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- Releases - Red Queen Hypothesis - Contorted in Deep Space CD Red Queen Hypothesis - Contorted in Deep Space (Third Uncle Records) CD Red Queen Hypothesis is the flagship band of a large collective of Midwestern weirdos based out of Indianapolis and Richmond, Indiana - a sort of Bermuda Triangle of rural sonic oddity that has expelled homemade recordings since 2000 by such bands you've never heard as the Snatchclaws, the Library, and Sharky Farmers. Red Queen Hypothesis - or RQH, as their fans call them - perform a timeless, fuzzy-cute pop that has drawn comparisons to the Polyphonic Spree, Guided by Voices, the Gerbils, and Jim Henson's Muppets. On Contorted in Deep Space, the group has distilled the pop promise of its earlier homemade releases into a focused, singularly catchy collection of tunes. Science themes (leader Andrew Myers has a geology degree from Richmond's Earlham College), obtuse poetry, and drugged storytelling feature prominently on this album. It even features a commissioned children's song about the evolution of wooly mammoths! There are plenty of 60s pop nods on here - Beach Boys style bouncing and Kinks-inspired sing songs - mingling with the layers of quirk, fuzz and home fidelities that at least one critic is sure to describe as "catchier than a football." Besides mainstay Andrew Myers, Red Queen Hypothesis has had a pretty fluid membership, including noteworthy alums Joe O'Connell (Elephant Micah), Jason Henn (Kitchen Typists, Elephant Micah), and about a dozen other musicians, at least one of whom is currently in prison. Contorted in Deep Space features Myers and Henn on most instruments, under the sonic influence of recordist Graham Wood (Gray Home Music). Jason Henn - Peace Drills CDR Jason Henn - Peace Drills (Third Uncle Records) CDR Culled from a large mess of untitled computer music that Jason had stashed away for quite some time, the Peace Drills cycle was improvised and edited together in a loose tribute to Conlon Nancarrow. Employing the notation software Finale as a sort of 21st century player piano, Henn stacked, squeezed and quantized a year's worth of off-hand, amateurish piano solos into several chaotic minutes of digital soul-spew. Additional tracks, which sound something like sterilized Milton Babbit, feature the MIDI contributions of Microwave Background mainman Will Ryerson, as manually altered and tweaked into oblivion by Henn, ultimately realized as piles of keyboards and drums. It's a dense 30-some minutes. Oh, and for the curious, the disc's title refers to one of several aborted attempts to find grant money to release the abovementioned music, its author assuming that the vaguely Jazz-based/New Classical pretensions of the material might actually confuse someone into funding its release despite its irrelevance to any/everything. One such proposal was addressed to a non-profit that claimed to support daring and exciting peace/soc. justice-type projects. So, our maestro set about writing detailed programs for the six "peace drills," claiming that each was performed as a meditation on a particular geopolitical/historical/social something-or-other (ex., "Peace Drill 2: Journey Through Gaza") when, in fact, Jason really just wanted the scratch for nice pressed discs and a color booklet. The org didn't buy it, but, when Third Uncle agreed to do the thing as a handmade edition, the name stuck. Gray Home Music - Motorcycle One CD Gray Home Music - Motorcycle One (Third Uncle Records) CD Gray Home Music's fourth album, Motorcycle One, is its first for Third Uncle and easily the most calculated, ambitious record of the band's short life. In a densely packed 35-or-so minutes, Graham Wood, the "gray home" in Gray Home Music, betrays just how much lonely studio experimentation he's been up to in the three years since GHM's Send Some Energy to Me, apparently building layers of Death Cab/Superchunk guitars in his spare time and learning to stretch his tenor to its emotive peak (see "Discarded Star Pianos" or "Field Study Samples" and don't forget to catch your breath). The lapse between releases was also spent accumulating some very heavy biographical material that Wood has spun here into a neatly unified cycle of pop meditations on materialism, fading childhood memories, relocation and the pain of death. If that sounds a little heavy—and it certainly is—the collection manages never to drag under the weight of its text. In fact, the whole thing is so coated with tuneful pop optimism, not to mention production keen on headphone treats ("Drinking Light," "Electric Keyboard"), that the overwhelming aftertaste of Motorcycle One is sweet, warm and fuzzy, if just a little melancholy. Like a sonic wine cooler. GHM previously released three discs on the venerable Brooklyn-cum-Athens, Ga., label bumbleBEAR; albums that sit in line with other great pop by folks such as Bugs Eat Books, Fairmont Fair and the Boys' Star Library. Vollmar / Microwave Background - split 7" EP Vollmar / Microwave Background (Third Uncle Records) split 7" EP Justin Vollmar has consistently appeared in the most unlikely sectors of French media, including fashion magazines, TV guides, and even a monograph on the history of rock music (translated title: Rock Odyssey). In the summer of 2005, Justin journeyed overseas to investigate this phenomenon and share a few of his songs in person. Surprisingly, the French seemed uninfluenced by what had looked like outright Vollmar mania when viewed stateside. The nation went about its business as usual, our hero but another baguette tucked under its collective arm at the day’s end. Once, in a moment of painful anonymity, Justin stood on a busy Metro platform and screamed, “I’M THE GUY FROM THE TV GUIDE!” repeatedly, before the noise of an incoming train muted his cries for recognition. While the trip did nothing to demystify Vollmar’s strange foreign relations, it did yield a couple of great new songs. Committed to tape in an open-windowed Bordeaux apartment, “The Runner” and “Feels Good Hurts” intermingle street-level ambience with Justin’s characteristically understated guitar and voice. The effects of a little knob twiddling back in the States help create the sense that Vollmar has here reconciled the contrasting extremes of his vision, merging seamlessly his adventurous sense of pure sound with his already distinguished storytelling. Like Justin Vollmar, Microwave Background mastermind Will Ryerson is a Hoosier transplant, left-handed guitarist, and practiced home taper. Prior to their recent reissue, you would have had to send up a microwave telescope on a balloon above Antarctica to locate one of Ryerson’s homemade cdrs. Actually, that’s exactly what led cosmologists to report on the musicality of the real Cosmic Microwave Background, for which the band was named. In 1998, a device called Boomerang (Balloon Observations of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics) floated around the south pole gazing deep into subtle radiation from the beginning of time, still measurable at the universe’s absolute edges. Miniscule temperature variations in these big bang remnants indicated in the CMB a “harmonic series of angular scales,” an acoustic structure as enormous as space itself. The music of the earthly Microwave Background might also be concerned with the spheres, but what the band does best is look through its telescope backwards, creating a skewed miniature of something vast. Orchestral moods are played out through the tiny timbres of battery-operated keyboards. Noisy rock-outs are crammed back into the boombox. After all, Ryerson’s aesthetic is more human than cosmic, even as it evokes the otherworldly. The jubilant “Wavy Oasis” sounds as if it were a fuzzy pop radio hit broadcast from the very “place with all your past and future friends” imagined in its lyrics. “Moon and Northern Cross” correlates stargazing with songwriting before lifting off on a Sonic Youth-style guitar implosion. All this suggests a simple moral: when next in Antarctica, bring a turntable. Jason Henn / Kitchen Typists - Oh, Look Out CDR Jason Henn / Kitchen Typists - Oh, Look Out (Third Uncle Records) CDR Oh, Look Out is the digital companion to Henn's pair of limited edition lathe cuts for the Luddite Rural Recording Cooperative. Hand cut by Nemo at Time-Lag Records, the first disc, The First Announcements, features a jumble of feedback duets, acoustic song fragments, organ improvisation and guitar punching (!) with help from friends Lance Jones, Andrew Myers and Hiro Noodles. The forthcoming second disc, Two of Three Pieces, will feature segments from Henn's serial scores for 12-piece percussion ensemble and amplifiers. While the lathe cuts accomodate only about ten minutes of audio, each with a unique edit from the source tape, Oh, Look Out presents the lathe cut material unedited, including the three percussion pieces in their entirity. Filling things out to a lean 40 minutes, Henn added some material once intended for the lost Kitchen Typists album, The Pink Eye Tapes. "Kitchen Typists is the brainchild of Jason Henn, formerly of The Students, an Indiana-based outfit that took cues from Guided By Voices, Swearing at Motorists, and other lo-fi indie trailblazers. However, the Typists have little to do with Henn's past work, choosing instead to explore the experimental realms of analog recording, tape manipulation and sound layering. "Hymns for Phones clocks in at just over 35 minutes for 36 tracks. As implied, the movements are short, whizzing by before you get a chance to absorb them fully. It's frustrating at first, but it makes for great repeated listens. Murky voices, backwards vinyl and various ambient sound effects are mashed together with short, 4-track acoustic instrumentals, sometimes to a hilarious effect. Imagine the wit of The Freed Weed, the boldness of John Cale and the budget of a high school band, and you're pretty much there. "Hiro Noodles, operator of Athen's, Georgia's Dust Bunny records, also adds his input to the record, although it's hard to tell who's who and what's what. Suffice to say, Hymns for Phones initiates the kind of head-scratching that leaves the listener smiling in his or her confusion." -John Wenzel, Sponic Elephant Micah - Home of Astronauts 7" Elephant Micah - Home Of Astronauts (Third Uncle Records) 7" EP What we have here is four cover songs. At first, there appears to be no overarching theme in their derivation. Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover was a pop radio hit for Sophie B. Hawkins in the early 1990s. Bits, on the other hand, was authored by an amateur Hoosier punk group called the Snatchclaws, and never even formally recorded. And what about Purr Snickety, you ask? A Smashing Pumpkins b-side. Willing is a grammatical correction of Little Feats Willin, from the Sailing Shoes album (this is the one with the anthropomorphic cake on a swing). If there is unity to be found in this work, perhaps it is in Elephant Micahs uniquely blurred vision of the material. There is consistency, after all, in its very mystery. Sounds slip by with subtlety, never falling prey to our times endemic sonic exhibitionism. (See the cryptic, meterless sampling keyboard on Purr Snickety). Glimpses of meaning can be caught through gaps in the clouds, yet are never handed away wholesale. (See the heartfelt, yet somehow gigglish treatment of Damn). Home Of Astronauts represents a treasured and guarded art, whose rewards will be reaped by those with a love of realism. Elephant Micah uses the tools of bluegrass and country, especially the banjo, but in fractured, beautifully messed-up ways. [Elephant Micah, Your Dreams Are Feeding Back] is for the first night when its warm enough to sit on the porch at 3 a.m. -Jeffrey Lee Puckett, Courier-Journal (Louisville) Elephant Micah, Your Dreams Are Feeding Back named #18 of top 20 albums of 2003. -BigO (Singapore) Avec ce premier album, Elephant Micah simpose presque malgre lui comme lun des nouveaux chefs de file de lindie-folk americain. Signe sur BlueSanct, comme Justin Vollmar, Joe OConnell possede une grace sans pareil pour evoquer les maigres defaites et les petites victoires du quotidien A fleur de peau et a bout de souffle, ces dix-huit vignettes vont nous accompagner pendant longtemps. -Florent Mazzoleni, X-Rock (France) O'Connell has one of those beautiful voices that commands attention while somehow remaining soft and effortless, much like the music that accompanies it Songs like Old Song on New Love and Grace of St. Christopher (as well as the two versions of Ohio Arch, quoted above), with their distorted drumming and thoughtful arrangements are more than enough evidence of O'Connell's strength as a songwriter The Untied States of Elephant Micah's soft and spacious songs serve as a fitting reminder that there's beauty to be found in even the [vastest] cornfields. -Nick Hennies, Fakejazz