Friday, May 21, 2010

Black Hippies - "Laughing Sickness" (Animal Image Search CS)


Been jamming this tape a lot as of late. Two 17 year old explorers hailing from the great lakes region - Minnesota - blasting and frying their way through crucial groove after crucial groove.

Empty open metal roads toward the circle. From there you realize you left your left foot outside the vehicle before you embarked. It's a gutter-jam-fest from now on to track two (NO SUICIDE DUB). Chock full of Skaters-esque trickle-down percussion and brain mushin'. NO PARTY, enter: the vaguely worldly shaker with bloop-gone-thin but blown out synth collisions on top. The makings for a perfect i scream sunday… afternoon.

For lads as young as these ones are, they certainly have their points of contact pinned. As stated in this interview last month, they are consciously working a bunch of angles - from DNA and The Hospitals to Augustus Pablo to Nam June Paik and This Heat. Enumerating these notably because these guys are necessarily so distant from all of said artists/ bands that their connection to them is more than thread bare. That is not to say that these influences do not surface in the music - they do. And if anything, I think that the distance at which Black Hippies is associated with their antecedents makes them more compelling rather than less so.

These duders grew up in the mid-west, somehow getting their ears on a magical musical mystery history, and gleaning from it whatever they could - what they did - what we hear here. Some sort of transmission has taken place, despite the lack of a comprehensive immerger. = kosher basement jam-town.

For some reason these guys are pegged (apparently by themselves) as a "drone duo". I think - not so much. I am not trying to sort out a proper classification, but Black Hippies should not be considered comparable to any types of music where adjectives like: dense, slow-paced, or continuous are used. These guys are having much more fun than that. And the result is a tape that is a hell of a lot of fun to listen to. Lots of different zones, lots of fresh breaks of old broken potions. Perhaps most exciting of all though is the patience that is exercised here.

The tape is out on a new label called Animal Image Search - which I know nothing about, but from a glance they seem to have some cool stuff - notably a release from the swedish duo SMYCKEN.

BUY the tape! Check out the label. Support these up and coming gangsters.

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