Released March 20th, 2019
Inner Space Gaze Album or Alien Contact Summoning Ritual?
With the explosion of cultural interest regarding psychedelic compounds as of late, few musical acts dare to ask the most fundamental question posed by these profound experiences, which would clearly be:
“Can samplers be used to summon the 5th dimensional God entities that hide within us all?”
No one disputes that shamans have been using sound to warp consciousness since time immemorial, but what happened to that thread in modern times exactly? New research unequivocally indicates that all of our ancient space wizards were like totally onto something with the drugs we made illegal thing, but what about the rest of their weird schtick? Can you really contact star people from “the heavens” with the right combination of chemical mind manipulation and bitchin’ guitar noise? Could sick beats and head fuck sequencers help push one through the veil and into telepathic space bliss?
If there’s any mere human who could answer these essential inquiries into the exotic nature of the human imagination, it’d be sole remaining Black Science member and former editor of the legendary (but now sadly extinct) countercultural institution Disinfo.com, Thad McKraken:
“Well, I was just sort of getting into psychedelic ritualism when Black Science released our first studio album, Cosmodemonic & Beyond. We had a psilocybin listening party and while we were in the midst of the album tripping us out, my consciousness was suddenly invaded by an unbelievable cavalcade of mutating surrealist imagery filled with sea spiders, mollusks, and various other shellfish. What was being communicated to me here was that the creative intelligence responsible for certain elements of the insect kingdom, arachnids in particular, was also the artistic mind responsible for a lot of these other undersea creature varietals. I can’t say this had ever occurred to me before, but I suppose it makes sense. Similar style as far as god mode character design goes.
This eventually segued into a vision of these muscles who were all conjoined together internally as well as physically clinging to the rocks while fighting against the oncoming surf through a particularly brutal storm. In time the storm subsided and there was such a beautiful communion among them. Their world was hard but there was also an unseen connective psi bond that echoed radiantly after surviving such a triumph. Well beyond what our earthly descriptors are currently capable of conjuring forth into mental pictures, but I try.”
So yeah, there’s that. There’s also finally a follow up to the best reviewed Seattle psych rock album of 2012. Worlds Within Worlds, Worlds Without End picks up where An Echo Through the Eyes of Forever left off and begs listeners to ask the important existential questions in life like, can you summon beings from the outer reaches just by getting high and wigging out to a psych record? I’m thinking the answer here is probably dudes, dudettes, and dudercopters. Proba-fuckin-bly.
Select Reviews:
Black Science is not a Boy-Band. You will never see Black Science on ‘X-Factor’. Before the Black Science foursome, Seattle was home to Jimi Hendrix, Paul Revere And The Raiders as well as Kurt Cobain. There’s a segment of Hawkwind’s “Silver Machine” where the relentless drums pound with mind-numbing repetition as the synths swarm like metal bees swirling around a guitar riff that teeters precariously into phased noodling on the point of collapse into fragmented quarks. It’s this exact point along the space-time curve that Black Science take as its ignition point, conjuring its chaos magick further into sheets of dazzling psychedelic noise. Yet not entirely dementoid, for there’s clever mastery of studiocraft and dynamics at work here too, creating “Divine Explosions” in realms “Where No Human Hath Ever Trod”. With hard guitar figures breaking through in the beautiful bones of a lost skeletal structure, both psilocybin spore-drive and ion-powered into interstellar overdrive. A hypnotic trance mantra beneath the twin moons of Mars.
The theoretical collective entity ‘Thad McKraken’ has got that good-soul in his feet. And it’s here that ‘The Kraken Wakes’. There are guitarists John G and Adam Draeger, Reverend Ryk Lambert on bass and keys as well as drummer G Eichler. They started recording weirdly rough-edged tracks that found a place on their debut first contact manual ‘A New Mastery Of Light’ in 2008. Their second sojourn – ‘Cosmodemonic And Beyond’ two years later, mutates heavy psych-rock into wigged-out stoner, “Resurrection Ship” is all contented 1950s housewives, straightjacket Sci-Fi, nuclear Armageddon, and Betty’s Page and Boop, spacey and hallucinogenic – orbiting the spectre of Hawkwind, Cranium Pie, and the Auckland, New Zealand Black Science (no relation) who did a 1950s-style “Burn And Rave” Horror-movie psycho-shocker EP drenched in reverse tapes powered on a relentless down-down-deeper-and-down momentum. Or the ‘Black Science’ solo album by Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler (1997). No relation.
But this CD is even further out than that, even further out than their ‘An Echo Through The Eyes Of Forever’ (2012), with a billion tunes inside its dream. This is more formless. More abstract. More x-treme. Cultural alchemy, ontological anarchy, where anything written or heard could be trickster. There are seven tracks, extending out to fifty-three minutes, one track nudging the ten-minute mark, three exceeding it, loops, samples and vocal lines lost in the submerged mix – ‘I wasn’t in my body anymore’, tracks screeching, lurching and juddering into each other. “Strange Remembrance” enters the flake-memory total recall syndrome scam gone down, channelling the discorporate wandering spirit of Hendrix and Timothy Leary’s orbiting gravity-dust, before burning up in the fires of Alpha Centauri re-entry. An “Ancient Sorcery Sound” on the transdimensional express out somewhere beyond the Oort cloud, where “Eternity Beckons”.
Even their PR from ‘DMI: Dark Mind International’ poses existential equations. Can we really contact star entities using this correct combination of chemical-compound mind manipulation and bitchin’ guitar noise? Can sick beats and head-fuck sequencers help warp us through the quantum veil into telepathic space nirvana? This shamanic ritual conducts a brutal storm of inquiries into the exotic nature of human consciousness itself. And it’s serious fun. The heavy programmed rhythms of “All The Way Out” circling all the way around back to the opening “Macrocosmic” fade-in.
You only have to imagine this on ‘X-Factor’ or ‘America’s Got Talent’ to realise what’s gone wrong with twenty-first-century noise.
BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
8/10
Seattle has historically produced legions of unusual rock bands, but none quite like Black Science. A self-described noise rock outfit, it’s the brainchild of Thad McKraken and he brings psychedelic, ambient and highly experimental ideas to his sonic palette, as Worlds Within Worlds, Worlds Without End is about as mysterious as its title.
“Macrocosmic” starts the adventurous album off and it is indeed packed full of big, spacey sounds, where spoken word branches off into busy percussion and aberrant noises, including hazy vocals.
An album full of unclassifiable sounds, “The Ancient Sorcery Sound” might be the most definable as it rests somewhere just outside the realm of electro-pop, while elsewhere the setting gets club friendly with “Eternity Beacons” in an industrial, ominous sort of way.
The second half of the experience is equally unorthodox, with the hypnotic, strategically repetitive “Where No Humans Hath Ever Trod”, where a strong semblance of rock exists, and the quickest track, “Divine Explosions”, that brings synthetic drums into a warbling, hazy pop tune. The record concludes on the 10+ minutes of “All The Way Out”, which blends glitchy patterns, strong rhythm and droning noise-rock into a groove filled exit fit for another dimension.
Part sci-fi experiment, part rock’n’roll manipulation and completely iconoclastic in all avenues, Worlds Within Worlds, Worlds Without End will leave you bewildered in the best ways, anxious for another spin of truly remarkable art.
Travels well with: Comets On Fire- Blue Cathedral; The Mars Volta- De-Loused In The Comatorium
This new album by Black Science has almost nothing in common with World Without End by Bob Frank and John Murry other than a similar title and a love of mind-bending substances, only this is far more into space inducing psychedelics rather than opiates. Although the bands name is probably inspired by the comic of the same name. Macrocosmic the opener is a slow spaced out journey into the psychic unknown that revolves around a sample that sounds like something from an Irving Welch film explaining what certain drugs do to you as the music mutates and distorts your brain before the main vocals come in to lure you into the bands nether world of hallucinations and part remembered trips that I'm helping along with shots of cough medicine that might not have the same effect, but the pulsing beneath the expiring guitars might still work their way into the crevices of your mind over the 9 minute course of this opener. The Ancient Sorcery Sound needs as good trippy light show to go with it and maybe a lava lamp to stare at as you start flashing back to nights at Club Silver or Planet Dog and Megadog throw your arms in the air and shake along as the spirits move deep within you in Senser round sound with a slightly miasmic feel to it. Eternity Beckons with a repeating sample leading into some real nasty sounding noises and an odd drum loop to begin it's ten minute journey as the distended vocals come in and out of the mix and are at times more of a texture as they get buried by the noise engulfing them it's time to inhale deeply and get into space. If you're not tripping during this song you never will be even as it summons some rather baggy ghosts to help you summon the aliens that the press release suggests it might. I certainly feel fried and ready for some alien intervention as the disembodied voices sent strange messages that land deep within your cerebral cortex. Strange Remembrance is more of a straight ahead druggy indie rock song from the late 90's it's almost Madchester with an added almost four to the floor beat that everything goes off of, as everyone feels the love and angst on the dance-floor as everyone starts singing along to it. Where No Human Hath Ever Trod is the aliens trying to make contact, with weird signal noises bleeps and growls distortions and deeply disembodied buried vocals. In places it's like early Loop Guru before going harsher and darker as the drugs explode in your mind and you stagger around pulling strange poses wondering what this alien place you've ended up in is, other than a converted warehouse or decaying club that really feels like it's not someplace Humans really go. Divine Explosions might be what you have after too many ecstasy tablets with a viagra chaser as the deeply strange music swirls around you and your entwined and enmeshed trying to get that explosion timed for proper divine ecstasy at the conclusion of the song that will only be sexual on the right drugs otherwise it's a spaced out journey toward the space dust invading your brain. The album concludes with the 10 minute plus psycho drama of All The Way Out and you'll need to be to really get what's going on in this monster of a tune. Synth noises blasting you off that drum pattern that almost works as an anchor as really your un-tethered now out into the world beyond our world. Like most of this album this will sound much better on a colossal club system with high volume to seriously distort everyone's minds as some of the music plays backwards and forwards and sideways like a ship careening over a stormy sea before arriving at some pagan ritual unlike any you've experienced previously. Then it shifts as if they are trying to get the space craft into land but they don't have any retro rockets for the job as the original sample from the start of the album comes back in to make us all feel like we're having another flashback. find out more at www.dmioccult.bandcamp.com
