Trance Farmers - "Scooby Doobie" tape - Glue Moon Records
Trance Farmers – “Space Farmers” MP3/download
Trance Farmers – “Betty Bop” (Babe, Terror mix) MP3/download
What it all comes down to? Hearing something new. That’s it, laid out on a spit-shined silver platter like a lobster on a bed of lettuce: That’s what, in essence, I listen to all this off-the-radar music to imbibe. Obviously there are other reasons for my quest but above all I want musics unfamiliar; alien, even. Thankfully, cassette culture has more than filled my script for loopy, static-laden, trucker-radio-recorded, technicolor-dreamcoat audio.
Trance Farmers, via latest cassette “Scooby Doobie,” plumb the Ariel Pink depths but take a lot more detours, coming out the other end more like a pungent brew consisting of whiffs of what is now common chillwave particles (you know the drill: Sun Araw et al) along with drips and drabs of Old Tyme Relijun, Excepter, Zumm Zumm, Tim Cohen‘s solo stuff, Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting, labelmate Babe, Terror, extended-label cousin Buon Giorno Luamada and Jane (Panda Bear‘s long-dormant side project-thing).
The most cogent argument for checking out this cassette, save the floaty, blimp-y, fluttery opening sequence, is the start of Side B, which interweaves softly plucked uke (or at least it sounds like uke to me) with two oddly rendered, pitch-bent pieces of sound twine that might just equate to extraterrestrial slide guitar.
The liquidity of the arrangements is impressive considering how much ground is being covered here. Lots of distant howls and chants to offset the occasionally clumsy, obvious wah worship. As the cassette unfolds I conjure even more band names to drop: acoustically driven Ghost, John Frusciante, Gumshoe faves Hair_Loss, Tonstartssbandht and Eola and even old Anticon chum (er, I mean I interviewed him once) Odd Nosdam.
“Scooby Doobie” is a succulent snack if you smack your lips every time you hear an audio spaceship squiggle through the sky. I’ve been running the Grove for awhile now and, along with the new Babe, Terror tape (which I will be reviewing on Tiny Mix Tapes’ “Cerberus” column sooner than later), “Doobie” is one of the best, most concisely delivered tapes I’ve had the purple pleasure of listening to.
