Freq reviews Gnod's Easy To Build, Hard To Destroy

They say:

The nouveau mediaevalism of the first track on Easy To Build, Hard To Destroy, “Elka” is a choice gem plucked for those early hippy daze where I first mentally hitched a ride on the Gnod train from the back of a dusty Trowbridge barn. A trickle of curling consciousness, leaking naturally into the latch key languid incessants of “Inner Z”, full of sweeping Moog and dazzling silver, the free-flowing vocal caged by a chordic bite and colliding colour.

It’s hot and summery and I have this on headphones, a fly lands on the page of a book I’m reading, and it walks the words in time to that steadily metered sprawl that wheels through my head in twisting spirals. Its thin insect legs obscure the letters, then scrabble-dance as the vocals levitate languidly in a weird synchronicity that plays nicely along...

Read the rest here: Freq

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Tom Tom Rock reviews The Holy Family

They say:

The Holy Family's debut album is a surprising trip in mysterious sonic dimensions, an almost 90-minute long ritual whose master of ceremonies is David J. Smith , percussionist and multi-instrumentalist already with Guapo and The Stargazer's Assistant. The musicians who assist him have precedents with bands such as Gong, Coil, The Utopia Strong, Téléplasmite ... very respectable past that guarantee a very high technical level and that accompany us in the maze of the most creative British underground, in which this album also lives, to between avant-garde, progressive, folk wyrd, psychedelia with space and ethnic influences.

The 'plant' The Holy Family
The Holy Family is like a plant firmly anchored to mother earth, but with long branches reaching out into the universe. The roots are represented by references to an ancestral folk matrix, percussions are preferred to drums that easily evoke the image of esoteric rites consumed in dark clearings to awaken the elements of nature. As in Lovecraftian mythology, the doors of access to another reality are opened, which returns to us simultaneously from the deepest interstellar spaces and from a remote and forgotten past...

Read the rest here: Tom Tom Rock

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The Prog Aspect reviews The Holy Family

They say:

My initial thoughts were, “Can I just say… this album is fucking tremendous!” Read on further if you want the long version. 

One of my go-to “altered state” albums has long been The Isness by Amorphous Androgynous – those who know, know. When I spotted a vinyl version of the Abbey Road mix of this fine slice of English wiggoutery on Discogs, I had to snap it up. I just played it prior to giving my shiny new copy of The Holy Family a spin, and it is the perfect hors d’oeuvre for David J. Smith’s main course, I must say! Gaz Cobain’s lysergic musings meld seamlessly into I Have Seen the Lion Walking, the opening woozily wonderful song on this effervescent new album from a new-but-old band, from whom we always await fresh waxings with a puppy-like eagerness.

You see, The Holy Family is really those tremendous righteous noiseniks Guapo wearing Kosmische make-up and a lush feather in their cap. Convening in Plague Year to craft a new album, David J. Smith and his mischievous troupe, namely Kavus Torabi, Emmett Elvin, Sam Warren, and Michael J. York, found that the heavy manners of the times was guiding the Guapo muse into an entirely different and colour-negative elysian landscape, far removed from its usual altar of levitational and deeply spiritual insistently heavy and heady rhythms. Here, where the musical kaleidoscope frequently hones in on rolling vistas of odd but vaguely calming hues, before heading off through clouds of Kosmische dust, things are not what they once were or may ever be again...

Read the rest here: The Prog Aspect

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Flowers Must Die announce rare live show

Flowers Must Die are playing a rare show at Festival of the Midnight Sun in their home town of Linköping on the 28th of August. Also on the bill is Träden and Baby Grandmother.

Info: Festival of the Midnight Sun

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Freq reviews The Holy Family album

They say:

This has a weird energy, a smokey commune bonfiring prog, hippy trippiness and the more esoteric end of the musical spectrum.

A flamboyant mirage angeling the experimental itch of the Ya Ho Wha 13, King Crimson and Comus (and a hell of a lot more). The Holy Family‘s head architect David J Smith has gathered together a host of like-minded travellers, including The Utopia Strong’s Kavus Torabi, and Téléplasmiste’s Michael J York to bounce ideas between.

The Holy Family is a fusion of spacey collisions and peppered psychedelics inspired by the shimmering surrealism of Angela Carter and displaced realities of Dorothea Tanning, the narrative slips past, as snippets zero in, dreamily detonate, affix themselves like uneven tapestries alive with candied contours and half-lit rabbit holes.

That tindering ’70s Brian Eno off-cut that is “Skulls The…” coaxing the cobra to cast wavery silhouettes across the room. The acoustic dawn of “Inward Turning Suns” that merrily ribbons your head like a Woodstocked aquarius, its flowered braids kaleidoscopically kiltering into the Can-like candy of “Stones To Water” that beetles some tasty percussive recoil and gargling crocodiles. A diverse universe, satirically pinching at its influences as “Desert Night” lustfully devours a Comus-like glee, and the musicality drifts out from its moorings to Rorschach the uncharted...

Read the rest here: Freq

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Listen to The Holy Family special on Sideways Through Sound radio show

Listen to this interview with David J Smith from The Holy Family plus a playlist of tracks he has picked out exclusively for  Australia's Sideways Through Sound radio show.

Listen here: Sideways Through Sound

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Listen to rare GOAT interview on Le Guess Who's 'The Big Playback' podcast

Listen to episode 2 of Le Guess Who's 'The Big Playback' podcast about the relationship between Art and Identity which features a rare interview with a member of GOAT amongst other interviewees.

You can listen here: Le Guess Who

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Le Guess Who? presents ‘The Big Playback’, a conversational, in-depth podcast about all things music. In the second episode of ‘The Big Playback’, host Margaret Munchheimer talks to four different musicians about the shifting relationship between Art and Identity and who in some way explore the self as a medium, through persona and performance. 

Episode 2 of ‘The Big Playback’ is titled What's Behind The Mask? It has been said that our ability to create art is directly linked to our ability to imagine something beyond what we see in front of us. For many, that imaginary ‘something’ begins with the Self. This episode explores the shifting relationship between Art and Identity, from alter-Ego to anonymity.

What kinds of possibilities are open to an artist through inhabiting a persona of their own creation that wouldn’t be available otherwise? Does the work create the Self, or vice-versa, and what are the effects of living in that space of transformation even beyond the stage?

The episode centers around conversations with Patrick Flegel (Cindy Lee), Natalie Sharp (Lone Taxidermist), Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) and an undisclosed member of Goat.

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Watch video for Land Trance track 'Transcript'

Here is the band made video for the track 'Transcript' by Land Trance, taken from their debut album 'First Séance' which is available on ltd edition vinyl. We have sold out but there should still be a handful of copies ion the shops. 

You can hear the album in full here:

Bandcamp   Spotify

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Gum Takes Tooth added to Raw Power line-up

Great to see that Gum Takes Tooth are joining fellow rocketeers Teeth of the Sea, Sex Swing and Petbrick at this years Raw Power Festival – weekend and day tickets are available: 

Raw Power

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Louder Than War and Echoes and Dust reviews The Holy Family album

They say:

The Holy Family are a band led chiefly by David J Smith and whose membership includes the likes of Kavus Torabi, Emmett Elvin, Sam Warren and Michael J York. Borne out of improvisations which took place in an old country house, the album was then molded into shape by Smith and engineer / mixer Antti Uuismaki, for approval and final overdubs from the rest of the collective. Inspired by everything from magical realism, children’s folk tales and the surrealist art of Dorothea Tanning, The Holy Family finds itself perfectly placed to soundtrack imagined journeys both outer and inner and seeing as most of us have not been able to travel far these last eighteen months then its timing could not have been better...

Read the rest here: Louder Than War

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What kind of foolhardy sonic adventurer would launch a new band with a double album of mind bending psychedelic rock? Not the fragrant chanteuse Olivia Rodrigo – at time of writing bothering the much coveted number one slot on the UK charts with ‘Good 4 U’. No doubt Ms Rodrigo’s “People” would advise her against sailing such a career-destroying course through the tempestuous waters of commercial pop. Much better to “do it for the kids” (or indeed, The Kidz). No, no pilgrim, The Holy Family are the ones to press-gang you aboard their leaky galleon and fare the sonic seas to the whirlpool of oblivion...

Read the rest here: Echoes and Dust

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