rafi bookstaber

 rafi bookstaber ~ late summer (woodsist, 2016)

“We’d like to welcome back our old friend Rafi Bookstaber. It’s all good... the immediate thing I felt when I jammed his Late Summer for the first time was wanting to hug life, cosmic love in the underground. 

“This is a diff kind of human digitata, it’s sweet analog. You dig spring reverb, then maybe flesh it with sum Ra-fi. Pure jam. Extended solos and explorations go from downtown woodland discord and eternal reverie to Relatively Clean Rivers and beat earth poetics. Pretty darlin’ indeed...

“What a vapor trail of music; very groovy to see folks finally catching up to this head. Dawn of a new vibration out of his occult pedigree in so many spaced out earth objects (Death Chants / Aswara / Von Himmel / Mendocino). Bookstaber also logged golden hours with Time-Lag and that deep scene. The beginning of an ear and golden spirit juice. Mined private press vision with his own Azriel and Humito imprints, shucked handmades~there’s also his groove and howl with the wolfpack in the MV / EE axis. Oxide, preserves and records…Rafi hummed the music of maidens. Iron Maiden this is not, shipbuilding it sails, four sail and many years ago I was there, so was Rafi’s fi. You dig, apache? Find some wampum, blow a journey, be here now for Late Summer eternal...” Matt “MV” Valentine

buy ~ listen

mv & ee

 mv & ee - space homestead (woodsist, 2012)

 
Coming at Space Homestead after heavy lifting with the recent Suub Duub live box, the first thing that hits you is the heightened articulacy of the group’s arrangements, which somehow stand out amid the blissfully languid performances. There are plenty of beautiful MV & EE songs out there, but very few quite as weightless and hallucinatory as “Moment,” where Valentines’s falsetto melts into Elder’s dream-sigh, buoys bobbing in an estuary of reverb for two criminally short minutes, while guitar and piano play a lover’s retreat, easy and gentle. The first half of Space Homestead feels almost uncommonly beatific and becalmed, the group playing through a haze of smoke, with Valentine and Elder’s voices sitting somewhere between an unforced drawl and soft susurration.

The second side of the record hits heavier. “Too Far To See” starts drowsy, swimming out on a tide of slide guitar, but about 90 seconds in, the song cuts to a more tense and fervid pace, as though David Crosby and his gang got all uptight during the recording of “Laughing.” When you reach the closing “Porchlight,” MV & EE finally surrender the reins to their more extended side, with what sounds like live recordings, carved up, exposed to the elements, and then bolted on to the front of a particularly weightless chunk of meandering blues, close to perhaps MV & EE’s clearest predecessors, the great Souled American. But it’s the preceding “Wasteland” that hits hardest, gifted with a graceful, slow, countrified gait, Elder and Valentine singing in unison over chord changes that seem to pull the ground out from underneath your feet, leaving you suspended mid-air and happy with it, before a fuzz-tone guitar solo carves firework shapes through the clouds. It’s another in a long line of seductive drift-songs from this most wise, peripatetic and yet enigmatic duo. dusted magazine

buy - download

matt valentine

matt valentine ~ what i became (woodsist 2011)

"...elements of deep forest psychedelia brush against Crazy Horse guitar / vocal flourishes that explode to reveal volk-based form mayhem at its hickiest. My particular fave here is PK Dick, a paean to nth dimensional logic in the form of a Swedish psych-folk readymade. My son prefers the haunted-Harvest-vibe (his words) of  Ave. B. My wife goes for the Seventh Sons approach offered by Sweet Little Indian Girl (always a fave with the ladies). And my daughter nods in the direction of Continuing the Good Life for reasons she will not explain. All this just goes to show that What I Became is a fun album for the whole family. It will soothe your savage breasts. It will turn your evil mother-in-law into a porpoise. It will wash your dishes and darn your socks. Darn them! Motherfucker, who else would do that? Nobody, Jack, except Matt Valentine. This guy has the magic touch. And it has never been displayed better than here..." woodsist

otro disco para seguir en modo floating...ease my eyes, por decir alguna, es maravillosa. neil young vs wooden wand, hush arbors & satya sai, sin ecstatic peace. 'this guy has the magic touch', mil veces sí!

 buy / download (gracias, davide)

ducktails

ducktails ~ ducktails III: arcade dynamics (woodsist 2010)

"...that delightful lazy summer day vibe hasn’t left the Ducktails music either, had this come out in the summer I’d probably be blasting this every day. As it stands, I guess I can close my eyes and pretend it is warmer." beach sloth

foto: alan giberson

woods

woods ~ at echo lake (woodsist 2010)

"The distance between 2007's At Rear House and 2010's At Echo Lake may at first seem only semantic, but it more properly represents a move from a kind of informal back porch jam ethos to a fully-committed vision of the infinite possibilities of group playing. Over the past few years, Woods has established themselves as an anomaly in a world of freaks...But despite the instrumental innovation the album heralds guest musician Matthew Valentine's harmonica and modified banjo / sitar on Time Fading Lines, At Echo Lake is all about the vocals. Woods secret weapon is the quality of Jeremy Earl's voice, absorbing the naïve style of Jad Fair, Jonathan Richman and Neil Young while rethinking it as a disciplineand a tradition. Here he is singing at the peak of his powers, in a high soulful style bolstered by heavenly arrangements of backing vocals. At Echo Lake feels like the transmission point for teenage garage from the past to the future. Deformed by contemporary experiments, bolstered by magical traditions, it's the sound of now, right here, At Echo Lake." Dave Keenan

foto: árbore

download / buy

ganglians

ganglians ~ s/t (woodsist 2009)

"Sacramento's Ganglians want an island somewhere where they can soak in the sun and prowl the canopy by night. It's not often that they do get out, but they can get down for that. Recording sometimes as one, sometimes as four it's a real game to figure out where the entity comes from and where it's going. First and foremost it's about uncertain pleasures. It's a bit like choose your own adventure. There's "codeine balladry"; a slightly upsetting tempo that is quickly flushed into an aural high, the next moment you're in the toy strewn abyss of the bedroom and then out to the tribal caves of the natives. The planets align and the sun beats down, palms tingling, and you are on the island they've built, the scenery constantly shifting for a better view, of you." woodsist

download