AETHR MYTH'D

Gotta be a little brief this week, my apologies...so one of the more underrated labels (or maybe more like underexposed - it's not like people who know the label don't rate it highly) around nowadays is the always awesome Spirit of Orr. I don't have a ton of their releases, but the ones I do have really rule, and their roster is pretty impeccable: Temple of Bon Matin, Ashtray Navigations, Axolotl, etc. I also really dig one of the entries in their "Blueberry Honey" CD-R series - a nice collection of oddities from Massachusetts mind-melders Believers called Forgotten Tracks - and I was lucky enough to be gifted with the fifth and newest episode of this series, The Night Outside by Aethr Myth'd. I've only had it a coupla days, but it's filled up pretty much all of my non-US Open time this weekend...

The band's basic story, from what I can glean, is that they were kind of formed as an alternate version of the Other Method (note the name similarities), with Paul Labrecque of that group (and also Sunburned) joined by Ron Schneiderman (at least for this CD...I've seen them listed elsewhere as Labrecque and Valerie Beth Webber, or Labrecque and Bram Devens, so apparently the parts rotate). Having never heard the Other Method I can't say what the stylistic deviation from the mothership is, but A Night Outside does remind me of Thuja in its organic noise feel, Pelt in its backwoods-y take on Theater of Eternal Music-style drone, and Jazzfinger (who've also been on Spirit of Orr) in the echoing lo-fi envelope that surrounds the band's humming meditations. A pretty stellar set of referents, to be sure...

All of which means that this is a fascinating set of windy drones, slow-growing noise, and eerie folk fragments that manages to be truly hypnotic - at least in the sense that every time I try to jump back to a particular track, the next thing I now I'm four or five tracks down the road before I've realized that we're not in the same town anymore. Makes it kinda hard to pick a fave to post - they're pieces of a puzzle that's easier to see when it's all put together - but I am particularly enamored of the second track, a rolling journey of squawking noises, crowing cacophony, and barely-there percussiveness, all weaved together with tantalizing passages of faded restraint. It's the kinda thing that makes me wanna lay down in a moon-lit forest and keep squinting and blinking in hopes of someday making out what I won't ever be able to see...or better yet have a dream in which I'm doing the same, and this is the soundtrack.

mp3:
AETHR MYTH'D - (track two) from A Night Outside