OWL XOUNDS EXPLODING GALAXY “Touch The Iceberg” (Fuck It Tapes)
Wowl Sounds man. This relentless free-jazz rotary club is dropping a lot of releases these days, but this is the best one I’ve heard so far. Or wait, the A side is anyway. “Oh Sweet Iceburn” is a live minidisc recording/document of a raging, intuitive shakedown set at the Flywheel in West Mass with Thurston Moore on second guitar and it SLAYS. Owl Xounds’ side of the Mef Teef split on Arbor was great too but the tape-recorder low-fidelity blurred a lot of the action/interplay. Here, shit shines a lot brighter, Adam Kriney’s drumming flies, the dual basses rumble and slam and stop on dimes, the guitars fray into fried piles of string smoke…exploding galaxy indeed. But, for better/worse, the B side isn’t really Owl Xounds, it’s an electronic remix of the side A set by Liek Twi (aka Hektor Fontanez and Anthony Lebron). It’s by no means bad per se, but the majority of it is extremely digital and computery and the glitchy deconstructionist approach to Owl Xounds’ sound eliminates all the untamed analog primitivism and intensity which seems to be their deepest strength. So, I don’t know. It seems like a strange choice. But strange is subjective, so touch the iceberg yourself – does it feel cold to you?