Starving Weirdos - Father Guru [AZD - 2006]Over the last year or so I've heard lots of positive things said about the Starving Weirdos work, but always seemed too late to get hold of their until now ltd cdr releasers. Father Guru represents their first un-ltd non CDR album, and what an album it is. Their wholly unequal take on improvised/ ambient/ drone music is cut up into three very different slices of sound cake. It all starts in wonderfully growing disturbing & sinister manner with Cypress Groves, which is a slow & creepy waltz of toy box pitter patter, joined by what sounds like slow unfolding guitar murderous ambience, and all manner of building dread. The track really seems to captures the feel of unfolding horror of films like 1970’s Tourist trap- which among other things feature eerier moving on there own shop mannequins, so the mannequin dummy on the front cover seems very apt. The track builds more depth and layers of tension, and dramatics of sound giving your whole listening space the feel of childhood unease, sewn shut baby doll eyes, creaking demonic rocking horse, scratched and redden nursery room wall paper. Next is trancin’ which introducers swaying and locking and unlocking string instrument strums and bashers. It seem rich with the air of settling corn dust, like the soundtrack to dawns first light finding the patrons all night party in drunken stupor on the floor of farm out building. There are echoes of the night’s activities and deception in their glassy staring eyes and their black lulling mouth. The Weirdos build into the track this strange muffled and in the other room sound of voices in a wonderfully strange and unnevering manner- like you’ve just been woken from sleep by shouting gameplay, but the echoes are just left, you cant quite make out the meaning of the vocal sounds. Though out the track seems to Purvey a wonderful air of mysterious and nearly falling apart, or the feeling of it will suddenly all make sense, but it never does. Lastly we have Mist- Shrouded world pt.2 which is an place of strange and discordant string plucking and fog horn like drones and subtle and sinister noise elements. It feels like one's inside a huge Victorian mechanical ship, deep in it’s strange guts, locked away in a world of steam and gurgling and burning oil and grinding gears. As the track progression it seems to become more trance inducing as revolving corridors of string pluck and steam gasp echo on and on before you like some strange looped dream. The feeling of been in a dream is present though out the whole Album. It seems like three separate and equally strange dream canvas reborn in audio form. Making a album that is at times disturbing, puzzling and strangely soothing. To buy direct and enter deeper into the Starving weirdos world hit this Pillow. Roger Batty
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