Album Review: Psychedelic Source Records, Flaming Hurricane
Posted in Reviews on July 10th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
It’s been a minute, so a bit of context to welcome the uninitiated (and that’s no judgment; good on you for checking out something you’ve never heard before): Hungary’s Psychedelic Source Records, despite the name, isn’t a record label in the traditional sense. Though it’s also that sometimes, pressing and releasing LPs or, occasionally, CDs, in limited batches. Mostly, Psychedelic Source Records is a collective of players and bands operating under the banner. These players, sometimes whole or parts of other bands, come and go throughout different improvisational jam sessions recorded sometimes in a special place (there was that time on the goat farm, for example) or with an outside collaborator, as last month’s Sokkyō (with LP pending) teamed a group of players in the collective’s stable with Go Kurosawa of Kikagaku Moyo.
These sessions are taken home and edited down, generally by Bence Ambrus, who plays guitar and bass and starts the recorder and so is about as close to a top-banana as Psychedelic Source has, but if it’s a hierarchy, it’s the most casual of them. To wit, Flaming Hurricane is the latest offering from the prolific, semi-amorphous group. It is the 10th release Psychedelic Source has had in the seven months of 2025 so far, and it brings two-thirds of Budapest’s Band in the Pit — guitarist Szabolcs Kesmarky and bassist Vilmos Schneider — into the fold with regulars like Ambrus (on guitar), guitarists Ákos Karancz (aka Pilot Voyager) and drummer Krisz Megyeri, the latter of whom proves to be the glue holding it all together as the three guitars go wandering through an expanse of psych drift, dynamic fuzz and at least partially improv processions.
Flaming Hurricane runs nine tracks and is two hours and 21 minutes long (2:21:34), so it’s probably safe to call it a productive day. In the spirit of past Psychedelic Source outings, it is presented in as organic a manner as possible, to the point that, on the Bandcamp release page, Ambrus posted the timeline of the day. Here it is for posterity:
The chronological order of the session:
11am: Bence arrived at the place, set the studio up.
12pm: Szabolcs and Vili arrived from Dunaujvaros, Krisz appeared too.
13pm: Session started, first five songs played in order, nothing weeded out.
15pm: Bence left the room.
Around 17pm Akos arrived.
second four songs played in order, nothing weeded out except a final one.
Later some drunker mates arrived (David, Pali), all the rest of the songs weeded out.
Enjoy
Note that in that, it’s stated that there was more, maybe a lot more, put to tape that day — presumably just weeks or maybe a month ago — but the jams didn’t work so they were “weeded out.” Flaming Hurricane, then, brings the best takes of the day. There are no overdubs, and right from opener/longest track (immediate points) “Glyphosate on Socials” (29:59), the troupe on tape dig into the moment with suitable gusto, Megyeri‘s drums — look out for “The Less We Speak the Better” (11:58) later on if you’re keying in on his performance — provide the backbone for movement through mellow dream-tones and the ebbs and flows around them. Schneider acquits himself well on bass late in the opener, and in the early going of “Self-Burial” (17:23), underscoring a skronk that builds through the song’s midsection and devolves nearly to complete silence before an epilogue of quiet standalone guitar leads the way out.
It’s more than a listener would probably be able to engage with in one sitting, because who the hell has two hours-plus to sit and actively vibe with heavy jams, but certainly “Glyphosate on Socials,” “Subliminal” (18:15), the fuzzblast-then-post-fuzzblast “Mahakala” (15:35), “Self-Burial,” and the finale “Robot Influences” (20:58), which meanders through a long drone and lead guitar only to be given shape in its second half by — you guessed it — the arrival of the drums, present the audience hearing them with broad soundscapes in which to immerse, get lost, dwell, really whatever you want to do with them. “Robot Influences” and “Glyphosate on Socials,” though the latter would need editing, could be a single LP on their own, and would satisfy as one, but “The Less We Speak the Better” — a fun title from a generally-instrumentalist outfit — and sub-10-minute pieces like “Throbbing Pulse” (9:28) and its apparent companion, the later “Pulsing Throttle” (8:40), as well as the penultimate, howling, heavy tube-blower “Atman Versus Brahman Cagefight” (9:17) extend the atmospheric reach of Flaming Hurricane such that, if you do sit down to give the album its requisite front-to-back time, the journey undertaken will be that much richer, even as the recording remains fairly raw.
Like a lot of what Psychedelic Source Records does under its own name — as opposed to putting out albums from Pilot Voyager, Band in the Pit, River Flows Reverse, Satorinaut, etc. — Flaming Hurricane offers documentary value as well as an engaging listen, and for those who’ve followed the imprint/group for some measure of time, there is perhaps extra satisfaction in the listening experience in terms of the chemistry and musical interaction between stable players. That is, while Schneider and Kesmarky are new, Ambrus, Megyeri and Karancz have done a career’s worth of jamming together at this point, and through the changes of “Self-Burial” the mellow desert-jazz of “Pulsing Throttle” and the hypnotic working-the-long-game build of “Robot Influences,” the instrumental conversation is happening at a level that, even just three years ago, wouldn’t have been possible.
If that sounds like I’m slagging off the older Psychedelic Source outings, I’m not. Sticking to their root methodology has given this collective their own kind of nascent maturity that one can hear throughout Flaming Hurricane, whether it’s in the smoothness of the changes from one part to another — not that all transitions are so smooth, as is natural — and that can’t replace the freshness or spontaneity of past sessions, even if it means their work has become more complex and farther ranging over time. Pastoralia continues to be a major factor in what they do, but the evocations of Flaming Hurricane — something that this climate-wrecked century seems likely manifest in a literal sense before it’s over — are limited only by the imagination that the listener brings to it. You could spend the rest of 2025 with these jams, but given that it’s Psychedelic Source Records and there are more sessions happening all the time, you probably won’t have to.
