Bardo Pond Announce New Album ‘Volume 8’ Out February 2nd 2018 + Reveal First Track ‘Kailash’
Limited edition purple vinyl / black vinyl / CD
Bardo Pond ‘Kailash’ audio:
There’s something of the intrepid and spiritual about this one. For sure. Are we’re reading far too much into this 40-minute opus? Are we conceptualising what is a psychedelic tapestry that’s slowly unravelling into the inner ear? Who knows? But it feels like it.
Anyway, here’s a starter, for ten… Imagine the scene – It all begins by scaling the heights of China’s mystical ‘Kailash’ mountain amid a hail of reverb which is soulfully and stoically caressed by a ceremonial flute, before regret and reminiscences infiltrate a stuttering tribal hum that breeds and grows, while the wind gently displaces uncontrollable follicles of hair on ‘Flayed Wish’.
The mountain is sacred to many religions – it has a power.
There’s an almost ceremonial throb that makes way for the beauty that is ‘Power Children’; featuring an esoterically hued lost race of strangely youthful mountain-dwelling mystics who always seem to have the sun setting or rising behind them – like a sexless future generation in a netherworld patrolled by the monsters their forefathers created – blonde hair is a must for this one.
There’s a hubbub of course. And, then, there’s a moment of reflection, a subdued guitar chews the cud in wonderment on the penultimate paean. “Can we join this lost tribe and find nirvana in their hand carved, henge-like abodes and can we partake of their baffling zodiac oneness?” We wonder. Of course, we can.
The mood escalates with the hypnotic ‘And I Will’ (clocking in at a breath taking 16 minutes plus). It gives the last will and testament to this lost race in a ‘Weld’—era Neil Young fog that that slowly and metaphorically discovers the lost chord, while a lone voice wrestles with the consequences and the top of the mountain is momentarily hidden from view.
On ‘Volume 8’, Bardo Pond is your rather ruffled tour guide to this far off place, this distant sense of wonderment at the crossroads with bewilderment. Next stop euphoria. How do they do that?
Of their previous travelogues, they have been loved and lauded by the late Lou Reed and his wife Laurie Anderson, Jesus & Mary Chain, Mogwai and many more:
“Dinosaur Jr guitar power with the glacial grandiosity of Black Mountain, as if Isobel Sollenberger is conjuring a thunderstorm with the sound of her voice and riding it across the heavens.” Stereogum
“One of underground rock’s most extraordinary enigmas” The Quietus
“They alter brain chemistry by the alchemical effect of distressed sound alone, aspiring to become engineers of the soul’s passage to alternate states of consciousness.” Tony Dale (RIP), Ptolemaic Terrascope, 2001
“Playing fuzzed out stuff of stoner dreams since the mid ‘90s.” Pitchfork
“Fugazi on acid.” Noisey
