Ransom Note

A longstanding, driving force within the Italian underground and the wider world of contemporary psychedelic music, Lay Llamas celebrates the release of the project's new album 'Time, Islands and Thresholds' with a mesmerizing mix for our main series.

Nicola Giunta has been leading the psych brigade under the Lay Llamas banner for well over a decade. Formed in 2012, the project has since released an entrancing, ever-evolving body of work across indispensable labels including Rocket Recordings and Black Sweat Records, collaborating with the likes of Goat, Clinic, Damo Suzuki (Can), and Mark Stewart (The Pop Group) along the way.


With new album ‘Time, Islands and Thresholds‘, Lay Llamas heads out on a spellbinding, synapse-fried voyage that evokes hallucinatory visions in mysterious, exotic lands. Across ten tracks, hypnagogic psychedelia is masterfully laced with cosmic dub, space rock, and the kind of music you might hear on records by Eden Ahbez and Martin Denny. Describing the imagery and existential trajectory that underpins the record, Giunta references “surfers on acid, mysterious rites on deserted islands, worshippers of solar deities, night flights, animal skins, will-o’-the-wisps on hilltops, liminal spaces, passages into the underworld, psychic inner journeys; life, death and rebirth.”

‘Time, Islands and Thresholds‘ then, is a record of heady, retrofuturist iconography and into-the-void introspection. Drawing parallels with Spacemen 3, Peaking Lights and Sun Araw, it’s an album that nevertheless finds Lay Llamas plotting the project’s own psychotropic course. The album finale ‘I Was Blind (Now It’s Over)‘ is also one of the most beautifully strung out songs we’ve heard this year.

To accompany the release of the album, Giunta has put together a suitably potent mix of hypnotic drum trances, heavyweight dub, snarling noir-punk and rarefied psych to liven up, expand and soothe your soul. Settle in for a special one.

Interview: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/lay-llamas-the-ransom-note-mix/

Tracklist
1 - Cheval Fou - La fin de la vie, le début de la survivance
2 - Cloud Management, Vivien Goldman - Judge Judge
3 - The Serfs - Cold Hand In Mine
4 - Laika - Spooky Rhodes
5 - Geologist - Oracle Road
6 - Death and Vanilla - Intro
7 - Orange Car Crash - Straight Star
8 - Coma World - Western
9 - Des Demonas - There Are No Vampires in Africa
10 - Dave Harrington (ft. Chris Forsyth - Ryan Jewell - Spencer Zahn) - REDUX Dub 8
11 - Deradoorian - Weed Jam
12 - Montel Palmer - Mermaid Wolf Whistle

Wonky organic grooves from Alf Champion and MDHNTR via Calypso records new compilation

There once was a Shape who could dance, With pockets of electronica trance, It wobbled its form through the Definition, And questioned each note and condition, While singing quite badly about circumstance.

“What is,” asked the Shape, “this peculiar sound? That bounces and bobs all around and around? Is it liquid or solid or something between? The strangest device I have ever seen!” Said a very confused polka-dotted hound.

The Definition replied with a riddled refrain: “I am what you hear when you listen again, A thing that is not, yet somehow it is, A shape-shifting, drift-curious quiz, That dances through corridors, valleys, and rain.”

And they walttzed through the Calypso till dawn broke its spell, Those two nonsensical friends, who got on quite well, For a Shape needs Definition as much as it’s true, That Definition needs Shape to be something brand new, And that, my dear reader, concludes this strange tale to tell.



“What Is Your Definition” sits in that liminal space between organic groove and electronic. It’s the sound of something taking shape… which leads rather nicely onto Calypso Vol. II, a nine-year endeavour where Iñigo Vontier and Thomass Jackson assemble 16 voices across the spectrum of the experimental electronic

Press play and find out what you’re listening to. Or better yet: ask what your own voice is.

From the coastline to the dance-floor.

Daichi's ear was formed early. Weekends spent at Oppa-La in Enoshima absorbing whatever the room had to offer, left a mark that still runs through everything he does. From there the path naturally progressed, co-founding Vinyl Youth, a collective whose energy has carried through Korea and onto the stage at Rainbow Disco Club.

His productions tell a similar story. Edits and originals landing on MM Discos, Crue-L and Not an Animal, each release finding ears far beyond Japan.

This is music with a sense of place.

Read more: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/daichi-the-shine-a-light-on-mix/

akarta’s Strange Fruit with the last track from their Drips EP is something super special. Pouvoi Moteur – French for “motoric power,” since you asked – is exactly what that sounds like: locked-groove krautrock discipline shot through with kosmische shimmer, the kind of track that makes the road ahead feel endless and the destination irrelevant.

The ghost of Can’s engine room is all over it, that locked hypnosis that somehow never quite repeats itself, while Cluster’s smeared electronics hover at the periphery. Aryadiaz, who conceived it partly out of an obsession with factory machinery and, apparently, partly with German beer, describes the 4/4 pattern as feeling like “breaking through space and time.” We’re inclined to agree.

Out now via Gentle Tuesday Recordings, with a vinyl release to follow through Loide and TipTop Records. Stunning stuff.

https://strangefruit.bandcamp.com/album/drips

Adispatch from the holy island, via Alabama.

Two guys from Muscle Shoals, Alabama -0 the city that quietly wrote half the soul records you’ve ever loved — making shoegaze concept albums about a tidal island off the coast of Northumberland. On paper, it shouldn’t work. In practice, Holy Island, the debut from Adam Morrow and Jamie Sego’s Sister Ray Davies, is one of the more beautifully stunning records to land this year: motorik folk, walls of fuzz, delay pedal disco, and genuine literary heft, released via the always excellent Sonic Cathedral and drawing comparisons to mid-period Flying Saucer Attack, Souvlaki-era Slowdive and a long-lost Spacemen 3 outtake.


They are, by their own admission, complete beginners as DJs. We handed them the airwaves anyway.
What came back is exactly what you’d expect from two people who learned to hear music through Nuggets compilations and Delia Derbyshire records, who want biblical noise and dream of piloting the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound. It’s a mix that’s charming and oddly coherent: dub basslines, psych and proto-electronic tangents, the kind of selection that could only have been assembled by people who think in pedals and reverb tails rather than BPMs. A journey with a clear first step, even if the destination remains gloriously unclear.

Not a DJ mix in any conventional sense, just an excellently varied record collection let loose.