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Once again, these are album reviews which are short, not reviews of short albums! I decided I like this format - or at least, I'm likely to find it more sustainable
I discovered this epic album, which clocks in just 10 seconds short of *two hours* and five minutes back in November or maybe early December last year, shortly after moving, and it definitely ranks as one of my best musical discoveries of 2020. This is really excellent spacey and jazzy long-form improvisation (basically exactly what the band name would lead you to expect) that flows effortlessly through a range of styles without getting boring. It ends energetically with a lively krautrock-inspired track called "Speedway to Titan", but the second track, the equally well-named "Soft Velvet Underbelly", is tremendously chilled out. The beginning of that track has an incredible tranquillising effect on me, I love it. I can't recommend this album enough. I am incredibly disappointed I didn't learn about the Oulu Space Jam Collective while I still lived in Finland and could have had the opportunity to see them live. Hopefully I'll still be able to do this some day when the pandemic situation is less severe.
Physical media geekery: this super long album will not fit on a single LP record (it is actually available for sale on vinyl as a *three* disc album, for those who really like interrupting their long, flowing jam sessions by getting up to flip records over multiple times), will not fit on a single CD and will not fit on any single cassette tape except the ones with really thin tape, that deck manufacturers often warned against in their user's manuals. A single 74 minute MiniDisc recorded in perfectly adequate LP2 mode? No problem, fits comfortably with room to spare.
"Drug Rings of Saturn" at Bandcamp
I discovered this album at a local cafe here very shortly after I moved. It's only a few hundred meters away from the temporary accommodation we stayed at immediately upon arrival, and the whole time I've been here has been operating in takeaway-only, one masked customer allowed inside at a time mode. The title track "Drop Out" was playing while I was waiting for my coffee and it was so up my alley that I asked the barista who it was. He had no idea, as he was just playing a Spotify playlist off his phone, but he was good enough to show me his phone's screen and I immediately searched for it when outside, and was delighted to find it on Bandcamp.
This is a collaborative album between two separate bands, Gnod from the UK and The White Hills from the US. I've since listened to some of each group's individual releases and, to my tastes at least, there's just nothing which compares to this. I guess this is an ideal outcome for a collab, that it produces something different from what either band might ever produce individually.
Anyway, this is really good space/psych/kraut rock, more energetic and rockier than Drug Rings of Saturn (although OSJC can rock out too, check out their album "Hijago"!), but not quite as loud or heavy as, say, Dhidalah's "Threshold" which I reviewed earlier last year. Excellent repetitive tracks which pull you in and hypnotise you without getting dull for a moment. Super happy I discovered this by pure chance when I did.
This album, and indeed this band, is really just something very different. I don't even remember how I originally stumbled upon this. Ghost are (or rather were) an experimental / avant garde rock group from Japan who put out some really strange stuff, with a heavy focus on improvisation, often recording in highly unusual venues, like ancient temples or abandoned subway stations. I have listened to a bunch of their stuff on YouTube now (seemingly the most accessible way to get at it - their record label has put their stuff on Bandcamp, thankfully, but have taken the very unusual step of not allowing you to preview their music before purchase, or sometimes allowing previewing of a single track. I think this is really dumb). I like some of it a lot, some of it not so much, but somehow this particular album captivated me enough that I ended up buying it. There is a huge variety of sounds to be heard here, with occasional extremely abrupt transitions that make you wonder if something has gone wrong and you've skipped the end of a track. Definitely something you need to be in the right mood to listen to.