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Neptune - Play Some Music
After twelve years of relative quiet, experimental rock band Neptune returns with Play Some Music, their ninth full length album and a return to form from a project spanning over three decades. Play Some Music reunites the band’s most recognizable and widest traveling lineup of Jason Sidney Sanford, Mark William Pearson, and Daniel Paul Boucher, whose 2008 LP Gong Lake (Table of the Elements) and 2006 LP Patterns (Les Potagers Natures) serve as defining releases among the band’s catalog of over thirty recordings. Wielding their distinctive homemade instruments - a melding of hardware store and landfill – Play Some Music features microtonal and macrotonal wire-framed steel guitars as well as amplified drums, amplified circular saw blade percussion, electronics, and feedback organ to produce a suite of songs, improvised and composed, that explore classical mythology and the nebulous realm of memory. Always expanding their sound world, Neptune’s signature frenetic guitars and drums are joined by new gamelan-like amplified percussion and phantasmagoric electronic textures hovering over its ether.
Released by esteemed outré music label Sleeping Giant Glossolalia, home to artists such as Ramleh, Ava Mendoza, and Multicult, Play Some Music was recorded by Jason LaFarge at Seizure’s Palace Recording (Swans, Sightings, Akron/Family) and mastered by James Plotkin (Sunn O))), Tim Hecker, Pauline Oliveros). Its gatefold artwork features paintings by Sean Micka from his series Book Out Of Stock But Six Pictures, a meditation on the little-known Nazi resistance fighter Mildred Fish Harnack.
Though largely active in Boston since its founding in 1994, the band members currently reside in Boulder, CO; Tucson, AZ; and Durham, NC. The band will support with their lengthiest US tour since 2008 with European dates to follow.
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Tracklist:
1. #41
2. Enter H—
3. Glass Masque
4. Furies
5. Mirror Side
6. Yesterday’s Face
7. rprii
8. The Oarsmen
9. #42
#41 opens with languid antirhythmic guitars and oscillator pulse, giving way to the all-band amplified drum and percussion barrage of Enter H—. Glass Masque continues the heaviness with a sparse guitar and feedback organ dirge laced with psychedelic lyrical yearnings. The Balinese influenced instrumental Furies features a xylophone made from cast off bicycle crank arms and effects-saturated circular saw blade percussion. Mirror Side ends side A with hushed guitar and vocals intervened by disorienting amplified drum runs. Yesterday’s Face further explores amplified percussion with big guitar stabs and electric fan drones. Noise rock instrumental rprii follows with thick distorted guitars, amped drums, and no wave dissonance. Motorik rocker The Oarsmen channels the Odyssey via guitars, amplified drums, and foot-controlled oscillator, and features backing vocals from founding Neptune member D Gregory Kenney. #42 closes the record in fried improvised dystopia, pushing the amplifier speakers to their windstorm limits and exiting with airplane hangar toms.
Instruments & live photographs:
LP Art:
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