Depending on what you count as a live record and what you count as a studio album, The Pilgrim to the Absolute is either the fourth or fifth full-length from Peruvian psychedelic collective Montibus Communitas. Either way, it is a gorgeous, lush work guided by masterful hands crafting spacious drone explorations, and a true sense of wandering and being carried by music that both suits the narrative given to the six included tracks and hones in on a feel that, if it weren’t sincere, would fall utterly flat. Released on CD and clear, black and glow-in-the-dark vinyl by Brooklyn-based imprint Beyond Beyond is Beyond, The Pilgrim to the Absolute is full-sounding even at its most minimal, using nature sounds — birdsong, crickets — to flesh out material somewhere between psych-folk and jam-based meandering. Instrumental and varied to the point of amorphousness, it’s these organic elements that serve to tie the 44-minute instrumental progression together, their changes mirroring shifts in the narrative that the band — a lineup of up to nine people that seems to be no less nebulous than the sounds they make — has constructed for the album’s progression, as can be read in the names of the tracks, which just so we can keep it all straight, I’ll put here:

1. The Pilgrim under Stars (8:22)
2. The Pilgrim to the Woods (3:50)
3. The Pilgrim at the Shrine (10:14)
4. The Pilgrim to the Source (4:04)
5. The Pilgrim and the Light Masters (3:16)
6. The Pilgrim to the Absolute (13:46)

Certain aspects of the arc are immediately clear from the titles. We know we’re following a character called “The Pilgrim.” In looking at the prepositions and remainders of the titles, we learn more about the journey. The album portrays a pilgrimage. The pilgrim begins under the stars of a night sky, treks through woods to arrive at a shrine, moves to the source, meets the Light Masters and, finally, discovers the Absolute, which is either a physical place, or — what seems more likely in the context of the music itself on the 13-minute closing title-track — a state of enlightenment attained. Set in longer and shorter progressions, The Pilgrim to the Absolute is a work of transience and destinations, but whatever duration each piece has and wherever it leads, there’s substance to be found, whether it’s the immersive tribal-style percussion of “The Pilgrim at the Shrine” set to strings and insect noise, or the improvised-feeling drone and bird calls of “The Pilgrim and the Light Masters,” which fades out on running water to lead into the title-track. Water is a recurring theme throughout and appears at the beginning of “The Pilgrim under Stars” as well, serving as the foundation on which an initial swell of birdsong and warm-toned guitar and drone is built. Some speech either sampled or off mic echoes in the mix and otherworldly flute acts as a guide as the first of the album’s six stages patiently draws the listener further into its course — encompassing, psychedelic and beautiful.

Quite clearly, The Pilgrim to the Absolute is meant to be taken as a whole, and the shifts between songs — birds and running water on side A, running water and birds on side B — bears that out, even with the fade to silence after the chanting and insistent percussion provides a dissonant apex to “The Pilgrim at the Shrine” to close the first half of the album, but some of Montibus Communitas‘ most satisfying moments come in those shorter tracks, “The Pilgrim at the Woods” bordering on Earth-style drone and “The Pilgrim and the Light Masters” providing an emphasis on experimentalism and spaciousness as well as setting up the engrossing scope of the closer. Likewise, “The Pilgrim at the Source” begins side B on what seems to be the morning after the nighttime ritual culminating “The Pilgrim at the Shrine,” some tension and dread worked into the residual rhythmic push. Are we running? I don’t know, but the music — guitars, hand drums, flute, birds — remains evocative throughout, the ultra-organic soundscape contrasting some of the effects-laden droning that arrives with the subsequent “The Pilgrim and the Light Masters,” though many of the other basic factors in the construction remain the same. The penultimate cut is a prelude of sorts, transitional in the sense of leading us from the “source” to the “absolute,” but it derives further function in expanding the context of the album as a whole as well, its drone, as alluded, being echoed in the final wash of “The Pilgrim to the Absolute,” which is unmistakably the payoff for the voyage undertaken by “The Pilgrim” and the listener alike.

Within its first two minutes, “The Pilgrim to the Absolute” has established much of what constitutes its course. The nature-sound themes persist and a drone works its way into the recesses of the mix, only to come forward as the song plays out. It’s not a build, necessarily, as though Montibus Communitas were about to conjure enlightenment out of a wall of distortion and try to make it believable. Rather, a sweet-toned, bright-sounding guitar figure makes its way in with the other sounds calls to mind a feeling of inner peace at the conclusion of the story. It is the fullest that the collective sounds on The Pilgrim to the Absolute, and little mystery why they’d choose the final chapter as the title for the album, since “The Pilgrim to the Absolute,” the track itself, manages to speak to everything that came before it while also adding this new texture, and true to form, the satisfying exhalation that seems to be taking place instrumentally comes across in the listener’s mindset as well. As the last guitar strums and the drone-wash gently fade, with the running water behind, it’s hard not to feel like you, and the band, and everyone, are the pilgrim in question, and that what’s just taken place is life itself. Whether that’s what Montibus Communitas intended to convey or not, I don’t know, but it’s worth considering in terms of just how resonant the material on The Pilgrim to the Absolute is and just how wondrous the journey can be if you’re willing to go with it. Recommended.

Montibus Communitas, The Pilgrim to the Absolute (2014)

Montibus Communitas on Thee Facebooks

Montibus Communitas on Bandcamp

The Pilgrim to the Absolute at Beyond Beyond is Beyond

Beyond Beyond is Beyond on Bandcamp

Organ-laced heavy psych rockers The Dead-End Alley Band have released their second album, Odd Stories. It’s the follow-up to 2012/2013’s debut, Whispers of the Night (review here), and sees the Peruvian four-piece continue their adventurous psych explorations, dipping into surf tonality on “Devil’s Mask” and vibing out long-form on the eight-minute “Lost Again,” a strong current of Floydian progressivism emerging from the start of opener “The Nightmare Goes On” and serving as a unifying theme throughout several of the tracks. Vinyl and CD are apparently out now through a variety of labels — CD through Tóxiko Records and Inti Records in Peru, vinyl through Nasoni in Germany — and the band has also made Odd Stories available for front-to-back streaming on their Bandcamp page. Because it’s the future, and that’s how it goes.

Downloads are cheap, and if you need impetus to hit play on the embedded doodad below, Javier Kou‘s bass tone should serve nicely:

People, our 2do Disco ‘ odd stories ‘ is already in Europe, in the format vinilo. But if you do not have tornamesa or you can not wait to come to the records, you can hear you toditititititiiiiiito here. :D to see what you think.

‘Odd Stories’ (2014) is the second studio album of Peruvian psychedelic rock band ‘The Dead-End Alley Band’. It was recorded and produced in Lima, Peru, by Javier Kou, Sebastian Sanchez-Botta and Chino Burga. Edited, manufactured and released on vinyl in Europe by Nasoni Records (Germany) and on CD and tape in Peru by Tóxiko Records and Inti Records (Peru).

This new album is loaded with more heavy, fuzz and stoner scents, that gives the band a new unabashedly sound. An eternal lone and mad trip, through a neverending odd nightmare.

released 20 September 2014

The band:
Javier Kou (Guitars / Bass / Vocals)
Sebastian Sanchez-Botta (Vocals / Organs / Piano)
Leonardo Alva (Lead Guitar at ‘The Cosmic Cry Out’)
Jaime Diaz (Drum)

The staff:
Chino Burga (Producer)
Hans-Georg (Nasoni Records CEO)
Marco Marin (Toxiko Records CEO)
Diego Valdivia (Inti Records CEO)
Jaime Diaz (Drums edition)

https://deabperu.bandcamp.com/album/odd-stories
https://www.facebook.com/deabperu
https://soundcloud.com/deabperu
https://www.facebook.com/ToxikoProducciones
https://www.facebook.com/IntiRecordsPeru
http://www.nasoni-records.com/

The Dead-End Alley Band, Odd Stories (2014)

Rife with intangible horrors, the three-track self-titled debut from Peruvian blackened noisemakers Quemos seemed to have originally appeared in 2012, but has been picked up for physical issue by Japan’s Golden Procession. Easy to see why, as it’s a cohesive execution of immersive, mood-altering darkness, a grueling stint of bum-out malevolence. Not raging, barely moving, the Lima-based four-piece use spacious minimalism to set the stage for dark arts drama, throat-singing vocals à la Attila Csihar gurgling atop atmospherics bleak enough to absorb the light around them. Quemos make it quickly apparent they hold structure in little regard, as the sprawling 26-minute opener “The Portal Must be Opened with the Blood of Their Throats” gradually unfurls — ancient and dismal — over its first several minutes, drone and ambient cymbal work shifting into the emerging crag and lurching progression. All four members of the band have adopted noms de guerre for the project, and the CD credits High Priest of Moab with “chanting and scriptures” (aka vocals), Harvester of the Dying Sun with “seeds of knowledge and soundscapes of madness” (I’m guessing guitar) the well-hyphenated He-Who-Walks-Among-the-Shadows with “discipline, aural obscurity and beyond” (bass maybe, or noise) and Kenotic Deconsecrator with “unholy blasts of darkness” (drums). Fair enough. A little over the top, maybe, but that’s clearly the point. The mention of Moab is particularly interesting since the band take their name from a Moabite deity, so at least there’s some consistency in the thematics at play.

Whether that’s the god to which the lyrics of “The Portal Must be Opened with the Blood of Their Throats” and its 19-minute follow-up “Light is No Longer with Us” seem to be making offerings, I don’t know, but the two tracks and Quemos‘ much-shorter instrumental finale, “Dawn of Moab,” reside firmly in the cultish sphere of black metal artistry. For having drums credited as “blasts,” there are no blastbeats. Even at its most sonically active, Quemos barely gets above a crawl, tempo-wise. Its brutality derives from the ambience and the harshness of some of its noise, like that in the middle of “Light is No Longer with Us.” That’s the case early in the opener as well, though it’s not particularly slow about arriving at the rumble ‘n’ gurgle that provides its crux. Within two minutes the vocals and drums have arrived. Noise and feedback swells and recedes in the mix around, but basically that’s what carries the track through the bulk of its time. The lyrics are a long sacrificial incantation — largely indecipherable from the audio, but presented in the CD liner — and it’s not so much a march that ensues as an excruciating stumble. Guitar arrives past five minutes in for one of several short-lived stays peppered throughout every couple of minutes, and as “The Portal…” moves toward 17 minutes, the drums cut out completely and the vocals stand alone over raw, droning noise. That’s the beginning of a final build, but even in its payoff, at about the 24-minute mark, the song maintains the tension that has driven it forward all along.

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With heavy nods along the way to Pink Floyd, early Alice Cooper and The Beatles, young Peruvian psychedelic rockers The Dead-End Alley Band conjure a classic moodiness throughout their full-length debut, Whispers of the Night, beginning with the immediately meditative vibing of opener “Mirrors and Seagulls.” More or less an introduction, the song still manages to set up a good deal of the spirit of the Lima-based act’s first outing, released on CD by Ice Label Records in Peru with vinyl through Nasoni. A spare, peaceful guitar sets out in minimalist exploration, slow, patient, but still moving, and toward the very end, a brief spoken word takes hold to smooth the transition into the rest of the 52-minute album, which is engaging and varied in approach but consistent in overall mood and the feel that the group’s core duo of guitarist/bassist/vocalist Javier Kou and vocalist/key-specialist (organ, piano, synth, etc.) Sebastian Sanchez-Botta are able to elicit throughout the total 10 tracks.

Structurally, the material is pretty straightforward, but there’s a wandering sensibility all the same, and in the compression of the bass tone and snare drum (it sounds like a real drummer, but might be programmed), the textures of the organ and synth, the layering of the vocals, The Dead-End Alley Band immediately conjure a ’70s LP vibe. Fifty-two minutes is long for that kind of feel — usually one encounters a more vinyl-ready 35-45 minutes — but they make the time work well, adding Eastern flair to “Lizards and Snakes” in following the traditional psych-folk of the title-track, into which “Mirrors and Seagulls” almost directly bleeds. Tradeoffs between the two singers in the lead role adds to the diversity as “Lizards and Snakes” gives way to the organ-and-bass-led creepiness of “Centuries,” which includes a somewhat surprising mash of news samples that, perhaps contrary to the band’s mission of psychedelic traditionalism, pull the listener into a more modern sphere with references to Japan’s Fukushima disaster and Today Show host Matt Lauer. The results are sonically fluid, but somewhat incongruous in theory, the late ’60s Floydian modus crashing into modern realities. Maybe that blend is what brought about the title “Centuries” in the first place, but it’s striking either way.

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Is Espejismos, the latest release from Peruvian progressive heavy psych rockers Don Juan Matus, an album? There are a couple different ways to answer the question, and I don’t think any of them are wrong, only more right than the others. You could say no, it’s not. It collects five new songs recorded separately by the band members and couples them with alternate versions and early mixes to, at most, make an EP with bonus tracks dispersed throughout. You’re not wrong. You could say yes, it’s an album. It’s cohesive, it’s got a flow from song to song, and the five-piece obviously took the time to structure it in a way that made the most of that, so who cares if there are six engineers listed in the tape liner and that recording was done over a period of six years between the band’s beginnings in 2007 and 2013? They put it out as an album, it’s an album. Who cares anyway?

You wouldn’t be wrong to say that either. It’s all true. I land on the third option: Kinda. Is it an album? Well, kinda. Those new tracks — “Contico a los Dioses Antiguos,” “Vortice Espiral II,” “Espejismos II,” “Auroral” and “Carne Humana para las Masas” — do a lot to tie the release together, but for anyone who heard 2010’s Más Allá del Sol Poniente (review here), the Melvins chug and soaring vocals of “Mundo Alterno” and the classic heavy prog rock of “Kadath” are going to be familiar, even if the context is different and the songs appear on Espejismos in different versions than on the last album (“Kadath” also showed up on a split 7″ with Oxido last year; streamed here). So it’s kinda a new album from Don Juan Matus, whose future is reportedly uncertain on account of geographical distance between its members, but whatever you want to call it, it’s a smooth, varied listen, and particularly on the Caligari Records tape, which forces you to hear one side at a time, it does have an undeniable flow.

Only one of the new songs appears on side one, and that’s the opener, so side two, which starts with “Vortice Espiral II” is bound to be less familiar. What starts out with heavy ’70s style weirdo psych — Alice Cooper Band, maybe? — soon gets met with chirping frogs, acoustic guitar, flute and mellotron on a 2008 version of “Matorral,” only to give way to cymbal wash and kick drum thud on the brief “Espejismos II,” only to move into patient, ambient pastoralia on “Auroral” and offset more nuanced psych exploration on “Verde Nocturno/Las Horas Azules” with a cinematic vocal and instrumental progression backing an extended classic rock solo. Rounding out, “Carne Humana para las Masas” is — of course — a theremin, snare and lightly plucked electric guitar piece that sounds vaguely Eastern European in its sad melody, only to end with concert hall applause. So yeah, it’s a bit of work to keep up with everything Don Juan Matus have to offer even on the half of Espejismos that’s mostly new, but as was the case with Más Allá del Sol Poniente, it’s a challenge worth taking on for adventurous ears.

The cassette version of the album — if that’s where you’re at on the delineation — is limited to 100 hand-numbered copies (I got #29), and comes with an eight-panel insert on quality card stock that on one side has the foldout Daniel Serrano artwork and on the other gives the info on who in the band recorded what and when. That’s a lot to keep up with as well, but the upshot is that even when you know the songs, you never quite know what’s coming next as you make your way through the two sides.

Don Juan Matus, Espejismos (2013)

Don Juan Matus on Thee Facebooks

Caligari Records

Peruvian progressive doomers Don Juan Matus have joined forces with countrymen classic metallurgists Oxido for a split 7″ that seems almost too heavy for a platter that size to hold. It seems an odd match at first. Oxido trace their roots back to a 1983 demo and play a post-Judas Priest type of straightforward classic heavy metal, while Don Juan Matus seem to be on a trip of thickened progressive heavy psychedelia if their third album, Más Allá del Sol Poniente (review here), and the song “Kadath,” included here, is anything to go by.

And yet, it works. At the end of the day, heavy is heavy, and that’s something Oxido and Don Juan Matus certainly have in common. The 7″ was released on New York’s Wardance Records, owned by Freddy Alva (he of Last Cause and the much-heralded 1989 New Breed NYHC compilation; not a bad endorsement to have), and finds the two bands united by that underlying love of classic heaviness. Oxido may move faster and Don Juan Matus‘ prominent organ keeps them well aligned to ’70s rock one way or another, but both “El Angel de la Muerte” and “Kadath” are imbued with a guitar-driven righteousness, whether it comes in the form of the chugging gallop of the former or the lumbering largess of the latter.

The record, which is limited to 300 copies and is a split release between Wardance and Basilica Records, has been out for a minute or two, but I haven’t seen the tracks online anywhere (maybe they are, it’s a big internet from what I’m told), so I asked if I could host them for streaming and was graciously granted permission. You’ll find both sides of the 7″ on the player below. Please enjoy:

[mp3player width=470 height=170 config=fmp_jw_widget_config.xml playlist=oxido-don-juan-matus.xml]

For more info on the Oxido/Don Juan Matus split, check out Don Juan Matus on Thee Facebooks or Oxido on Thee Facebooks, or hit up the Wardance Records store.

Word came down on Friday that Más Allá Del Sol Poniente (review here), the 2010 third album from Peruvian prog/psych rockers Don Juan Matus, has just received a vinyl issue in a variety of pressings, including a limited diehard edition with a poster, postcards and marbled grey platter.

The release comes via Clostridium Records, while the original CD was handled by Golden Procession (Japan) and Espíritus Inmundos (Perú).

Here’s the latest and the links:

Don Juan Matus – Más Allá Del Sol Poniente vinyl release

Clostridium Records are proud to announce the exclusive, worldwide vinyl release of Peruvian collective Don Juan Matus’ third album, Más Allá Del Sol Poniente.

The album, which earned record of the year accolades in such mainstream media as El Comercio and Caretas magazine, was originally issued in late 2010 via joint release between Espíritus Inmundos (Perú), and Golden Procession (Japan), only on CD format, making this the first time the album’s available worldwide in an analog format.

The LP has been released on gatefold 180g vinyl, featuring reimagined cover art by Karen Müller, in classic black, white, and ultra-limited die-hard marbled grey wax. The latter also includes an A2 sized poster and 3 postcards.

The hardest part about listening to Peruvian experimental doomers El Hijo de la Aurora is trying to imagine whether their mysterious musical concoctions were crafted in a darkened science laboratory amid bubbling vials of green and blue liquid, or in a pagan forest amidst animal skulls and unspoken heathen rites. If the cover and general atmosphere of the Lima trio’s second full-length (first for R.A.I.G.), Wicca: Spells, Magic and Witchcraft Through the Ages, is anything to go buy, it’s probably the latter, but given some of the bizarre turns and villainous twists contained within these eight tracks (there are nine listed on the back of the disc, but eight show up when I put it in my player), I’m still not sure. Something about this kind of stuff just seethes with malefic and haunting forethought.

El Hijo de la Aurora — which boasts drummer and effects-master Joaquin Cuadra (who also produced here) and bassist Manolo Garfias (also guitar), formerly of Don Juan Matus alongside vocalist Rafael Cantoni – made their full-length debut with last year’s avant drone outing, Lemuria (review here). What the two records have in common, aside from dense atmospherics and a foreboding throughout, is a slew of guest appearances. Wicca engineer Saul Cornejo shows up on Hammond for the later shuffling rocker “Akasha,” Marcos Coifman wrote the lyrics to that song, and takes vocals on it and “Vril,” which follows, Tania Duarte sings on the shorter acoustic closer “Cuentos de Bosque Encantado Part II,” as she sang on the finale of Lemuria, and there are numerous other appearances as well on theremin, Hammond, Moog and vocals. A big difference between Lemuria and Wicca is the inclusion of Cantoni as a uniting vocal factor throughout at least several if not most of the tracks, and as Wicca is less barren and instrumentally drone-based, I’d say there’s been a shift in songwriting approach as well.

That shouldn’t be surprising, given the avant and openly creative feel El Hijo de la Aurora showed on the debut, but the raw Sabbathian doom definitely comes to the fore from the start of Wicca with opener “Der Golem,” which I think is combined with the sampled intro “El Ojo Hipnotico” (“The Hypnotic Eye”) to get the track listing/disc disparity. The song starts with Cuadra on drums setting a mid-tempo plod for Garfias to follow on the riff before Cantoni rides the groove vocally. All told, Wicca is a more active-feeling album than what Lemuria, but nothing feels sacrificed in terms of ambience, and the blend of classic riffage and doom that El Hijo de la Aurora proffered there remains one of the strongest assets here. In the hands of a band less capable of affecting a mood, “Psicodrama” might just come off as stoner rock, but El Hijo de la Aurora make the song more than the sum of its riffs, setting up the massive 14-minute “Libro de las Sombras (Including Dios Astado & el Escrito)” like the person who bends down behind you while someone in front pushes you over. Just when you think you know what to expect from El Hijo de la Aurora, they change it on you.

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