psychedelic / stoner rock

Let me ask you a question. Are you a fan of Hawkwind? or bands playing spaced out fuzz from a galactic stage in the middle of the cosmic hyperverse? Or maybe spacey stoner rock that sounds like it's been dug up from the middle of the Nevada Desert and eaten way too much peyote? If you answered yes to any of those questions then gather round friends as I have a new album to introduce you to in the form of Trondheim natives Dune Sea and their self titled album. 

The first place you think of when you mention fuzzy space rock or desert/stoner rock may not be Norway but these guys are looking to change that. They are well schooled in the art of the heavily distorted groovy bass heavy sound we know and love. They have tried to sprinkle a bit of originality in there in the form of some bluesier sounds but make no mistake, this album is balls to the wall space/stoner rock worship.

Opener Pentobarbitol And Ethanol (yeah that one just rolls off the tongue doesn't it!) shows you just what to expect from the album. It's bass driven spaced out bliss and does not disappoint. The whole album continues on exactly as you would expect, indeed if there is one criticism one can point at this is that it's not very original, but then again, why try when imitation is the best form of flattery. The track Morphine does hint at more rockier inclinations but it is a mear toe-dip in the grand scheme of things and it does open out into a wonderful progressive section towards the end which I would have liked to see expanded upon. The song Green has a great blues tinged riff and is dripping with reverb drenched spacey goodness, the rhythm section is particularly impressive as it bounces and grooves along and is a personal highlight from the album. 

So then, fans of space rock or stoner rock will find much to like here and is well worth your time, however, if you are not keen on either of these styles then move along as this album will do nothing to change your mind. 

​Simon

noise / dark ambient / experimental

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electronic

dSound In Silence

progressive / metal / black metal

heavy metal / thrash metal

downtempo / electronic / post rock / shoegaze

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psychedelic / doom

sludge / black metal

ambient / modern classical / experimental

bandcamp

drone / doom / noise / experimental

ambient / electronic

noise rock

stoner rock / grunge / alternative rock

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​Serge

krautrock / psychedelic rock / post rock

The Insektlife Cycle is no stranger to Merchants Of Air. This instrumental rock band from Manila has been featured a few times in the past several years. In 2015 I was quite amazed by their post rock influenced music, especially since the band members have a history in death metal and mathcore.

So that was rather surprising but perhaps even more remarkable: the band is already evolving away from the post rock scene. With 'Temple Of The Soul', this quartet jams itself into the world of krautrock and psychedelic anthemization (if that is a word).

The four lengthy tracks on this album have been recorded during a 150 minutes lasting jam session and recorded live on a four track cassette player. With that, it might be rather normal to be catapulted back into the sixties and seventies. Pretty much everything on this record breathes that vintage air, from the cover to the elaborate guitar solos and the overall sound quality. So no, this is no longer a post rock band, this is a psychedelic jam act that will rock your socks off if you're into this kind of stuff.

The music on the record has been cut from the original tape recording, which is quite noticeable in opener 'Unmentioned Motions'. This track does not feature an intro or anything, it just starts rocking rather suddenly. From the very beginning the drums and bass guitar provide a steady foundation over which the guitar players seem to enjoy absolute freedom. 'Sonic Sermons' is my personal favorite, mostly because of its doomy blues feel. Title track 'Temple of Our Soul' would make a neat sixties movie soundtrack.

The closer is up to you to discover. If you are a fan of long jam sessions, inspired by everything between Hendrix and Hawkwind and Pink Floyd, this album deserves a shot. Perhaps it needs some time to grow on you, but once inside, you'll never want to get out of there.


​Serge

stoner rock / progressive / experimental

bandcamp

Different Layers of Fear is an album released on May 10, by Romanian stoner/psychedelic rock band Methadone Skies. A very interesting and abrasive album, the level of powerful energy, consistency and creative strength demonstrated by this work is simply above all the extraordinary measurements one can imagine, much more by their creative audacity than the beauty of the music itself. With elegant and symmetric, though mostly diluted harmonies, the style of the group gravitates towards a vast and dense cosmogony of dynamic, but synchronic musical tonalities, where a modest degree of experimentalism and graciousness showcases a proverbial and dispersive sense of lugubrious tenacity. 

Seventy-one minutes long, Different Layers of Fear has seven very extensive tracks:
1) Where Were You When We Were Into the Void?; 2) God Help Us All; 3) Focus; 4) Contra; 5) Ol' Painless; 6) A Glitch in the Sun; 7) Manos; though the album eventually resents itself of some degree of monotony – given the length of some songs –, this beautiful work has a formidable set of qualities, intrinsic to its exceedingly peculiar, delightful and audacious musical style. With expansive melodies and a dynamic density that lives by the color of its graciously designed and sculpted sonorous atmosphere, the general creative diagram displayed by the songs revolves around a rhythmic synergy between creativity and technique, that proves to be a major point of cohesion in the axis of the group’s restless, but competent style.  

With a gracefully vivacious sound that departs from the horizon of its sometimes slow, but consistent patterns, this album is a collection of lovable dream-like symphonies, that definitely creates a peculiar, but methodic universe of harmonies within its diluted introspective existence. As the album evolves, the sound becomes more serene, perceptive and transparent, showcasing a stylish lucidity whose clear visibility exposes a strong and visceral degree of musical authenticity, whose standards definitely highlights the most formidable virtues – stability, cohesion, serenity – displayed by the band. 

With vocals eventually surfacing a little after forty-minutes, this additional surprise comes as a pleasant quality that aggregates a gracious element of sensibility and grandiosity within the band’s musical atmosphere. All along the way, Different Layers of Fear proves itself to be a majorly epic, genuine and ambitious album, whose ostensible levels of excellence, experimentalism and originality certainly will please all enthusiasts of the genre, possessing all the necessary qualities to shake and to take the underground scene by storm, with a natural and inherent artistic authority.  


Wagner

psychedelic rock

Four Bibles is an album released by English psychedelic rock group Hey Colossus, on May 17. A very intriguing, catchy album, with exceedingly gracious and vivacious melodies, the work displays a formidable simplicity of style and elegance, that definitely captivates the listener from the very beginning. With a remarkable, but sensible artistic sonorous lucidity, Four Bibles proves to be a dynamic and genuine effort, whose strength lies basically on its proverbial, dense and concentrated style.  

Forty-eight minutes long, the album has ten tracks: 1) Bees Around The Lime Tree; 2) Memory Gore; 3) Confession Bay; 4) It's A Low; 5) (Decompression); 6) Carcass;
7) The Golden Bough; 8) Palm Hex / Arndale Chins; 9) Babes Of The Plague; 10) Four Bibles; with a discreet nostalgia vibe that sometimes remembers bands like Fleetwood Mac and The Bolshoi – though mostly in the atmosphere, not in the general layers of the harmonies –, the sound of Hey Colossus is a clear, vivid and elegant conjuncture of serene and affable symphonies, though moderately restrained to a certain degree of artistic pragmatism, where there is a certain absence of audacity and energy; nevertheless, this album has marvelous songs that exposes a band with a high creative potential, backed by tremendous technical skills.  

Despite the fact that the album keeps itself mostly on an ordinary level of creativity, the band displays a peculiar and organic style, with a salutary and genuine set of musical capabilities, that it’s impossible to ignore, as they are good enough to avoid genre commonalities, never being predictable nor generic. With a proverbial degree of proficiency, Four Bibles not only consolidates its worthwhile contributions, as well as demonstrates that, stylistically, the genre presents possibilities that deserves to be better explored. Hey Colossus definitely opens new doors with this marvelous work of art, that will stimulate creatively similar bands, despite the inherently restrictive standards that the genre may present on its sonorous anatomy.

Definitely a very good album, Four Bibles is a work to be vastly appreciated, with its qualities far surpassing its mostly imperceptible deficiencies. With an expansive, graceful and diffusive sound, this is an album that will easily please all the enthusiasts of good old rock’n’roll with a soft taste of nostalgia, that will resolutely revolve around the density of a sensible, yet restless style of music. 


Wagner

stoner rock / psychedelic rock

Time of the Healer is an album released on May 10, by an interesting and very promising stoner rock group, named Bright Curse. The record has only five, generally ten minutes long, tracks: 1) Smoke of the Past; 2) Laura; 3) Une Virêe; 4) Shadows; 5) Time of the Healer; with beautiful, extravagant and cohesive harmonies that are imperiously, gracefully, discreetly diluted in a sensational ocean of marvelously miraculous melodies – fulfilled by the colorful virtues of extraordinary creative qualities –, Time of the Healer reveals itself a splendorous and majestic album from the beginning, with remarkable stylish ordinances, that definitely makes this concise, but profoundly consistent musical effort worthwhile listening, easy to love and to appreciate. 

With a degree of experimentalism that fears or sees no boundaries in their creative horizons, the band conceives with an authorial level of sagacity and proficiency peripheries of sound that flirts with the laborious contingencies of psychedelic blues and stoner doom in a very dispersive, expansive and sometimes lethargic synergy. Looking for harmonious dissonances that resonates in an entirely different category of sound – possibly to elongate the melodic tissues of the compositions to achieve more sophisticated and genuine patterns of dynamism –, the band continuously displays with melancholic graciousness the exponentially vivid layers of opaque easiness that is a constant feature of their dilated style. 

Despite the fact that the sound becomes more homogeneous throughout the album, the quality of the sound and the beauty of the music generally stays in a very satisfactory and cohesive level. The band – loyal to their style and musical proposal – delivers to the audience a very exotic sound, whose discreetly innovative features displays an impressive degree of refined authenticity, though discreetly indebted to the cultural inheritance sculpted by the work of audacious and genuine predecessors. 

With a calmer sound that slowly reveals the consistency and the grace of its sensible peculiarities and fusions, Time of the Healer – though predictable in some occasions – is an interesting album, that aggregates and combines a whole new set of elements into a very distinct and elegant set of harmonies, despite some minimal limitations that, in general, doesn’t compromise the longevity scale of their sound. Nevertheless, this is a very interesting album, that certainly will please all the enthusiasts of the genre. 


Wagner

 

psychedelic rock / stoner rock

Mind Maze is an album released in May 11, by German psychedelic rock trio Pyramid. Almost forty-one minutes long, the record has seven tracks: 1) She's The Wind; 2) Vintage Spacemachine; 3) Entrance; 4) Temple Of Low Men; 5) March; 6) Reincarnation; 7) Drifter; a truly fantastic instrumental album with wonderfully crafted and marvelously sculpted melodies, Mind Maze is a superb and fabulous state of the art work, whose spectacular musical sensibility definitely impresses the listener, as long as the album keeps playing. The level of creative audacity and technical versatility displayed by the group on this sensational masterpiece underlines a virtuous synergy whose admirable musical qualities and consecrated impeccable excellence defines a completely new degree of musical professionalism.   

With interesting harmonies and a great convergence of sonorous ordinances, Pyramid knows how to explore wisely the greatest features of stoner and psychedelic rock, in a very original context. Without any fear of sonorous experimentation, the band’s quintessential musical elements levitates towards an everlasting, but sometimes desolate aphorism of imperiously creative contingence, that overlooks the horizon of its own ambitious diligence. All of this is crafted without renouncing to an incredible level of simplicity, that flirts with its own layer of methodic elasticity. 

Carefully attentive to all the possibilities that are probably hidden in the expansive platform of harmonies upon which the group extensively worked to conceive, Pyramid slowly, but consistently navigates throughout an ocean of wonderful placidity, that gradually reveals a frozen realm of solitary vicissitudes, lost in an infinite and delightful wave of sound. And as these beautiful conjuncture of melodies revolves around the axis of a sincere and delicate delusion – eager to collide in front of a realm of tempestuous grandiosity –, the style of the band gets characteristically robust and elegant, ready to transcend incognito a state of sensorial lethargy, to become a cohesive, serene and grandiloquent pleasant experience, for the continual amazement of the listener.    

An incredibly delightful and fantastic album, whose enormous creativity ostensibly conceives fantastic harmonies sidelined by a gigantic wave of sonorous majesty, Mind Maze reveals itself a gloriously genuine and splendid album, whose elegant and graceful atmospheres cohesively trespasses the ordinary boundaries of the genre. 


Wagner
 

metal

metal / death metal

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progressive rock / experimental

psychedelic rock / doom

hard rock

progressive metal

psychedelic rock /  doom

sludge metal / doom

black metal

alternative rock / psychedelic / noise rock

electronic / psychedelic

bandcamp

Meiosis is an album released in April 10, by an unknown American sound artist, from Twin Falls, Idaho, whose alias is From the Flora. A marvelously beautiful album, with splendid harmonies and gloriously poetic vocals, the first song, “Nigredo”, already unfolds a spectacular level of graciousness, majestically devised by a soft and philosophic degree of immaculate serenity. With an exceedingly proverbial sound, the style devised by this project is deeply authorial and hard to define precisely. Nevertheless, the album is majestically wonderful, and certainly will please everybody that loves a more genuine, distinct and depressively calmer sound. Undoubtedly, this is an album whose spectacular degree of rapture defines its own level of sentimental redemption. 

Almost forty-eight minutes long, the album has nine tracks: 1) Nigredo; 2) Red Turtle; 3) Orange Orchid; 4) Yellow Liana; 5) Green Hermit; 6) Blue Lion; 7) Indigo Mushroom; 8) Violet Octopus; 9) Albedo; with lucid harmonies marvelously crafted into deeply imponderable sonorous devices, Meiosis is a formidably pleasurable experience from the start. With surprisingly innovative and unexpected musical features, the originality and the graciously audacious level of creativity present in the work certainly deserves to be highly emphasized and appreciated. Incorporating elements from alternative music, electronica, neoclassical and even hip-hop, the style that emerges from this album is superbly unique, and its sensational singularity displays such a powerful degree of virtuosity, that you immediately perceive yourself to be listening to an extraordinary and resolute masterpiece.   

Despite the simple sound structures, every song on this album is a majestic work of art, made from the quintessential perceptions of the artist’s visionary sensibility. With a pungent, dense and vibrant atmosphere, the glorious symphonies delicately displayed by this work reveals profound and erudite musical ambitions, efficiently filtered by a lucid, albeit fearless sense of dynamic inventiveness. Although all the tracks are fantastically wonderful, my favorite songs are Nigredo and Blue Lion. 

With the right degree of experimentalism precisely inserted into its effervescently expansive musical diagram, Meiosis reveals itself a gracious and impressive artistic effort, preciously conceived as a singular universe within the artist’s soul. With a serene, beautiful and graciously poetic musical style, a colorful horizon of hope emerges from Meiosis, without renouncing the depressive darkness that resists at the epicenter of its galactic despondency. A deeply peculiar and exceptionally singular album, Meiosis definitely deserves to be categorized as one of a kind; certainly one of the best underground albums of the century, without exaggeration!   


Wagner

progressive rock / post rock / progressive rock

One of the reasons why I started this whole Merchants Of Air thing was to push underrated albums and artists who rarely seem to be featured elsewhere. The world of music is so vast and so magnificent that many interesting acts get left behind and that's a shame. So I started seeking them and writing about them. Soon they started finding us and in only a few years time there was an overwhelming amount of albums coming in, many of which are still in my day-to-day playlist. 'All The Useless Spinning' by Polish duo Miist is one of those underrated and underappreciated albums, one which takes me back to the roots of Merchants Of Air.

Miist is Michał Koczor on guitars & synths and Robert 'Falon' Kułakowski on drums. They seem to share a mutual love for jamming, which almost continuously shines through on these tunes. They also share an admiration for psychedelic and progressive rock, plus they have at least three albums by post rock bands in their collection. In their rehearsing studio, they mix all of these elements and influences together into a neat collection of immersive and energetic compositions and luckily for us, those tunes are now available on CD.

The album opens with the long 'Philosophy of Pessimism'. This anthem immediately sets the tone: atmospheric, cinematic, immersive and quite often overwhelming. Although coined as heavy psychedelic rock, there is so much more to experience. Throughout the entire album I hear influences from bands like Monkey 3, My Sleeping Karma, Casa Sui but also Pink Floyd and even Tangerine Dream here and there. Yeah, instrumental, psychedelic and progressive but most of all immersive and captivating.

I'm not going into a song by song description on this one. The songs are quite similar in nature, driving on a mild tempo, delivering amazing guitar licks and solos, plus a high jam feel. The album feels like a concept record, with highly narrative melodies and plenty of variation to keep it interesting. So yes, this is an underrated album, one which deserves a lot more attention. Miist is a talented duo which ever progrocker needs to check out immediately.


​Serge