PINE SMOKE LODGE "From The Yellow" c90 + c38 (Existential Cloth)

It took me awhile (as in months) to even press play on this recording because I knew I was in for quite a journey and I needed to pack some supplies. There are over two hours of music on From The Yellow a late 2011 double album by Pine Smoke Lodge. While I would usually discourage artists from sharing quite this much of their "special talents" in one helping, the loooong player is actually an ideal format for this duo from Portland, Maine (my new home town -- holla atcha void).

This is echo-laden mystic drone at it's best. A hallucinatory wash of tambura, keyboards, bells and frame drum that can be forgiven it's mild pilfering of other culture's music due to the intense amount of dedication and patience that must have been required to produce such sounds. Pine Smoke Lodge is a male/female duo that came along at the tail end of the Portland folk-psych thing and they're still doing it like it's 2006. I've seen them unspool their thing live and it's quiet a treat if you're the kind who can sit still for 45 minutes. It's not new age, it's stone age. So show some support and get the tape, or write 'em a post card.

Looks like it's still available, but the total run was only 50 copies so act fast. Get it here. Sample or here or here. Check out their dense discography here

PINE SMOKE LODGE "Throwing New Light" c54 (Ghetto Naturalist Series)

Pine Smoke Lodge is the duo of Matt McKeever and Hillary Dickerson, who run Existential Cloth Recordings. Nathaniel Brennan's (Cruudeuces) description of this tape on the Ghetto Naturalist Series site dares the listener to listen to it on a midnight walk in the woods, which is a helpful piece of advice-- because it gives a sense of how haunting this tape truly is. The arrhythmic percussion, the sputtering flutes, the reverberated chants: Pine Smoke Lodge set a mood that is both entrancing and unsettling. Side A doesn't even have the patience to fade in; it immediately immerses you in a haze of meditative clatter, that ends on a somewhat more melodic/pleasant note. Side B completely disregards where this tape left off and returns to its ominous roots, however it begins subtly and slowly introduces its indecipherable sounds. The changes each of the three pieces go through are slow, but completely alter themselves once complete. Highly recommended.

Edition of 40 hand-numbered tapes, comes with a small insert.

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