Bomis Prendin began their musical career back in the late Seventies as a collective of liberal arts refugees who recorded strange music in a living room in the Washington DC area. Their cassettes and flexi-disc releases garnered them ample praise and an underground audience. Twenty-five years later, the band are still recording esoteric tunes, only now they're self-releasing that music on CDRs.
Fusing quirky pop with electronic and experimental sensibilities, their music is as appealing now as it was way back then, proving that eccentricity is truly timeless.
For a long time, the band's old pair of 9-inch flexi-disc releases have been much in demand on the collectors scene, selling for ten times their original price. Well, now the band have remastered those old tracks and reissued them on a single CDR, so that everyone can enjoy them.
BOMIS PRENDIN: Test/Phantom Limb (CD on Bomis Prendin Music )
This release from 2005 offers 49 minutes of wildly fun electronic pop music.
At the time, Bomis Prendin was: Bomis Prendin, Bill Altice, Miles Anderson, Candee, and Corvus Crorson.
Spacey guitar transcends its garage origins with gritty chords surrounded by an astral milieu. Feedback and treatments abound, achieving an ear-splitting cadence of ecstatic bliss.
Coarse electronics stem from a primal time of experimentation, capturing psychedelic moods with a mixture of head-spinning noise and celestial airiness. Cacophonic structure is keynote here instead of any harmonic flow. The result is jarring, but nonetheless bewitching.
Echobox vocals croon away with remote regard for the real world, evoking the dissent of youth from a time when such sentiments were not commercially viable.
A bevy of devices and toys contribute auxiliary sounds, crudely fleshing out the songs with tasty meatiness.
The innocent simplicity of this music becomes moot when compared to its overall charm. Imagine if Stockhausen or John Cage took a stab at pop tunes, and you have a starting point to appreciate this music.
While the tracks from "Test" exemplify a primitive character, with "Phantom Limb" the band evolved to a slightly more refined state, producing songs rather than just harsh snippets. These evolved tunes possess a sultry quality buried in coarse attributes. The electronics became slicker and more melodic, establishing cosmic foundations for the earthly weirdness displayed by the gestalt of instruments. Effects matured into solid elements in the mix instead of their prior status of piercing contributions. Even the guitar grew spacier, more haunting, more compelling. A melodic sense crept into the band's compositions as they left behind harsh sonic assaults and channeled their creative idiosyncrasies into cohesive songs.
Needless to say, this music benefits greatly from its remastering, sounding vastly superior to the old scratchy quality inherent in flexi-discs.
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