Bowing At The Altar Of A Scattered Purgatory On Sundays

Two-thirds of excellent Brisbane psych rock band Dreamtime have launched their own booking and touring platform, Altar of the Thirteenth Eye. Their first venture brings forth two equally brilliant acts from Asia, Taiwan's Scattered Purgatory and Japan's Sundays & Cybele, to Australian shores for a bunch of shows.

Scattered Purgatory is an ambient drone three piece that are ultimately interested in the swirling viscera left when sound is stripped of location and place, a discombobulated tonal salve against the scorched soul. Their last release, Lost Ethnography of the Miscanthus Ocean, is a serpentine temporal shift of wavering tension, as calming as it is unnerving. The looped guitars and synth, combined with the shimmering and clashing of gongs and cymbals in spaced out abbreviated bursts, takes on a tactile quality, a trance in amber.

Sundays & Cybele on the other hand are more traditional psych in the sense that we have the laidback grooves and sepia-tinted tones that combust into elongated liquefied-heat meltdowns at the blink of a third eye. Somehow displaced from the 70s acid trip hangover of the 60s, their album Gypsy House is a mystical blast.


Both bands have been put out by Tokyo label Guruguru Brain. Here are the list of shows, Australia - do not miss these guys in action, with some excellent support:

BRISBANE 

Thursday 21st May (SP only) 

Trainspotters

With FROWN and special guests 

SYDNEY 

Friday 29th May 

Presented by Octopus π

The Red Rattler Theatre 

with Broadcasting Transmitter and special guests 

MELBOURNE 

Saturday 30th May 

Presented by Psychedelic Coven

The Tote 

With Pearls and Power 

Sunday 31st May 

Presented by Psychedelic Coven 

The Public Bar

With Council of Elders

BRISBANE 

Thursday 4th June (S&C only) 

Beetle Bar

With Special guests 

More shows to be announced!

A Frown Is The Greatest Gift To Give

Now that I’ve dished the psyche dirt on Dreamtime, let’s dive into the sludged-out filth that is new member Fergus Smith’s other band (well, one of them anyway), Frown. You can see where the connection comes from – if Dreamtime’s riffs ratcheted up the tension, dropped a little tone and ingested some Melvins atrocities, we would have The Greatest Gift To Give, Frown’s latest EP. The cover art - what I assume to be a woodcut of a high priestess sitting at the foot of a tree praying, her head cowled by a hooded robe that opens up to show her chest, her candle impaling a skull whilst others lay strewn around her – is also indicative of what is in store. This doom metal is a blast furnace to the face, an underworld chasm of deafening howls, destructive riffs and perforated eardrums. There are moments of respite here though that to me holds added atmosphere – the ruminative close-out of ‘Harpocrates Unborn’ for example, or the almost tribal drums that bring in the thundering ‘Cold Gail That Blows My Lonely Grave’. This track is more of a psych drone number than any before it, whilst closer ‘Offering’ takes the archetypal Black Sabbath notebook and burns it asunder. These guys are all about suffocation, celebrating the Fall, the occult and the bruising effects of heavy metal – but above all else, Frown knows how to rock. Brisbane needs to celebrate these guys more (ask Golden Bats, another local bastion of doom, for how peripheral this genre truly is).

Here is their last EP for a taste...

Taken By The Serpent’s Tongue

Dreamtime are busy – well busier than usual. Despite keeping live appearances to more of a minimum in 2014, the now-quartet (Fergus Smith from Frown (more on them later) has joined to add more droned heft) had their two sold-out LPs Dreamtime and Sun re-released on local label Conquest Of Noise, all set with new artwork and a wider-reaching push to reach those global psyche carpal tunnels. They have music in store for their third album, and we gratefully get a taste in terms of ‘Serpent’s Tongue’. It’s a more open, cleaner sound in some ways, but guitarist Zac Anderson’s vocal delivery is flayed bare with little reverb to hide the spit and rolled-back eyes lent to the delivery. This therefore lends a more blasted, unhinged aspect to an already monumental aesthetic that Anderson, Cat Maddin (bass/vocals) and Tara Wardrop (drums) have painstakingly developed over the years. It’s always a pulsating experience seeing these guys weave their dense sonic mantras, but with ‘Serpent’s Tongue’ it seems that atmosphere is more likely to implode in a calamitous thrash here.

You can get your hands on ‘Serpent’s Tongue’ here. Added bonus are two improvisational pieces Dreamtime have done on stage this year. The one at Shedstock in particular is a mind-melter.