Magic Lantern - Sun Araw - Super Minerals - Beyond psychedelia

The hallucinatory flashes of the Magic Lantern

Magic Lantern formed in Long Beach in the second half of the decade. Initially the lineup included guitarists Cameron Stallones and William Giacchi, later joined by bassist Gavin Fort, keyboardist/percussionist Phil French and drummer Chip Knechtel. From their earliest live shows, the Californian band made clear they had a precise idea of the path to follow: conceiving sound as a psychedelic journey, in line with the lexicon of 60s and 70s acid rock. This is confirmed by their approach to composition, built on improvisational dynamics that in most cases revolve around (or start from) a simple guitar riff, twisted, reinvented and freely arranged according to the mood of the moment.

When I first listened to Magic Lantern, my brain made a mental association that seems obvious in hindsight, but which at the time struck me as out of place. As "Feasting On Energy" played - from their fine debut album High Beams - I found myself thinking of Cold Sun, an obscure outfit from the late-60s Texan psychedelic scene, authors of a cult vinyl titled "Dark Shadows", released posthumously in 1989. Incidentally, if you come across it, grab it without hesitation, because in overall quality and hallucinatory ecstasy it has nothing to envy in masterpieces like "Power Plant" by Golden Dawn and "Easter Everywhere" by 13th Floor Elevators.

Going back to the mental association mentioned above, the band led by Stallones and Giacchi immediately struck me as the archetypal mysterious object - just like Cold Sun - despite having enjoyed, from the very start, no small amount of visibility within California's underground scene. A cult act, then, for at least a couple of good reasons: for their cover art, certainly not conventionally psychedelic, yet endowed with an estranging visionary quality. But above all for their sound, which seeks no middle ground with the freak-outs of the last decade, instead reconnecting directly with the golden age of psychedelia. Both the American kind - Texan and West Coast - and, to a lesser extent, the kraut variety, incestuously blended into an acid brew like few others in the 2000s.

Of course, Magic Lantern have also spawned a couple of offshoot projects that, by contrast, seem to wear rather more fashionable clothing, but we'll come back to that later.

If Magic Lantern find their inspiration in classic psychedelic music, it's in their approach that the deviant potential of this sound truly lies, as somewhat confirmed by Stallones and Giacchi themselves in their choice of favourite records, which include "Ege Bamyasi" by Can, "Hapmoniym I-V" by Magical Power Mako, "Safe As Milk" by Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band, and the self-titled album by Pärson Sound. Not to mention Stallones's veneration for "Permanent Green Light" and "Radar Eyes" by the Godz (both contained on "Godz 2"). So, in a strange hall-of-mirrors effect, at times the Californian band's music rests on alienating repetitive structures, presumably borrowed from acts like Loop and Spacemen 3, or more likely sharing the same lineage. Add to this a predilection for progressive suites, and it becomes clear that the sound of Magic Lantern is anything but easy listening, despite the hallucinogenic haze that at first glance seems to envelop it.

After intense live activity around Long Beach, Magic Lantern debuted in 2007 with the cassette At The Mountains Of Madness, released by the never-celebrated-enough Not Not Fun. What caused a stir, albeit within a well-defined niche, was the long title suite, which drags on for nearly 15 minutes through a devastating vortex of trance. In a swirling maelstrom of hallucinatory feedback, mechanical rhythms and ethnic flourishes, Faust, Loop and the motorik Ash Ra Tempel of "Amboss" are synthesized together. And to think that such a complex, multifaceted piece was composed almost as a joke by William Giacchi alone in his bedroom, even before the band existed.

2008 saw the release of two vinyl records: High Beams on Not Not Fun and Magic Lantern on Woodist.

High Beams continues the conversation begun with At The Mountains Of Madness. The opening suite ("Deathshead Hawkmoth") follows the same grammar while slowing the tempo down considerably. Here the drums' martial cadence lends the track a minimalist imprint, while the guitars climb through tight chord progressions and psychotic onslaughts, creating a tangled knot that stops just short of tipping into stoner rock. "Vampires In Heat" follows the same blueprint. The guitars weave a carpet of celestial distortion, while the drums bring the sound back down to earth with funereal rhythms: as if the frayed trance of Popol Vuh had been swallowed whole by the cadaverous blues of Earthless.

Released a few months later, the vinyl Magic Lantern contains almost entirely previously released material, including the two compositions from the At The Mountains Of Madness cassette. At this point the band ceased activity. Stallones went off on his own tangent, giving birth to the Sun Araw project. Phil French and William Giacchi did likewise, christening their own creature Super Minerals.

In late 2009 Magic Lantern announced a new album on Not Not Fun, released by the American label in early April 2010. It's called Platoon, and word has it that it could be the last.

Platoon shifts the axis of the sound towards Hendrix and Funkadelic, in the process shedding the krautrock character that had marked previous releases. The monumental "Dark Cicadas" and "Friendship" - placed at the opening and close of the record - unfurl lasciviously like serpents in heat through a prolonged series of derailing guitar solos, while once again it's the rhythm section that lends the music a minimal poise, steering it away from mere revivalist drift. The visionary funk of "Planar Sonar" and "On The Dime" round out the picture of a record that's powerful, if less varied than its predecessors.

Blinding suns and radioactive beaches

That Stallones was obsessed with psychedelic music was already abundantly clear. With the Sun Araw project he offers a modernist take on it, undoubtedly influenced by what was being heard around him at the time. It's no coincidence that the sound's evolution followed distinctly trend-chasing trajectories, considering that the drone music of The Phynx progressively veered towards hypnagogic shores, especially in the later Beach Head and Heavy Deeds. It's certainly not hypnagogic pop tout court, at least not in the form codified by David Keenan, yet in the lethargic sound of the latest Sun Araw one can glimpse that same sense of longing for a bygone era.

Be that as it may, the debut takes no prisoners, nor does it get trapped in that aesthetic of remembrance that would characterize later releases. On the contrary, the four hallucinated tracks of The Phynx recall the sound of acts like GHQ and Starving Weirdos, if not the hypnotic trance of Spacemen 3 and even Skullflower. A track like "Hive Burner" shows off Stallones's retro-modernist vision, sitting halfway between '90s English psychedelic rock and '70s minimalist trance - in short, as if Loop were covering Terry Riley.

As far as this writer is concerned, The Phynx deserves to be counted among the best drone records of the 2000s. Starting with Beach Head and running through to the recent On Patrol, Sun Araw's sound veers towards the territory of a more liquid, battered psychedelia. The sun has melted, incandescent magma drips onto scorched beaches, accompanied by hot, radioactive winds. Remember the cover of "Ravvivando" by Faust? That sickly, alien reddish hue festering over that post-atomic wasteland scene? Well, the sound of Beach Head is steeped in the very same imagery. The theater of fallout moves to the beach, where flaming butterflies wander aimlessly, dazed children with sagging skin, buzzing locusts ready to pounce on any semblance of a living being. It's then not hard to understand that the optimistic, even sunny, sound of Heavy Deeds and the recent On Patrol actually expresses the resignation of a world destined for extinction. And passersby wander with smiles on their lips while the radioactive sun scorches their flesh.

Sunstroke plays nasty tricks on the already heavily strained psyche of this tipsy civilization: thus are born the fervid, luxuriant "ancient" visions of Ancient Romans, a double LP of scorching mantric suites barely cooled by the shadow of pantheons, culminating in the techno delirium of "Impluvium", while with Inner Treaty (2012) the dream is further distilled into a drier, more free-form (sur)reality.

Records that make it definitively clear that Stallones now communicates in a language entirely his own - one that's almost impossible to grasp unless you first loosen the reins of the psyche and pry open the thrilling Pandora's box of irrationality.

Amid seaweed, alien slime and sea monsters: the underwater (and muddy) sound of Super Minerals

If on the surface Sun Araw's fallout slowly devours every last trace of life, underwater things seem to move more slowly. The sound forged by Super Minerals - Phil French and William Giacchi - sounds like the soundtrack to an underwater voyage aboard a Russian K-19 submarine.

On a record like The Pelagics, you get the sense of an unsafe, contaminated environment. Outside, water turbid and laden with inorganic waste makes every movement laborious, while menacing echoes of mutant creatures can be heard in the distance. And the sense of precariousness stirred by the sight of rust lodged in every joint combines with the horror of giant sharks and octopuses.

That's how we described the sound of Super Minerals when writing about last year's Multitudes: "What Super Minerals do is essentially a kind of basement dark-ambient, a sound that recalls the atmospheres of what Cold Meat Industry was putting out in the '90s, but completely disfigured, degraded, expressionless. In short, a sort of ambient music for inmates in the final stage of disturbing autism. That said, listening to 'Multitudes' requires patience and dedication (don't even try playing it in the background), because you have to force your way into those somnambulant, lifeless drones. Once you understand where it's headed, you'll realize these guys mean business, so don't be surprised if your worst nightmares start taking shape in your mind."

Between cassettes, CD-Rs and official releases, Super Minerals have put out seven albums so far, and they all seem like a continuation of one another. There's no break, no evolution (or devolution), just a dense black tide—which is, after all, the stuff our nightmares are made of, the ones we can't remember when we wake up.

Contributions by Roberto Rizzo.

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