OLD MILLION EYE – The Air’s Chrysalis Chime (2022, LP Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube Records)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube Records

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, 300 copies

Release Date: 26 August 2022

Old Million Eye is the solo psych project of bassist/artist Brian Lucas. Brian is best known these days for his bass work with Dire Wolves Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band, but he has a hand in many other California psych outfits such as 43 Odes, Angel Archer, Cloud Shepherd, Dark Horse Candidate, Dire Wolves, Father Beard, James Bloodbeard, Mirza… Brian Lucas is releasing CDRs and Cassettes as Old Million Eye, since 2006. Here’s the info that the Bandcamp page provides:

“The Air’s Chrysalis Chime is the second LP from Old Million Eye, primarily a solo project of Brian Lucas. This beautifully transcendent and deeply explorational album sees Lucas widening his spectral and woozy palette to include musical contributions from Gayle Brogan (Pefkin/Burd Ellen), Steven R. Smith, Sheila Bosco (Dire Wolves), and Jeff Jefferson (3 Moons/The Lodestones). The album’s darker more drifting songs, “Ruby River ” and “Tales from Copperopolis” feature the vibrational voice of Georgia Carbone, erstwhile vocalist of Dire Wolves. Lucas and Carbone’s eerie vocal duet on the lengthy “Ruby River” is stunningly haunting and unexpected. This mysteriously anomalous album utilizes such elements as tape collage, improv jazz-type drumming, clarinet, Brogan’s melodica, intertwining basses, piano, treated violin, and Lucas’s Scenes from the South Island-like plaintive skeletal guitar playing that is sure to tickle the ear into quiet hysterics, if not downright rearranging the ear to accommodate a new form of hearing!
The listener should expect the usually oddly crafted and layered sound combinations as evidenced on previous OME releases. These sonic elements are a vehicle for Lucas’s softly placid tenor, but with added dimensions, his purely solo work only alludes to. This album isn’t “psychedelic” in the sense of spacey, wah-wah riffs: it’s far more subtle, detailed, and delicate in terms of its transcendent properties, but the invitation is there to climb into the chrysalis and be transformed”…

“The Air’s Chrysalis Chime” contains 7 tracks in total, the opener “The Right Climate” has a cool electronic and experimental environment emerging with an intense avant-garde psych feeling, there are lots of strange noises and various effects that are mixed together with some experimental percussion, a quite “indigestible” track… “Tangiier Mirror” uses the same avant-garde-ish soundscape in a little more ambient-like way, weird distorted with sporadic tribal (kind of) drumming, singing-like-chanting, showing a clear flirt with Krauty-related stuff… On “Chrysanthenan” the atmos is somehow more electronically flavored, with an ambient touch, experimental (of course), and kind of improvised, dreamy but hazy lyrics with a lot going on at the back, or beneath the surface, if you prefer. This is psychedelically electronic drone music definitely inspired by the legendary early 70s Berlin School. Side ‘A’ closes with “Tales From Copperopolis”, avant-garde Psych blends in-a-cool-electronic-way with a weird Krauty scenery, creating a rather odd but very mind-expanding heady atmosphere, harmonically abstract with vocal melodies that you cannot understand, a cool surrealistic artificial track! Side ‘B’ opens with “Louthian Wood”, free-flowing non-conventional sounds, voices, noises, and percussion, mixing indie-flok and psych elements, altogether creating an impressive amalgam of Cosmic Art Experimental Music… “White Toads” is probably the most “psychedelic” track in here (though you must think “Psychedelia” in a very wide range), avant-garde-ish and kind of dark spacey with tons of things happening at the back, this is an experimental mind-trip, quite expanding, drone-y, and tribal-delic… You can easily lose your head in here… Eventually, the album comes to an end with “Ruby River”, a mysteriously electronically flavored avant-garde psych track, becoming eerie, dark, flirting with experimental psych, a quite psychedelically transcendental tune with weird vocalization, a lethargically creep-a-delic Heady mindtrip! “The Air’s Chrysalis Chime” is an impressive complex abstract unstructured modern avant-garde Psych album that I’m sure will please all genuine underground psych seekers out there… Surely, one of the best albums of 2022… TimeLord Michalis

Tracklist