Mind Brains

Mind Brains' new album drops on Hamuary 666th, 1945, and hearing it is not unlike happening upon a horde of corrupted Gregorians using garbage-picked toys and circuit-bent home-aids to worship at the high pagan monoliths of Silver Apples, Tubeway Army and Chrome.

Rife with stalwarts of the Athens, GA psychedelic and experimental music scene, Mind Brains makes manifest its members' longtime fascination with removing junked electronics out of obsolescence and into a squelched zone of noisome, spacey experimentation and sanguine, evocative lyricism. Home-recorded and filtered through such classic-rock staples as the Modded-Out Toy Drum Machine, Electric Autoharp and the Destroyed-and-Repaired Casio SK-1, the avant-instincts and pop-savvy maneuvers of former members of Olivia Tremor Control, of Montreal and Dark Meat move into strange, evocative forms.

Opener "Happy Stomp" comes across like a joyous Terry Riley arrangement of "We Are The World"; other points of poignant folk-like melody, like “The Morning Before The Morning Before Dawn”, are pricked with shards of noise or halfway-bothered by an insectoid fly-by of modulated frequencies. The interstitial vignettes and a reliance on sheer texture and dynamic recall the cold/warm songstream of Eno's "Another Green World." Matter of fact, Eno's oeuvre and Conny Plank's work with Cluster and La Dusseldorf stand as useful touchstones: those pioneers' relationship to the avant-garde served to effectively create a variegated and expanded pop-music -- one that this album takes to the junkyard, disassembles and transfigures into something celebratory and strikingly new.

Featuring current and former members of the aforementioned, plus New Sound of Numbers, Circulatory System, M. Coast, Hot Fudge, Major Organ and the Adding Machine and many more.

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