Posted in Whathaveyou on March 5th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
All three of these bands had releases out in 2024. In the case of London heavypunkers Thee Alcoholics, they had two. Poland’s Sunnata released Chasing Shadows (review here) and Scottish psychfreaks The Cosmic Dead proffered Infinite Peaks (review here) last Spring, and both have set about supporting the records ever since. The three bands join the lineup for Nijmegen’s Sonic Whip Festival alongside a righteous host of acts from various genres, from Frankie and the Witch Fingers‘ heady garage-psych-punk to Temple Fang‘s farthest-out soulful prog, to Orsak:Oslo‘s Scandidrone and Osees‘ how-do-they-do-it-oh-yeah-cocaine-and-ADHD chicanery, among others.
Two days, all killer. Elder, Slomosa and The Devil and the Almighty Blues sharing the stage with Graveyard. Khan and Dutch prog-boogie upstarts Heath holding it down next to Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol and Lord Buffalo. Whether it’s those two from the US, Khan from Australia or others from around Europe, there’s 23 acts on this bill and each one brings something different to the proceedings than the others. Yeah, there are elements shared — it’s a genre-based heavy fest; not a new concept — but if you get a sense of personality looking at the assembled names of the final Sonic Whip 2025 lineup below, I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
There have been a few ‘Live at Sonic Whip’-type releases the past few years as well. If anybody wanted to get that The Devil and the Almighty Blues set on tape, I’m pretty sure a live album from those guys would make the world a better place. See also everybody.
From social media:
LINE-UP SONIC WHIP 2025 COMPLETE
With the addition of the exploratory Scottish spacerockers The Cosmic Dead, ritualistic Polish doomsters SUNNATA and raunchy noise UK five piece Thee Alcoholics the line-up for this year is now complete. Three killer bands next to twenty other amazing acts making the 2025 edition surely one not to be missed!
Posted in Whathaveyou on July 24th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Oh, you know, no big deal. It’s just Desertscene (the folks behind Desertfest London) and Heavy Psych Sounds (the foremost European heavy imprint and booking concern) pairing up for a London-based Heavy Psych Sounds Fest this November with Dozer, Black Rainbows, Lord Dying, Black Tusk, Alunah, The Cosmic Dead, Margarita Witch Cult, Child, Josiah, MR.BISON and The Clamps at The Underworld and The Black Heart. Oh wait, that is a big deal, and awesome besides. Like a mini-Desertfest, tucked right in there after the end of the always-busy Eurofestival October. Killer bill, killer clubs. Dozer and Josiah in the same lineup alone. Total no-brainer. If you can go, just go. Trust me, the rest of us will wish we could too.
From the PR wire:
*** HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS FEST LONDON 2024 ***
– LINEUP + TICKETS PRESALE ANNOUNCED –
HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS FEST returns to London after four years this fall to make Camden Town rumble and crumble under the mighty fuzz assault of some of the most revered bands in the stoner, doom, psych and heavy rock scene!
The festival will proudly welcome Swedish stoner rock royalty Dozer, Portland genre-bending heavy metallers Lord Dying, and Savannah swamp sludge specialists Black Tusk for the first time. Fuzz and buzz will be supplied by some of the finest live acts from the HPS roster with stoner rock icons Black Rainbows, Scottish space rock explorers The Cosmic Dead, Birmingham’s soulful proto-rock merchants Alunah and occult doom revelers Margarita Witch Cult, Italian heavy psych goldsmiths Mr.Bison and speed stoner’n’roll unit The Clamps, as well as UK heavy psych veterans Josiah. Fans of the finest psychedelic blues be delighted by an exclusive UK appearance of Australia’s own Child.
Curated by two major players of the European & UK heavy rock scene with London’s fuzz-worshipping Desertscene and leading independent heavy rock label Heavy Psych Sounds, this decibel-charged weekender promises to be one for the books, so don’t wait to book your ticket!
HEAVY PSYCH SOUNDS FEST LONDON 2024 @ The Underworld // 2nd November 2024 @ The Black Heart // 3rd November 2024
– LINEUP – DOZER BLACK RAINBOWS LORD DYING BLACK TUSK THE COSMIC DEAD ALUNAH MARGARITA WITCH CULT CHILD JOSIAH MR.BISON THE CLAMPS
Good morning and heavy riffs. Today is day 7 of the Quarterly Review. It’s already been a lot, but there are still 30 more releases to cover over the next three days, so I assure you at some point I’ll have that nervous breakdown that’s been ticking away in the back of my brain. A blast as always, which I mean both sincerely and sarcastically, somehow.
But when we’re done, 100 releases will have been covered, and I get a medal sent to me whenever that happens from the UN’s Stoner Rock Commission on Such Things, so I’ll look forward to that. In the meantime, we’re off.
Quarterly Review #61-70:
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Ufomammut, Hidden
Italian cosmic doomers Ufomammut celebrate their 25th anniversary in 2024, and as they always have, they do so by looking and moving forward. Hidden is the 10th LP in their catalog, the second to feature drummer Levre — who made his debut on 2022’s Fenice (review here) alongside bassist/vocalist Urlo and guitarist Poia (both also keyboards) — and it was preceded by last year’s Crookhead EP (review here), the 10-minute title-track of which is repurposed as the opener here. A singular, signature blend of heft and synth-based atmospherics, Ufomammut roll fluidly through the six-tracker check-in, and follow on from Fenice in sounding refreshed while digging into their core stylistic purposes. “Spidher” brings extra tonal crush around its open verse, and “Mausoleum” has plenty of that as well but is less condensed and hypnotic in its atmospheric midsection, Ufomammut paying attention to details while basking in an overarching largesse. The penultimate “Leeched” was the lead single for good reason, and the four-minute “Soulost” closes with a particularly psychedelic exploration of texture and drone with the drums keeping it moving. 25 years later and there’s still new things to discover. I hear the universe is like that.
Considering some of the places Dana Schechter has taken Insect Ark over the project’s to-date duration, most of Raw Blood Singing might at times feel daringly straightforward, but that’s hardly a detriment to the material itself. Songs like “The Hands” bring together rhythmic tension and melodic breadth, as soundscapes of drone, low end chug and the drumming of Tim Wyskida (also Khanate, Blind Idiot God) cast a morose, encompassing atmospheric vision. And rest assured, while “The Frozen Lake” lumbers through its seven minutes of depressive post-sludge — shades of The Book of Knots at their heaviest, but still darker — and “Psychological Jackal” grows likewise harsher and horrific, the experimentalist urge continues to resonate; the difference is it’s being set to serve the purposes of the songs themselves in “Youth Body Swayed” or “Cleaven Hearted,” which slogs like death-doom with a strum cutting through to replace vocals, whereas the outro “Ascension” highlights the noise on its own. It is a bleak, consuming course presented over Raw Blood Singing‘s 45 minutes, but there’s solace in the catharsis as well.
Laced through with harmonica and organic vibes, Netherlands-based five-piece Heath make their full-length debut with the four extended tracks of Isaak’s Marble, reveling in duly expansive jams keyed for vibrancy and a live sound. They are somewhat the band-between as regards microgenres, with a style that can be traced on the opening title-cut to heavy ’70s funk-boogie-via-prog-rock, and the harmonica plays a role there before spacing out with echo over top of the psychedelia beginning of “Wondrous Wetlands.” The wetlands in question, incidentally, might just be the guitar tone, but that haze clears a bit as the band saunters into a light shuffle jam before the harder-hitting build into a crescendo that sounds unhinged but is in fact quite under control as it turns back to a softshoe-ready groove with organ, keys, harmonica, guitar all twisting around with the bass and drums. Sitar and vocal harmonies give the shorter-at-six-minutes “Strawberry Girl” a ’60s psych-pop sunshine, but the undercurrent is consistent with the two songs before as Heath highlight the shroomier side of their pastoralism, ahead of side B capper “Valley of the Sun” transitioning out of that momentary soundscape with clear-eyed guitar and flute leading to an angular progression grounded by snare and a guitar solo after the verse that leads the shift into the final build. They’re not done, of course, as they bring it all to a rousing end and some leftover noise; subdued in the actual-departing, but still resonant in momentum and potential. These guys might just be onto something.
The Cosmic Dead, releasing through Heavy Psych Sounds, count Infinite Peaks as their ninth LP since 2011. I’ll take them at their word since between live offerings, splits, collections and whatnot, it’s hard sometimes to know what’s an album. Similarly, when immersed in the 23-minute cosmic sprawl of “Navigator #9,” it can become difficult to understand where you stop and the universe around you begins. Rising quickly to a steady, organ-inclusive roll, the Glaswegian instrumental psilocybinists conjure depth like few of their jam-prone ilk and remain entrancing as “Navigator #9” shifts into its more languid, less-consuming middle movement ahead of the resurgent finish. Over on side B, “Space Mountain” (20:02) is a bit more drastic in the ends it swaps between — a little noisier and faster up front, followed by a zazzy-jazzy push with fiddle and effects giving over to start-stop bass and due urgency in the drums complemented by fuzz like they just got in a room and this happened before the skronky apex and unearthly comedown resolve in a final stretch of drone. Ninth record or 15th, whatever. Their mastery of interstellar heavy exploration is palpable regardless of time, place or circumstance. Infinite Peaks glimpses at that dimensional makeup.
Perhaps telegraphing some of their second long-player’s darker intentions in the cover art and the title Nyctophilia — a condition whereby you’re happier and more comfortable in darkness — if not the choice of Max Norman (Ozzy Osbourne, Death Angel, etc.) to produce, San Francisco’s The Watchers are nonetheless a heavy rock and roll band. What’s shifted in relation to their 2018 debut, Black Abyss (review here), is the angle of approach they take in getting there. What hasn’t changed is the strength of songwriting at their foundation or the hitting-all-their-marks professionalism of their execution, whether it’s Tim Narducci bringing a classic reach to the vocals of “Garden Tomb” or the precise muting in his and Jeremy Von Epp‘s guitars and Chris Lombardo‘s bass on “Haunt You When I’m Dead” and Nick Benigno‘s declarative kickdrum stomping through the shred of “They Have No God.” The material lands harder without giving up its capital-‘h’ Heavy, which is an accomplishment in itself, but The Watchers set a high standard last time out and Nyctophilia lives up to that while pursuing its own semi-divergent ends.
Leipzig’s Juke Cove follow a progressive course across eight songs and 44 minutes of Tempest, between nodding riffs of marked density and varying degrees of immediacy, whether it’s the might-just-turn-around-on-you “Hypnosis” early on or the shove with which the duly brief penultimate piece “Burst” takes off after the weighted crash of and ending stoner-rock janga-janga riff of “Glow” and precedes the also-massive “Xanadu” in the closing position, capping with a fuzzy solo because why not. From opener “The Path” into the bombast of “Hypnosis” and the look-what-we-can-make-riffs-do “Wait,” the three-piece of guitarist/vocalist Mateusz Pietrzela, bassist/vocalist Dima Ogorodnov and drummer Maxim Balobin mine aural individualism from familiar-enough genre elements, shaping material of character that benefits from the scope wrought in tone and production. Much to its credit, Tempest feels unforced in speaking to various sides of its persona, and no matter where a given song might go — the watery finish of “Wait” or the space-blues drift that emerges out of psych-leaning noise rock on “Confined,” for example — Juke Cove steer with care and heart alike and are all the more able to bring their audience with them as a result. Very cool, and no, I’m not calling them pricks when I say that.
A little more than a year out from their impressive self-titled debut LP (review here), Philly three-piece Laurel Canyon — guitarist/bassist/vocalist Nicholas Gillespie, guitarist/vocalist Serg Cereja, drummer Dylan DePice — offer the East Side three-songer to follow-up on the weighted proto-grunge vibes therein. “East Side” itself, at two and a half minutes, is a little more punk in that as it aligns for a forward push in the chorus between its swaggering verses, while “Garden of Eden” is more directly Nirvana-schooled in making its well-crafted melody sound like something that just tumbled out of somebody’s mouth, pure happenstance, and “Untitled” gets more aggressive in its second half, topping a momentary slowdown/nod with shouts before they let it fall apart at the end. This procession takes place in under 10 minutes and by the time you feel like you’ve got a handle on it, they’re done, which is probably how it should be. East Side isn’t Laurel Canyon‘s first short release, and they’re clearly comfortable in the format, bolstering the in-your-face-itude of their style with a get-in-and-get-out ethic correspondingly righteous in its rawness.
If you hadn’t yet come around to thinking of Poland among Europe’s prime underground hotspots, Tet offer their four-song/45-minute self-titled debut for your (re-)consideration. With its lyrics and titles in Polish, Tet draws on the modern heavy prog influence of Elder in some of the 12-minute opener/longest track (immediate points), “Srebro i antracyt,” but neither that nor “Dom w cieniu gruszy,” which follows, stays entirely in one place for the duration, and the lush melody that coincides with the unfolding of “Wiosna” is Tet‘s own in more than just language; that is to say, there’s more to distinguish them from their influences than the syllabic. Each inclusion adds complexity to the story their songs are telling, and as closer “Włóczykije” gradually moves from its dronescape by bringing in the drums unveiling the instrumentalist build already underway, Tet carve a niche for themselves in one of the continent’s most crowded scenes. I wonder if they’ve opened for Weedpecker. They could. Or Belzebong, for that matter. Either way, it will be worth looking out for how they expand on these ideas next time around.
Aidan Baker, Everything is Like Always Until it is Not
Aidan Baker, also of Nadja, aligns the eight pieces of what I think is still his newest outing — oh wait, nope; this came out in Feb. and in March he had an hour-long drone two-songer out; go figure/glad I checked — to represent the truism of the title Everything is Like Always Until it is Not, and arranges the tracks so that the earlier post-shoegaze in “Everything” or “Like” can be a preface for the more directly drone-based “It” “Is” later on. And yes, there are two songs called “Is.” Does it matter? Definitely not while Baker‘s evocations are actually being heard. Free-jazz drums — not generally known for a grounding effect — do some work in terms of giving all the float that surrounds them a terrestrial aspect, but if you know Baker‘s work either through his solo stuff, Nadja or sundry other collaborations, I probably don’t need to tell you that the 47 minutes of Everything is Like Always Until it is Not fall into the “not like always” category as a defining feature, whether it’s “Until” manifesting tonal heft in waves of static cut through by tom-to-snare-to-cymbal splashes or “Not” seeming unwilling to give itself over to its own flow. I imagine a certain restlessness is how Aidan Baker‘s music happens in the first place. You get smaller encapsulations of that here, if not more traditional accessibility.
Based in the arguable capitol of the Doom Capitol region — Frederick, Maryland — the three-piece Trap Ratt arrive in superbly raw style with the four-song/33-minute Tribus Rattus Mortuus, the last of which, aptly-titled “IV,” features Tim Otis (High Noon Kahuna, Admiral Browning, etc.), who also mixed and mastered, guesting on noise while Charlie Chaplin’s soliloquy from 1940’s The Dictator takes the place of the tortured barebones shouts that accompany the plod of 13-minute opener/longest track (immediate points) “The Sacred Skunk,” seemingly whenever they feel like it. That includes the chugging part before the feedback gets caustic near the song’s end, by the way. “Thieving From the Grieving” — which may or may not have been made up on the spot — repurposes Stooges-style riffing as the foundation for its own decay into noise, and if from anything I’ve said so far about the album you might expect “Take the Gun” to not be accordingly harsh, Trap Ratt have a word and eight minutes of disaffected exploration they’d like to share with you. It’s not every record you could say benefits aesthetically from being recorded live in the band’s rehearsal space, but yes, Tribus Rattus Mortuus most definitely does.
I was pretty stoked last week when word came through that Glasgow’s The Cosmic Dead had signed to Heavy Psych Sounds for their next record, and at that point I didn’t even know the album announcement would be here. Turns out the LP-to-come is called Infinite Peaks, and it’s got at least one entire-side-consuming jam, from which the video-premiering-below “Space Mountain Part I: Desert Djilo” has been carved out as an initial single.
A longer-form modus isn’t new for The Cosmic Dead, for whom Infinite Peaks serves as their ninth full-length as noted by the PR wire below. The band’s most recent outing, 2021’s split with Giöbia, The Intergalactic Connection – Exploring The Sideral Remote Hyperspace (review here), also came out on Heavy Psych Sounds, so it’s not the first time the band and label have worked together, and by adding the Scottish space racers to their roster, the Italian imprint only further cements its position at the forefront of heavy consciousness within and beyond Europe’s borders.
And if I told you “Space Mountain Part I: Desert Djilo” was a scorcher, would you believe it? How could you not? The Cosmic Dead‘s contribution to the Giöbia split was the 19-minute “Crater Creator,” and it doesn’t take them long to nestle into a groove on the new single, with threads of cosmic synth coursing along with the central outward nod; vibes and tones heavy, aimed at the sun, launch’d. There’s a lot of space rocking this and that out there right now. What distinguishes The Cosmic Dead from the glut of chic cosmic whatnot is the low end. It’s where heavy lives, and where bass is an afterthought in so much psych as there’s barely room on stage with guitar pedal boards the size of neighborhoods, The Cosmic Dead have always been able to hone a sound with float as well as heft. They’re heavier.
That’s what I’m hearing in “Space Mountain Part I: Desert Dijlo,” anyhow, and five years after 2019’s Scottish Space Race (review here), I’m glad for the reminder of what I thought was so badass about these guys to start with. The track is six minutes long, so more than a teaser, but you can still expect to be left hanging as the segment of the longer jam cuts out. The band comments on the piece under the player below, where you’ll also find the ever-crucial preorder links.
V-i-b-e:
The Cosmic Dead, “Space Mountain Part I: Desert Djilo” video premiere
THE COSMIC DEAD – New album “Infinite Peaks” out April 12 on Heavy Psych Sounds
“Infinite Peaks” is the long awaited ninth full length album from tumultuous Glaswegian astral travellers The Cosmic Dead. The album features two extended incantations recorded and mixed at Glasgow’s 16 Ohm Recording Studio. About the new single: “‘Desert Djilo’ is the opening section of our 20-minute instrumental track ‘Space Mountain’, completely improvised and recorded live in the studio, it was in itself part of a larger jam. This is a jam within a jam, synth follows bass follows drums follows fiddle. The sound of the radioactive desert.”
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 16th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
After releasing the expansive-of-title-and-sound split LP The Intergalactic Connection – Exploring The Sideral Remote Hyperspace (review here) in 2021 through Heavy Psych Sounds and partnering for that release with their now-labelmates in Italy’s Giöbia, Glasgow heavy psych explorers The Cosmic Dead have made it official with the same label for their next full-length. And I know there’s been a lot happening in space rock the last couple years with your King Gizzards and your Slifts and Pigsx7, etc., but it’s been a half-decade since The Cosmic Dead released their last LP, 2019’s Scottish Space Race (review here), so you might need a refresher on just how righteous their interstellar slop actually is. All good. I’m sure by the time the record shows up — April? late March? — the hype will have us all up to date.
The PR wire hurled this in the direction of my eyeballs a bit ago, and it seemed fitting to share. True to established methodology, Heavy Psych Sounds next week will follow this announcement with the album details and first single:
Heavy Psych Sounds to announce THE COSMIC DEAD signing for their upcoming new album !!!
We’re incredibly stoked to announce that the Glasgow space rock band THE COSMIC DEAD is coming back with a brand new album !!!
NEW ALBUM PRESALE + FIRST TRACK PREMIERE January 24th
BIOGRAPHY
The Cosmic Dead are an amorphous blob of space rock energy hailing from Glasgow, Scotland. Their exploratory compositions often reach levels of sonic destruction through reflective repetition and visceral harmony.
The band has taken many forms since forming in 2010 and has been declared ‘The loudest psychedelic rock band on the planet.” by legendary compere Kozmik Ken. At the base of the current sonic obliteration team is a rhythm section of Tommy Duffin and Omar Aborida, a thunderous and cohesive unit which is then further propelled into the outer realms by Luigi Pasquini providing frantic italo synthesized electronics along with Calum Calderwood’s mind bending, sky-shattering fiddle acrobatics.
The Cosmic Dead is: Omar Aborida – Bass, Guitars, Wah Tommy Duffin – Drums, Wah Calum Calderwood – Fiddle, Wah Luigi Pasquini – Synthesizer, Wah
Giöbia and The Cosmic Dead will release their new split LP, The Intergalactic Connection: Exploring the Sideral Remote Hyperspace, on Friday, Oct. 29, through Heavy Psych Sounds. And of course, the question isn’t so much whether or not you can hang with the 37-minute outward-tripping psychedelic wowness of it, but whether or not the transwarp pathway they’ve opened by routing aux power systems through a tertiary distortion matrix will continue to expand at an exponential rate, gradually swallowing, you, me, your dog Toto, both of our record players, and eventually the rest of the universe as we know it. I’m going with a solid “yes” on that.
And by the way, “going with” is precisely what The Intergalactic Connection — saving some time by shortening the title if you’ll pardon; I know time is a construct, and the Italian and Scottish four-pieces are only offering a reminder of that here; what is once more around the sun when you’ve left orbit at three times FTL? — is made for. As to how much direct collaboration of intent there was between Giöbia, who begin side A with the let’s-surf-in-antigrav “Canyon Moon,” drift peacefully through a take on Pink Floyd‘s “Julia Dream” and drone away three and a half earth minutes in the hypnotic “Meshes of the Afternoon,” and The Cosmic Dead, whose “Crater Creator” runs 19:40 and is a blunter instrument of blowout on its face but no less dynamic once it actually hits your auditory processors.
Can you believe there was a time when humans measured distance in miles instead of sound?
Anyhoozle, whatever psychic link may have been established across these international borders — I don’t know what kind of VAT one has to pay for such things in this post-Brexit era, or even how they’d tally it, or even if VAT applies to the dimension the bands are working in — the two acts are firmly united in the purpose of taking their audience from the place they are and putting them in the place they want them to be. That is to say, The Intergalactic Connection starts far out and proceeds on a course toward farther out. “Canyon Moon” is ignition. “Julia Dream” the organ-inclusive wistfulness of seeing Earth for the insignificant dot it is. “Meshes of the Afternoon” a float through background radiation, perhaps a state of suspended animation across decades or centuries or some other unknown stretch of depth and time. And “Crater Creator” is the fabric woven of interstellar indecencies against the galactical puritan square. Shred shred shred your conceptions and the rest will follow. What happens when? When happens what?
Preliminary data makes it hard to determine a proper rate of cellular decay across what translates as a deceptively-manageable full-length runtime, but let the takeaway from this briefing be that the advent alignment of Giöbia and The Cosmic Dead is not down to simple happenstance. They are drawn together in intent across a linear direction, a single arrow pointing all the way beyond known space (rock). These are not asteroids banging together at random. If you believe something as unknowable as the unknown itself could be working from a plan, well, this is a record and not actually the universe and that’s a pretty dumb idea, but hell’s bells, there’s certainly a plan at work here. And the rest? Screw the rest. If fucking Bill Shatner can go to space on a rocket shaped like a billionaire dingus, certainly you can with headphones and closed eyes and all the wah you can handle and probably then some.
Heavy Psych Sounds Records is really proud to present the Psychedelic-Space split of the century!!
“The Intergalactic Connection – Exploring The Sideral Remote Hyperspace” it’s a split album that came from deep deep space !!! Here Giöbia meets The Cosmic Dead, two of the best modern space-rock bands you can find. The Italian quartet come with 3 incredible songs, while the Scottish guys deliver a 19 minute long suite.
This piece of psychedelic journey is a travel inside the universe, 4 tracks full of heavy psych and space rock riffs that will bring you into a psychedelic vortex with no way out!
A must-have for all the space travelers. Fans of Hawkwind, Pink Floyd, UFO and Gong will be more than enthusiastic… It’s a Space Ritual journey!!
Rad artwork by Branca Studio!
GIÖBIA A01 Canyon Moon A02 Julia Dream A03 Meshes of the Afternoon
THE COSMIC DEAD B04 Crater Creator
GIÖBIA are: STEFANO ‘BAZU’ BASURTO – GUITARS PAOLO ‘DETRJI’ BASURTO – BASS MELISSA CREMA – ORGAN / SYNTHESIZERS / VOCALS PIETRO D’AMBROSIO – DRUMS
THE COSMIC DEAD are: OMAR ABORIDA – GUITARS / WAH TOMMY DUFFIN – DRUMS / BIG GUITAR / WAH LUIGI PASQUINI – SYNTHESIZERS / WAH CALUM CALDERWOOD – FIDDLE / WAH
Posted in Whathaveyou on October 13th, 2021 by JJ Koczan
Arriving just in time for your freaked-out Halloween, the new split between Italy’s Giöbia and Scotland’s The Cosmic Dead bears the cumbersome title The Intergalactic Connection: Exploring the Sideral Remote Hyperspace. It’s out Oct. 29 through Heavy Psych Sounds and I’ll be streaming it on Oct. 26 (shh…), but ahead of that, here’s more good news in that Giöbia are returning to playing live at a number of indoor shows and even a festival in Germany in December. Hey folks, baby steps, you know?
I’m not actually sure how much of their Spring 2020 tour the band played supporting their then-just-released LP Plasmatic Idol, but they were headed out right as the Covid-19 pandemic was laying waste to their home country, and their social media has any number of “sorry to cancel”-type posts. Obviously out of their control. In any case, they’re a bunch of weirdos and accordingly, I’m glad to see them get back out on the road and do the thing. One imagines and hopes that more performances will be scheduled for 2022. Not trying to jinx anything so I’ll leave it at that.
From the internets:
Friends we are super excited to announce the first indoor concerts for this fall.
Music lovers and live fans please help support, concerts, promoters and venues.
THE INTERGALACTIC CONNECTION FALL TOUR 2021 OCT 16 ZIGGY Club – Torino OCT 23 Circolo Gagarin-Bust Arsice VA NOV 19 Caracol Pisa – Pisa NOV 20 Traffic Club Roma – Roma DEC 4 Bloom – Mezzago MI w\Delving DEC 16 BASIS Vinschgau Venosta-Silander, BZ DEC 17 Astra Kulturzentrum Centro Culturale-Bressanone, BZ DEC 18 NEKROPOLIS FEST 2021 – Munich, Germany
The mystical day 60s rock met neo-psych and krautrock, mixing up to the point of losing consciousness of their own essence in an overwhelming and incessant soundtrack with an unmistakable Italian taste, GIÖBIA’s acid rock was born. In a vortex that leaves no way out, the unique melodies of this quartet take the listener into a world where the boundaries of reality are no longer defined and anything can ever happen.
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 21st, 2019 by JJ Koczan
Next May will mark the third edition of the Sonic Whip Festival, though I’ll admit this is the first I’m hearing of it. No surprise there, as I’m about two years behind on most things in life. Tickets for Sonic Whip 2020 are set to go on sale tomorrow at noon CET for the night-and-dayer, with a pre-party May 1 and a full event on May 2 at Doornroosje in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and the lineup will feature a few of the acts making the rounds at that time, including headliners Masters of Reality and Kadavar, as well as Pissed Jeans, Rotor, Forming the Void, The Cosmic Dead, Gum Takes Tooth and Bonnacons of Doom.
I’ll admit it was Forming the Void that caught my eye and not just because I happen to be wearing their t-shirt today. This is the second event around that time that the Louisiana-based progressive heavy rockers have been announced for, and while I was already just waiting for them to announce a European tour after the first one, this only further confirms that update is coming.
Likewise keeping an eye out for Masters of Reality‘s full run to be unveiled, as they’re set to do Desertfest and others in addition to this one. And, well Kadavar are just kind of always on the road somewhere, so yeah, they’ll probably be touring too.
But I’m getting off-track, so here’s the announcement from the fest:
Sonic Whip 2020
Sonic Whip, the multi-headed rock monster that combines roaring guitars riffs with steaming bass lines, pounding drums and other sonic, psychedelic excesses, is preparing for the third edition. We kick off on May 1 with a pre-party deluxe in Doornroosje to go completely berserk on May 2 at the same location.
LINE-UP ? MASTERS OF REALITY ? KADAVAR ? PISSED JEANS ? ROTOR ? THE COSMIC DEAD ? FORMING THE VOID ? GUM TAKES TOOTH ? BONNACONS OF DOOM ? MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED…
Ticket sales start on Friday 22 November at 12.00 with the combi tickets. The first batch of very limited combi costs € 57.50, then € 67.50. Day tickets go on sale later, more info will follow.
