Saturday 24 November 2012

STONE TAPE THEORY - WHITE FLASH / DJINN

Released November 2012
TOR33

Code names for secret operations or buzz words for a coming apocalypse, Stone Tape Theory's latest offering is a 12-inch single which provides a soundtrack for deeply paranoid times - it may also be the score to the best science fiction movie you've never seen. Probably based on a Philip K. Dick short story. There are no lyrics though the two tracks crackle and insinuate with snatches of talk - borrowed, tapped or beamed in from other sources, confidential or otherwise, perhaps movies that were never released or official announcements that, once made, were soon forgotten, or erased. These are ghost messages, haunting the fibre of the music. 

The first track, "White Flash", is the more driving and sweeping of the two - edgy, roving like a groovy stealth plane with spy camera attached, picking up aerial shots of the world in abstract, then swooping in close to record moments, events, negotiations, acts of terrorism, lapses of judgement and the steady accumulation of bad faith - capturing both the covert and the mundane, the nefarious, the well intentioned and the clueless, then relaying this imagery back to an underground studio where banks of television screens create a collage of the way the whole thing really works. (Warning : This program may contain flashing imagery.)

The flipside, "Djinn", is more of a slow burner - exotic, seductive and sinister. The snaking, intricately loose and elusive guitar work darting and shimmering - chasing its many tails - almost, but not quite, colliding, creating new possibilities and riddles as it vibrates, like heavy karma in the air. There is surf, early Beefheart, Can and African street music in there, among other things. All in all it becomes an itch you can never quite scratch (perhaps you don't want to), creating patterns that are evocative and insistent, becoming some kind of garbled code before drifting off, gnomically, into inner/outer space.

This is music that paints pictures. Music that sculpts and refashions reality. Music as kinetic art. A sonic handbook for our times. - David Thompson.






Download here : http://www.treehouseorchestrarecordings.bandcamp.com/album/white-flash-djinn

Or here : http://www.mediafire.com/?7t23wphooo2hjul