Terrestrial Tones – Blasted (Psych-o-Path)

There’ no doubt that Brooklyn duo of Dave Porter (Animal Collective) and Eric Copeland (Black Dice) will confound fans of either one of their day jobs with this outing. And if you think about Animal Collective and Black Dice’ track record and penchant for extremity, weirdness and structural incomprehensibility that’s definitely saying something. Yet Terrestrial Tones out weirds either outfit, producing some highly repetitive very challenging sonic pieces that alternatively sound like stoned improvised noodling and a series of half thought out lo fi textural renderings. They seem to be using field recordings, live instrumentation and electronic pedals, all manipulated, prodded and looped into a lo fi sonic soup. There appears to have been little thought about musicality, where dynamics, volume shifts or even structural progression seem wholly irrelevant. Rather Blasted comes across as difficult dense and slightly incomprehensible, where they have constructed a series of thick sonic events and re just waiting for them to play out before they move to the next.