Eternal Tapestry is apparently a pretty new group out of Portland, OR (it’s Portland, baby!). It features Nick and Jed Bindeman, the former of Jackie O Motherfucker and Tunnels and the latter of Heavy Winged, as well as Dewey Mahood Wah on guitar and Bob Zone Jones (what a great name) on bass. The excellently titled Vibrations New Dawn is a recently released cassette reissue of a recently released cd-r of the same name on Mahood’s Solar Commune label. The sounds that lie within are totally psychedelic and, perhaps more importantly, totally rockin’ but in a somewhat relaxed groovy kind of way.
A side “Vibrations” starts off slow with some phaser guitar noodling and ever so gradually starts turning up the volume, and the fuzz. This slow start leads me to believe the track is improvised, which is a total thumbs up in my book. Though everything begins to coalesce suspiciously quickly around the 5 minute mark so maybe I’m wrong. Either way, everyone’s instruments mesh real nicely—discernible but still moving through a little haze. I actually really dig the bass playing here, Bobzone lays down some nice two note grooves before Jed comes in and the guitars slowly go haywire. The enthusiastic vocal “wooooooooooooo”s that pop up towards the end are a nice touch too. Anyhow, just when the track feels like it’s really gonna get going and everyone is gonna bust out their secret karate moves they’d been saving, they start to break it down and dismantle it piece by piece. Which is cool, though I have to admit I would have really liked to see the band go all wild eyed and start foaming at the mouth, I bet they’d be awesome at it.
Luckily for me, the Eternal Tapestry guys get a tad more aggressive on the flipside’s sole track “New Dawn”. It’s 12 minutes of guitar fuzz and midtempo crash cymbals. The whole thing rumbles along on the verge of total meltdown with low-end fuzz, half lurching/half grooving drumming and some nasty wah-wahed axe duels trick you into believing a reckoning is about come. It never does though and that’s fine by me.
I’ve never heard anything else by these guys, so I can’t say for sure, but it seems like their thing is to take the psych-rock blueprints and shade them with subtlety rather than scrawl sweaty freakouts all over them. The point is not to take the jam to a drastically different place than it started, but instead to just make it a little groovier, a little hairier and maybe a little louder. And the trick works quite nicely for them, I must say.
Hopefully I’ll get to catch a show by these guys during my summer months here in PDX but I can’t seem to dig up any dates online, so I’ll see how that goes. Nonetheless, if yr into psychedelic cassette jammin’ look no further, there are still copies (for cheap too) over at Not Not Fun the last time I checked but it is limited to a hundred so get yr ass in gear if you want one. A real nice packaging job by the way, black tapes speckled with silver paint and textured labels and then a piece of textile fabric is glued on the case in conjunction with the already cool J-card design. Very sweet.
A side “Vibrations” starts off slow with some phaser guitar noodling and ever so gradually starts turning up the volume, and the fuzz. This slow start leads me to believe the track is improvised, which is a total thumbs up in my book. Though everything begins to coalesce suspiciously quickly around the 5 minute mark so maybe I’m wrong. Either way, everyone’s instruments mesh real nicely—discernible but still moving through a little haze. I actually really dig the bass playing here, Bobzone lays down some nice two note grooves before Jed comes in and the guitars slowly go haywire. The enthusiastic vocal “wooooooooooooo”s that pop up towards the end are a nice touch too. Anyhow, just when the track feels like it’s really gonna get going and everyone is gonna bust out their secret karate moves they’d been saving, they start to break it down and dismantle it piece by piece. Which is cool, though I have to admit I would have really liked to see the band go all wild eyed and start foaming at the mouth, I bet they’d be awesome at it.
Luckily for me, the Eternal Tapestry guys get a tad more aggressive on the flipside’s sole track “New Dawn”. It’s 12 minutes of guitar fuzz and midtempo crash cymbals. The whole thing rumbles along on the verge of total meltdown with low-end fuzz, half lurching/half grooving drumming and some nasty wah-wahed axe duels trick you into believing a reckoning is about come. It never does though and that’s fine by me.
I’ve never heard anything else by these guys, so I can’t say for sure, but it seems like their thing is to take the psych-rock blueprints and shade them with subtlety rather than scrawl sweaty freakouts all over them. The point is not to take the jam to a drastically different place than it started, but instead to just make it a little groovier, a little hairier and maybe a little louder. And the trick works quite nicely for them, I must say.
Hopefully I’ll get to catch a show by these guys during my summer months here in PDX but I can’t seem to dig up any dates online, so I’ll see how that goes. Nonetheless, if yr into psychedelic cassette jammin’ look no further, there are still copies (for cheap too) over at Not Not Fun the last time I checked but it is limited to a hundred so get yr ass in gear if you want one. A real nice packaging job by the way, black tapes speckled with silver paint and textured labels and then a piece of textile fabric is glued on the case in conjunction with the already cool J-card design. Very sweet.
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