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LP
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DAK 022LP
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"From their early '90s inception to the latter years of the 21st century's first decade, No Neck Blues Band appeared (to distant observers, anyway), to be something of the Platonic ideal for the 'improvisational collective,' in turn confounding ideas of authorship, recognition, and fame. A fragile symbiosis at best, the scrim of anonymity began to fray sometime around the turn of the century, and a group that looked like it might, for a second, become the ur-rock, drug-soaked United-States-of-American AMM, instead unraveled. As individual members began to emerge from behind the veil, the conceptual, compositional, and improvisational personalities behind the group's untouchable alchemy took form. Two of the group's lifers stood out -- Dave Shuford, undeniably the group's guitar powerhouse (who also revealed himself to be an ace songwriter with Rhyton, D. Charles Speer, et al), and Pat Murano, who founded his label Daksina to explore obsessions with deep electronics, metal's outer reaches, and late-night murmurings of all sorts. In addition to whatever else they were, Murano and Shuford confirmed their status as high-order improvisers, albeit with an expansive grip wielding far more power than the polite conversationalism permeating most 'non-idiomatic' improv genres. On their second duo LP Sing and Play for the Guru, Shuford and Murano dig deep into the crevices of nocturnal electric moan, the first side a meditation on the abyss that sits easily on the shelf next to Murano's blackest Decimus musings. Building at a horrifically slow pace towards a sunless molten boil of vocals and electronics, the side is a perfect soundtrack to our ongoing entropic apocalypse, a 'dark ambient' opus that manages to make Abruptum sound like Kiss. While it's a stretch to call side B 'brighter,' it moves from its opening guttural cyborg eviscerations into tranced-out elaborations on non-Western modalities (something both of these punters excel at) with synapse-cleansing grace. As a whole, the LP ups the ante yet again for Daksina, whose every release effortlessly resets the pinnacle for non-rock psychedelic entanglement. Regardless of your take on the future, it seems foolish to muse on society's collapse with anything other than this record on the deck, your ass in an armchair, and your libations of choice flowing into your gullet." --Tom Carter
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LP
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DAK 016LP
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"In some distant future? No, you say. Now, there's a logic in being skeptical about seers, but there have been some murmurings that perhaps you're devoid as well. Easy stuff is fun, it's the obvious stuff that should make your hair stand on end. Fun stuff is fun, they say. So, drop it and have a little conjuring session. If there's desert access, take advantage of it, you'll be glad you did. For the less fortunate of us, find a field, a rooftop, a city street corner. Let's say that you're worried that you've been dubbed a thing, marked. Who isn't? Who hasn't? Now look up at the sky; please don't be concerned with the time of day or night. At some point, they'll be born into it. In how distant a future? A requiem for a failed space program vibrates the air. Electronic fireworks sizzle in the distance. Somewhere, a beacon has been received. Will they shed it, their mark? Remember, there's comfort in not suffering. And the profanity of genre, it's like a curse! Worse still, each remaining one a lonely scaffold supporting the crumbling edifice, their backs to the proverbial wall and thus facing the wrong way. Will there be more? Think of the awful words they'll designate to them, spat out. The edifice presupposes something on the other side of it. Something to come; this is what's to come music. Can you hear the signals embedded within? How about the patterns? Are you counting, are you good with numbers? Here being the moment when a nay-sayer could interject some paradox about the difference between remembering and repetition. Or a haiku about the void. But if you look over there you can see those wavering shadows. There is light around that corner, fire born maybe. See how it glows, then see the projected flickering darkness? This is music for a deprogramming. In some distant future? you ask. Well, not yet." Recorded winter 2021/22. Silkscreen by SIWA Prints. Limited to 100 copies.
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