) and noted flamenco guitarist Ronalda Baca — follow-up with Live at Guild Cinema. The announced-today/out-today live outing runs three songs and 68 minutes — consistent with the studio debut — and in the third cut, Baca and Frye bring on Roman Barham of Red Mesa, fellow Albuquerquian Steve Schmidlapp of Blue Heron, and electric violinist Kristen Rad for what’s been called a “Drone Circle.” Welcome to your next meditation.
As I read it, this was the first Droni Eye Omi show. Call it an adventurous start, to say the least. The PR wire has it as follows:
Droni Eye Omi ‘Live at Guild Cinema’ – Releases August 20th, 2025 – Desert Records
On March 7th, 2025, Droni Eye Omi performed live for the first time ever. This immersive and powerful heavy drone set was recorded in the iconic theater, Guild Cinema (Albuquerque, NM). The music was magically synced up with the intense psychedelic video art projected on the movie screen by Quannumthrows (Michael Pino).
To celebrate the release day of the band’s debut album ‘Liminal Mass’, the drone duo of Ronaldo Baca (Swing Magique) and Brad Frye (Red Mesa) pummeled the Guild Cinema with the “loudest performance in the history of the theater” according to the cinema’s owner.
Ironically, it’s also the quietest and most dynamic electric guitar performance Ronaldo and Brad have ever executed on-stage in their musical careers, as you can hear the guitar pedal clicks on the soft parts of certain tracks.
Chromosphere (Live) is the opening track from the band’s debut album ‘Liminal Mass’. More dynamic than the studio version, the track shows the interplay between the two guitarists.
Guitar Gongs (Live) is a new Droni track showcasing a quiet and gorgeous side of the band. The duo has been working on the technique of making their guitars sound like bowed or resonating gongs.
The band invited their friends to join them on the set’s last song “Drone Circle”. Roman Barham (Red Mesa), Steve Schmidlapp (Blue Heron), and Kristen Rad (long-time collaborator with Red Mesa) brought their talents via drums, electric guitar, and electric violin respectively.
Immerse yourself in 68 mins of meditative and ambient drone music through a wall of amplifiers and a slew of guitar pedals.
Recorded on a Zoom H6 by Droni Eye Omi at Guild Cinema (Albuquerque, NM) Mixed and Mastered by Ronaldo Baca Album cover photo by Adam DeBary Design by Brad Frye and Stephanie Seibert Layout by Dave Walsh
Droni Eye Omi: Ronaldo Baca – Electric Guitar Brad Frye – Baritone Electric Guitar
Guest Musicians: Roman Barham – Drums (“Drone Circle”) Kristen Rad – Electric Violin (“Drone Circle”) Steve Schmidlapp – Electric Guitar (“Drone Circle”)
Posted in Whathaveyou on August 15th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
It’s the end of the week. It’s mid-August. Dead of summer. If I go outside, I drown in humidity. The days are eternal and the horrors are multidimensional. A bit of good news goes a long way.
So I’m happy for New Mexican desert rockers Blue Heron, who’ll head to Europe for their first bit of on-the-continent touring this October. They’re set to appear in Munich at Keep it Low (would go) and Desertfest Belgium (would go) with club dates in Germany and the Netherlands between, including shows with High Desert Queen and riffy troublemakers Gnome, as well as the speed rock magnates Tankzilla, which is sure to be a hell of a show.
They go in support of their 2024 LP, Everything Fades (review here), which came out through Blues Funeral Recordings, which is helmed by Blue Heron vocalist Jadd Shickler. The band will also take part in the upcoming Nine Inch Nails redux on Shickler‘s other label, Magnetic Eye, as noted below in the PR wire info:
Desert stoner metallers BLUE HERON announce fall European tour and festival appearances; new album out on Blues Funeral Recordings!
New Mexico, US stoner metal merchants BLUE HERON have announced their first-ever European tour in support of their latest album “Everything Fades”, released last fall on Blues Funeral Recordings.
Riding high on the success of their 2024 sophomore album “Everything Fades”, Blue Heron has announced a string of European tour dates this October, including performances at two key scene festivals. With nine shows alongside the likes of Gnome, Mephistofeles and High Desert Queen, the band will bring their blistering desert rock to stages across Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium for the first time ever.
Along with announcing their first live appearance in Europe, Blue Heron has also been revealed to be taking part in Magnetic Eye Records’ latest Redux Series installment, paying homage to industrial rock crossover icons Nine Inch Nails. Magnetic Eye has launched a Kickstarter in support of the project, with other initial artist reveals including Black Tusk, Daevar, Abrams, Grayceon and IAH. More info on the NIN Redux project and Kickstarter can be found at this location:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magneticeye/the-downward-spiral-redux-and-best-of-nine-inch-nails-redux
Blue Heron European tour 2025 Oct 10 – Karlsruhe (DE) Alte Hackerei w/ High Desert Queen Oct 11 – Munich (DE) Keep It Low Festival Oct 12 – Arnstadt (DE) Rockjungfer Oct 13 – Bamberg (DE) Live Club w/ Submarin On Mars Oct 14 – Hagen (DE) Werkhof Hohenlimburg w/ Stargo Oct 15 – Rotterdam (NL) Roodkapje w/ Mephistofeles, High Desert Queen Oct 16 – Tilburg (NL) Little Devil w/ Gnome, Tankzilla Oct 17 – Trier (DE) Rothaus Oct 19 – Antwerp (BE) Desertfest Belgium
Surrounded by endless horizons, Blue Heron formed in 2018 out of a compulsion to fill the vastness with massive volume, saturating their piece of desert with rolling, thunderous riffs, drums that pummel and swing, deep, thrumming tones and vocals that rip and roar.
Their guitarist and singer were founding members of Spiritu, possibly Albuquerque, New Mexico’s first desert rock band, whose brief burn in the early aughts included a Jack Endino-produced LP, a European tour with Clutch, Spiritual Beggars and Dozer, and a compilation appearance alongside Entombed and Mastodon. Their debut LP “Ephemeral” arrived in May of 2022 via Kozmik Artifactz in Europe and Seeing Red Records in the USA. Substantial appreciation in the underground led to performances at Ripplefest Texas and Monolith on the Mesa and opening slots for The Well, Elder, Black Mountain, Ruby the Hatchet, Howling Giant, Heavy Temple and The Obsessed, along with a swath of positive reviews throughout the heavy media.
In May 2023, Blue Heron dropped three new tracks on a split LP with friends and fellow southwestern riff-purveyors High Desert Queen for Ripple Music’s Turned to Stone series, with cover art by award-winning comic and poster artist Johnny Dombrowski. The bands embarked on a short tour in August 2023, before they set to work on their next full-length.
Released in the fall of 2024, “Everything Fades” expands on their unyielding desert sound with a new slab of propulsive, sun-scorched riff-heaviness. Balanced between laid-back, meditative atmospherics and heavier, more aggressive lunges, Blue Heron’s cruising jams and gritty stoner romps call to mind echoes of Kyuss, Clutch and Monster Magnet, as well as modern contemporaries Valley of the Sun and Greenleaf. “Everything Fades” is available now through Blues Funeral Recordings.
BLUE HERON is Mike Chavez – Guitars Ricardo Sanchez – Drums Steve Schmidlapp – Bass Jadd Shickler – Vocals
Heavy drone duo Droni Eye Omi will make their debut on March 7 with the two-song full-length, Liminal Mass. Carving a place for itself with mountainous tonality and a drumless, often-howling expanse, it’s being released through Desert Records, whose Brad Frye (also Red Mesa) comprises half the lineup alongside flamenco guitarist Ronaldo Baca, and as you’ll see in the release info below, they go so far as to call it a “migration to thyself.”
Anybody remember Inner Space? Go look it up if you’re under 40. Or better, don’t.
“Chromosphere” (29:53) and “Black Flare” (14:13) make up the record, and as a new project, it drones hard. Very definitely self-aware in the Earth 2 nod, and I mean, we’re talking about interwoven layers of guitar noise as a genre, so a given listener might hear all kinds of things in the reaches of the material. I can’t say I’m all the way on board with the band’s decision to keep the release 100-percent free of flamenco guitar (not even a little?), but they’re just getting started and have a clear and expressive purpose as showcased in these initial audio slabs. Both tracks are hypnotic and meditative, but not actually still.
The opener and longer of the two (immediate points) is of course awash in distortion, but it writhes in that, one guitar howling and feeding back as they push toward the 10-minute mark while the other sets a foreboding backing ambience, soon to join a building fray. There are notes, held, distinct, but Baca (who also mixed and mastered) and Frye are exploring here as well, and the sense of improv — a palpable ethic of “let’s try this” overarching the songs — adds to the motion of the listening experience. As destinations go, “thyself” may or may not be a place you want to end up, but terms of being transportive in sound, Liminal Mass is no lightweight.
And this gets us a little closer to understanding what the mission behind the instrumentalist search here actually is. “Black Flare” feels stately and is a little more patient in its unfolding, changing less but still oozing into a resonant wail before letting go to a more subdued ending, but it’s heavy, and that’s a distinguishing feature. Droni Eye Omi are of course not the first to make drone feel oppressive, but Liminal Mass feels like a counterpoint to trends toward floatier sounds. Just because it’s ethereal doesn’t mean it can’t feel like it’s collapsing your sternum.
One more distinguishing feature? No pretense about it. Frye and Baca made the thing in a day, recorded live — they even had a light show to ritualize the mood — and clearly aren’t going for the SunnO)))-style drone metal avant-garde positioning in naming the project like they were a bong metal band. This character is something one doesn’t often encounter with drone: fun. And in the context of the tube-burning noise Droni Eye Omi are making throughout what might be the beginning of a broader journey with heft to spare in terms of style, somehow the admission that they might actually have enjoyed the process of putting the album together feels daring. Drone is weird. So is life. If you’re still reading, so is thyself in all likelihood. Might as well have a good time with it.
“Chromosphere” — duly scorching — premieres on the player below, followed by the PR wire background on the project as mentioned above.
Take a breath, open your mind, and enjoy:
DRONI EYE OMI – Debut album ‘Liminal Mass’ releases via Desert Records on March 7th, 2025.
Two guitars, one from Brad Frye (Red Mesa and Desert Records founder) and a second one from Ronaldo Baca (renowned New Mexican gypsy jazz band Swing Magique and flamenco guitarist) bring you a dense electric guitar drone mixed with psych and space minimalism, and meditative heaviness.
However, desert/stoner rock or gypsy jazz/flamenco this is not!
This is true drone and minimalism inspired by Lamonte Young’s “Composition 1960 No. 7” and Earth’s “Earth 2”.
The band takes these primary influences and sends them straight to the cosmos.
Take a journey to the outer realms of your inner thoughts and sentiments. Droni Eye Omi are the cosmopilots that steer the celestial cruiser of sound into the vast universe of your mind.
Fear not of uncertainty, for nothing is certain with the settling of souls, here and beyond. Hear not the redundant questions of man, but experience the answers known to sound and vibration. Let the high voltage guitars rumble your chest and rattle your ears to an intoxicating sphere of bliss and realization.
You are on a migration to thyself!
CREDITS Recorded by Droni Eye Omi with a Tascam Model 12 on 5/31/2024 at Bingo Studios in Albuquerque, NM. Mixed and Mastered by Ronaldo Baca at Orange Cat Studios Album cover by Diogo Soares
[Click play above to stream Blue Heron’s Everything Fades in full. The album is out Sept. 27 on Blues Funeral Recordings. The band play Ripplefest Texas on Sept. 20.]
The second full-length from Albuquerque’s Blue Heron begins, of course, with a science lecture. Okay not quite. Lead cut “Null Geodesic” unfolds with a snippet about or responding to or by theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, and before it evaporates into echoing trails a few seconds later, it reminds the listener that science is based on observation. Fair enough. One might observe a similarity in concept behind the title of Everything Fades — the four-piece’s second album — and their first, 2022’s Ephemeral (review here). Accordingly, since when in side A’s “Swansong” frontman Jadd Shickler declares, “I’m running out of legends and I’m sick of saying goodbye,” the hardest thing to know is which legend he’s talking about (I’d guess Mark Lanegan, but feel free to make your own pick), it feels safe on a scientific level to note the continued relevance of the theme.
Joined in the band by guitarist Mike Chavez, bassist Steve Schmidlapp and drummer Ricardo Sanchez, Shickler is a significant presence in the material as he is in the broader heavy underground. Like Chavez, he formerly featured in Spiritu, and in addition to founding Blues Funeral Recordings and serving as label boss for Magnetic Eye Records, he’s one of the two founders of the defunct imprint MeteorCity, and arguably somebody who has been part of shaping heavy rock as it is today on a level few others could claim as their own.
He’s not writing songs about it, so it’s not all directly relevant to Everything Fades, but he’s someone I’ve known for 20 years, give or take, and one can hear in the included nine-tracks/38-minutes a conversation happening with the modern sphere — you’ll recall the band took part in RippleMusic‘s split series with last year’s Turned to Stone Ch. 8 (review here), sharing a platter with now-on-Magnetic–Eye Texas rockers High Desert Queen; the coursing, grunge-nodding progression of “Clearmountain” on Everything Fades would seem to show some effect of that — as Blue Heron build on the accomplishments of their debut.
And Everything Fades very much does that. “Null Geodesic” serves double-duty as a proper opener and an album-intro, and its sub-three-minute run recalls the interludes from the prior long-player but is more of a song despite a simpler structure where the heavy middle establishes the desert-hued tonal heft to come, brings the first gritty vocal echoes and balances impact and atmosphere. Much of Everything Fades feels tighter-wrought than Ephemeral, and part of that may just be that “Null Geodesic” is backed by the four-and-a-half-minute title-track instead of a 13-minute jam-out, but there’s no lack of expanse carried in the sound either way.
Tonally rich, Chavez‘s guitar and Schmidlapp‘s bass intertwine fluidly over the emphatic march of Sanchez‘s drumming as “Everything Fades” moves toward its pedal-click volume burst, and Shickler‘s guttural take recalls some of Neil Fallon‘s throatier moments but proves malleable in the more melodically-focused “Swansong,” which includes backing harmonies, and side B’s aforementioned “Clearmountain” as well as the penultimate “Bellwether,” which ties it all together with a particularly heavy push near the finish, ready to give over to 1:17 instrumental capper/outro “Flight of the Heron.”
This evolved approach corresponds with an instrumentalist breadth that manifests a crushing lumber on centerpiece “Dinosaur” at the start of side B, an immersive roll through “Swansong” and others, and a bluesy psychedelic turn in the sans-vocal “Trepidation,” which scorches in spacious lead guitar over Sanchez‘s steady thud until it fades out. As a whole, then, Blue Heron present a more dynamic take across Everything Fades, and do not draw needlessly stark lines between elements in their blend of microgenres. When “Flight of the Heron” kicks in with a riff that feels as purely Kyussian as desert rock could to be — Sanchez‘s soon-arriving drums give a more urgent edge to that — that point of arrival is earned all the more by the swath of ground the band have covered in getting there.
Be it in the tense thud and crawl of the first half of “We Breathe Darkness” that resolves in a consuming, fluid sprawl of distortion, or in the stomp of “Dinosaur,” which revels in its stomp and is one several showpieces for Sanchez besides, or Shickler‘s higher-register reach in the apex of “Bellwether,” Blue Heron find ways to underscore their development as a band over the last several years, without either making Everything Fades about that more than its own songs or letting the material stray too far from where they want it to go. This self-awareness is a strength in terms of their craft and aesthetic purposes, and the album is able to cast itself as a front-to-back journey in part because of it. There may be a lot going on at any given point, and variety is given to structure as well as volume throughout — and not just with what’s a ‘song’ and what’s an interlude — but Everything Fades is cohesive and directed, and boasts a depth of mix that affects the listening experience, whether they’re going all-out and not.
Spiritu never got to put out a follow-up to their 2002 self-titled, and some of what Blue Heron do is directly inherited from Chavez and Shickler‘s work in that outfit, but not all of it. Certainly a powerhouse rhythm section, modern production, and greater stylistic range make a difference, and these are aspects of Blue Heron that come to light throughout Everything Fades in relation to its own predecessor. As the band dig further into their songwriting modus, they seem to find more that works, and even if the pieces included are shorter on average, they’re allowed more impact for that individually while feeding into the overarching flow that, like the movement in “Bellwether” from mellow, tom-backed sandy brooding into a vibrant, hard-hitting course, comes across as organic. At no point does Everything Fades feel forced to go somewhere it doesn’t want to, and much to Blue Heron‘s credit, “Flight of the Heron” resists the temptation to undo its impact with cleverness and ends cold.
To bottom line it, while Ephemeral saw Blue Heron setting forth with an idea of who they were and the kind of music they wanted to make, Everything Fades magnifies that exponentially and is therefore an greater showing of potential for continued growth. Without pretense, they align to an expanded definition of what desert rock is, and in fostering a more varied persona across these songs, they sound ready to add to it. Speaking scientifically, the record kicks ass.
mention the cleverly titled “The Good, the Brad and the Ugly” — and brings a minimalist creep to the later “Crossing the Malpais,” it is central to the atmosphere that in turn is central to the album.
