Please note new street date: December 10. 25th anniversary edition of Bardo Pond's long out-of-print second album and label debut, "Amanita" - newly remastered 2xLP reissue limited to 100 copies for Canada on purple vinyl. Formed in 1991, the Philadelphia-based quintet have spent some thirty years mapping guitar music's outer limits dialing into extremes of noise, chaos, and harmony in free-form compositions that now unfurl across 12 full-length records and a near-limitless body of EPs, cassettes, and CD-Rs. Recorded by the lineup of John Gibbons (guitar), Michael Gibbons (guitar), Isobel Sollenberger (voice, flute), Clint Takeda (bass), and Joe Culver (drums), "Amanita" is the place where the band's spontaneous collective creativity blazed into maturity. Even within the heady subcultural micro-verse of 90s underground zoner-music, the Fishtown-basement-dwelling quintet's vision of "psychedelia" was singular in its heaviness.
March 1 street date. Bardo Pond's extensive archive recordings series opens up once again with "Volume 9", an incisive journey into their hypnotic sound. Recorded in the early 2000s, it's a heady mix of acoustic ambience and menacing distortion. Infamous purveyors of longform stoner rock, Bardo Pond embrace their sludgestorms with graceful nods to Hawkwind, Earth, and my bloody valentine. For anyone uninitiated with the band's tranquilizing sound, "Volume 9" leans into their mesmeric practise with reckless abandon. Featuring two tracks recorded with ace percussionist Michael Zanghi (Kurt Vile/The War On Drugs) and the seminal two parter ‘War Is Over’, a lilting Floydian strum that’s invaded - quite literally - by unreconstructed noise. The Zanghi collaboration is an Eastern-facing mantra with percussive flurries and distorted modal shifts - like listening on the other side of feedback.