BLANK REALM “Blight Monument” (Barnacle Rodeo)
This Brisbane posse have been disseminating their strange strand of damaged jam/psych DNA for comin’ on a couple years now, but they’re still pretty sub-radar for most folks. This oughta change. “Blight Monument” is a new-ish missive, and it’s a monster. Sprawling, shifting explorations into indefinable architectures. Would be easy to lump ‘em into Donnelly’s down-under MYMWLY beard brood, but BR fashion a far more focused take on unclassifiable psych, it makes them very difficult to describe. The A side pieces together several long-form song fragments carved with ebowed guitar, cavernous voice, and fried percussion, and lets them overlap and sink into one another, creating endless spools of swirling ritual. The B is darker but also possibly deeper, weighted down by stasis-heavy drones and even slower arcs of instrumental mood-reading. A really amazing tape, and highly worthy of a wider audience than this edition-of-50 will likely reach.