Thursday 16 December 2010

DOWNLOAD: Hear Hums - Psyche Cycles



Hear Hums
Psyche Cycles

Hear Hums is an experimental audio-visual group from West Palm Beach, Florida.  Following quick on the heels of their debut Notions Shift at Tryptamine Bay they've released another cacophanous swathe of deeply trippy heavily Animal Collective influenced rhythm and noise tracks on their new album, Psyche Cycles, to be released on December 21st through Crash Symbols - the cassette label of Get Off The Coastmediafire or the label's Bandcamp. blog. Generously, they've offered it up for free at both


This album draws the same allusionary parallel to it's environment that I got from ...Tryptamine Bay; Soaked through with fierce sun and salty wind blown sea water, these tracks have an almost tropical heat radiating off them, and a soporific quality that melts away the listener's energies with their own occasionally furious movements, echoing the pull of tides in the ebb and flow; heavy percussion and abstract chaos jutting out like hard outcrops, promontories between the tonal eddies that lap against them - “Like the sea, I think” as Kelly Brook once said, before diving off a yacht into some azure blue somewhere along the equator.


The album opens with two tracks that bleed into each other, a coastal drift of ambience that swiftly builds into a blurring rolling boil of tumbling beats and yelps, hallmarks of Here Comes The Indian era Animal Collective, and a very strong influence on this album, but one that I think has been reconfigured and executed with such a distinct atmosphere that it doesn't matter if you can hear the reverence for that record. The peak comes towards the end of the fourteen tracks in Toward Above - four minutes of tribal synaptic hexing, building to something even more skin strippingly cacophonous, then Change brings a beat that might almost fit a nightclub; but makes it clear this is music for open skied starry nights rather than clammy ceilinged indoors with its assortment of exotica embellishing that sturdy thump. Not one for the clubs, but easily one to throw on once you get back, especially in the hot night of Summer. Maybe turn the radiators on full for the now.


Here's a video of the first two tracks - the great double whammy opener - created by the band, all their own recorded material, using a colour saturated kaleidoscopic lens-flare technique that evokes further that heat-soaked beach-side aura of the music without being explicit about it:

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