Chicagoans Rebecca Schoenecker and Patrick Holbrook probably heard all the lame jokers getting labeled as freak folk and were like “fuck this” and felt the urge to show everybody what’s up. The heart of LEWE’s weirdness is Rebecca’s initially almost unbearable vocals. At first, she sounds whiney, abrasive, and incompetent but by the end of the album you realize she can actually have a remarkably beautiful voice. She chooses when to sound like a howling cat, enchanting siren, demented shaman, or elegant princess, and it always works perfectly.

Like most freak folkers, LEWE’s array of instruments is vast but pretty traditional. There’s the tambourines, bells, chimes, recorders, Casios, guitars, plenty of handclapping, and, most importantly, the ever-present and always welcome harmonium. In fact, it sounds like they use a harmonium as the core for most tracks and I fucking LOVE IT. Gorgeous reeds humming and wheezing those irresistible droning chords, adding an element of soothing bliss to the frequently atonal album.

I’m not gonna lie, when I first heard Where Snakes & Seers Go, I wasn’t sold. I was damn interested because anything this weird always catches my attention, but it took me awhile to see its genius & inner beauty. Laughing Eye Weeping Eye probably aren’t going to be the next Prince Rama but I’m absolutely certain their fans are going to be wayyyy more dedicated. Once you have that LEWE epiphany, you’re fuckin hooked for life.

And the album is available on the cheap digitally and analog-ally with the limited LP being pressed on some super swanky pink/lavender vinyl, which they somehow did even though this is self released? I think? Unless I missed the label info somewhere. Dunno. Either way, slick as hell and totally worth the mere $10.

New work from Nicholas Szczepanik isn’t rare. If you’ve been keeping up with his Ante Algo Azul subscription series, you’d know he’s been putting out a new 15-20 minute piece every month. However, a new full length, well, we haven’t had one of those since LAST YEAR. Withdrawal inducing, to say the least. But the best news about this recent one, though, is that it’s the longest single piece Szczepanik has released (I think?), just about 50 minutes worth of beautiful tones & dreamlike drones. Fucking HEAVEN.

I can’t imagine a nicer way to spend each and every day than listening to Please Stop Loving Me. It dances in such organic ways, shifts and glides so smoothly, pure delicacy seeping through each moment. It’s like swimming through a spring fed lake, floating from pockets of warm to cool, rising and falling but always completely immersed.

As wonderfully serene as it is, the whole time you’re wading waist deep in emotion, the sustained & intertwined tones heavy hearted, cascading heartache, longing, and hope. An elegiac softness matched with poignant massiveness that ends on the brightest, most uplifting note, fading into the horizon.

I’ve listened to this countless times and every time it’s more breathtaking than the last. It’s almost overwhelming how gorgeous it is. If I was the type of dude that was brought to tears by a record, Please Stop Loving Me would have made me weep until I collapsed.

Not all of the tracks appeal to me, there’s lots of vocals & flutes giving off a fantasy vibe that just doesn’t rub me the right way, but “Cream Sky” is a perfect example of where they dance line, staggering ever so closely to the dreaded cheese zone but ending up with something totally fucking great. There’s plenty of classy instruments, making a warm and airy atmosphere, then tossing in some reversed sounds to spice things up. The deep resonant vocals eventually come in, flowing like silk through the forest, a wondrous & light hearted dream, and finishing with looped hand claps and mouth clicks. Super cool stuff, especially when heard in the context of the whole record.

Mind Over Mirrors (solo project of Jaime Fennelly of Peeesseye, Acid Birds, etc) takes a harmonium and fucks it up with all sorts of pedals & FX, making it droooooone in the most beautiful way possible. You think harmoniums are naturally good-lookin? Just wait and see what Fennelly does with ’em. Stretched out gauze floating through pink/grey bliss, endless layers of reed textured harmonies, all of the fantastic things about harmoniums but given a new life through Fennelly.

On “You Ain’t Reeling” he pounds out a Zomes like techno loop with a chopped up beat that could get your Blade Runner dance mix up and running, the nearly 12 minute long “Point Hammond” takes a toasted feedback sound and psychs it up into a mournful slow burner, like some lost guitar in a vast sea of golden mist, stuck in a static wasteland dirge, rummaging through bottled up gloom, “Coaling” is a deep thunder rumble, rupturing black smoke and tearing holes in the sunny sky, “Round, Around” is a peppy pop tune, panning and waving a subdued rager, glistening in the pulsing wash, but all of this is is just child’s play when compared to the real action on the expansive “Barely Spun” which again takes a loopy beat driven approach, a warped Giffoni-esque acid synth jam on ecstasy steroids, building into a heavenly grit so monolithic it’ll blind you to the fact that you just creamed your pants.

The amount of pleasure I get from listening to The Voice Rolling is almost incalculable. Fucking free reeds, man. They just do it. They make the drone that is the ESSENTIAL drone. And when they’re put in the masterful hands of someone like Fennelly who can make them do whatever the hell he wants, the result is a record that’s pure fucking bliss. Best of all, it’s getting the vinyl treatment very soon thanks to Digitalis.

Some Kissed Charms is a mostly minimal, mostly synthy drone monster, spicing things up with some noise & field recordings (I think?) on two side long pieces. The A side is a heaving sweetheart, giving you massive swells of dense intimidation, never breaking any volume records or shattering eardrums, but glowing bright & loud enough to make your knees quake a bit. But in between those swells are loooong drawn out bouts of nothing. Literally, multiple minutes go by with nothing but the texture of vinyl and your surrounding white noise, making each listening experience entirely different from the next. Walking home late at night with this on the headphones, for example, is a fantastic way to listen to this, as the occasional car passes by, mimicking the rise & fall of the drones on the record. Too fucking cool. Eventually the silent spurts turn into a high end unnerving ambience, along the lines of bowed metal, then some distant helicopters get mixed in, each successive “in between” lull adding a little mail order cialis online more, but always the waves of beautiful hypnotic clarity continue to wash up, and ending just as the B side starts, creating a smooth transition to the otherwise intrusive physicality of flipping the record.

The B side is starts out rearing its head in the same slow pulsing way as before, but the repetitive swells don’t last, instead going for a minimally textured glitched bubbling weave, like melting icicles on top of a blanket of thick tones. Rather than letting your environment paint a picture for you like on the A side, Rale does all the heavy lifting, conjuring images of watching a thunderstorm roll in on the beach, the dripping ice turning into rain drops piercing raincoats, wind whipping tarps against the sand, blowing a soothing grit into the mic, breathing in the salted air and waiting for the storm to reach shore, only to find that it just misses the coast and you see the tail end of it, safe from the expected destruction, the rain still pelting your face, worse than before, but enjoying it without fear and wallowing in the glory of the lightening sky, the majesty of nature beautifully overwhelming.

So Rale’s new record is pretty fucking astounding. If this can’t convince people of his greatness, nothing can. BUT ACT FAST, only 300 copies were made, and they are insanely awesome to behold. Just like Acre’s Isolationist, that image up there looks like ass compared to the real deal. It’s a bright neon blue jacket with silver foil stamping, artwork done by none other than Brandon Nickell himself. Hot. As. Fuck.