Ticket Crystals re-issued (first time) Vinyl on Fire Records with new art

 from Sonic Masala

http://sonicmasala.blogspot.com/2013/02/sunny-day-cover-up-crystal-tickets-make.html

It’s been three years since Philadelphia’s psych surgeons Bardo Pond gave us something new – not that we need anything new necessarily, because their back catalogue is pretty exemplary. I’ve always thought the five-piece has been one of the most underrated bands of its ilk in the past decade. Fire Records can only bolster that claim, by lovingly reissuing 2006’s Ticket Crystals in a LP-only edition. Double vinyl and adorned with Joy Feasley’s new artwork, the album typifies the calculated yet fluid doom template that unrelentingly drives their sound, yet also showcased the pastel undercarriage that lightens the load enough for it to become immensely immersive rather than bludgeoning.

I realise this is a Sunday, but seeing as this is a stellar reissue I thought I’d give a special edition of “Friday Cover Up” to include the cover of the Beatles’ ‘Cry Baby Cry.’ Originally recorded for and broadcast by the BBC as part of their commemorations of the 25th anniversary of John Lennon’s death, it exemplifies the whole point I crafted the Cover Up segment in the first place. Taking great music and imbuing it with their own personality to craft a unique vision, this is Lennon in an iron lung filled with cryogenic fluid and absinthe.

Bardo Pond – Cry Baby Cry (Beatles cover)

And here is another Ticket Crystals classic…

Bardo Pond – Destroying Angel

Pre-order Ticket Crystals here. The band aim to release a new record in the latter stages of 2013, whilst also planning to release an exclusive 12” covers record for Record Store Day, so we haven’t heard the last of this stellar band.

Posted by 

 

 

 

 

 

YNTRA – A Latitudes Session For Southern Records

Yes that’s right,  those legendary space rockers aka Bardo Pond have joined the Latitudes ranks. The psychedelic journey of the Pond all began by two brothers, Michael & John Gibbons, sharing their interest in free-form noise, spreading the enthusiasm to an array of instrumentalists and vocalists. Their sound snowballed taking in musical roots from the realm of jazz and blues structures, not to mention New York’s No Wave movement championed by the likes of James Chance and the Contortions as well as the downtown Knitting Factory scenes. Now after eight acclaimed full-length albums, the band that often dabbles in an eclectic range of side projects have regrouped for another stormer in our very own Southern Studios.

The resulting session, Yntra, is a brilliant distillation of what the band do best into just three epic tracks. From the elaboration of the densest, textural landscapes to moments of pure, ecstatic clarity the sound is still incredibly thick with their battery of guitars and unrelentingsignature groove riding merrily along underneath. Bardo, true to their name, manage to balance their sound exquisitely between polar extremes.

Yntra consists of three suitably epic tracks clocking in at 35:25 minutes. Set for release on the 1st October and available for pre-order now in an edition of 500 CDs in foil-blocked letter-pressed orgami-fold wallet, and 800 LPs on 180g white marble vinyl in die-cut sleeves, all with inserts; hand packed and hand numbered by the Southern elves.
  Bardo Pond – Side To Side (excerpt) by Southern

You can also pre-order either the CD or LP with a T-shirt as part of a special bundle available only from our web shop until the 17th September.

 

 

 

Viagra is the most famous ‘love pill’ in the world, but it is not the only option for you. The majority of men who tried both brand and generic pills state that Cialis (the most famous and top-quality generic drug) works better. It is up to you to decide whether you choose brand pills or buy Cialis, but ED patients state that:
Now it is possible to avoid awkward publicity if you buy Cialis online in our reliable web pharmacy. To purchase Cialis online simply place your order, use your credit card to pay for your pills, buy cialis professional receive your drug per post in a decent package and start your way to perfect men’s health!

Bardo Pond / Carlton Melton Split Vinyl LP

 Bardo Pond / Carlton Melton Split LP

Out now on AGITATED RECORDS

http://www.facebook.com/pages/AGITATED-RECORDS/100542643334300

Bardo Pond/Carlton Melton

Split EP

Agitated

Released: Monday 31 October 2011

I missed a chance to see Bardo Pond live recently and I’ve got to say listening to ‘Fallen’, their side of this split release with fellow psychedelic troubadours Carlton Melton, doesn’t help. An incredible, sprawling, 20-minute monolith that reaches those deep down, psychedelic regions that Jefferson Airplane just can’t reach anymore. This is dense, disorientating music; thick with drones, fucked guitars, flutes (yep, flutes) and distant, spacey vocals from front woman Isobel Sollenberger. The vocals don’t appear until about 15 minutes into the track, so don’t go expecting any sort of recognizable song structure. Bardo Pond make roaming, immersive and trance-inducing pieces that could quite happily go on for hours. It’s an intense and all-consuming ride through the noise-rock underground and one I can’t recommend enough.

As Bardo Pond’s track gradually subsides it’s followed by the equally epic Carlton Melton piece, ‘Slow Growth’. The track fades in with slowly building electronics and a dusty, wind-swept drone; the title couldn’t be more apt. At once soothing and mildly unnerving, Carlton Melton make music for your mind. It’s around the five-minute mark that crunching, doom-rock indebted guitars come in, perfectly balanced with the rather pretty instrumentation now going on in the background. If I were to draw comparisons I’d say there’s something of the Vibracathedral Orchestra’s hypnotic, circling majesty in ‘Slow Growth’. It’s around the 12-minute mark, however, that ‘Slow Growth’ turns its hand to punishing, skull-splitting noise as the drone becomes almost overpowering. It’s a powerful piece of music but definitely not one for the faint-of-heart.

Together, these two tracks make up a truly impressive 40-minutes of noise, drone and modern psychedelia. To describe this release as a split EP would be somewhat misleading as it’s longer than a lot of full-length albums. However you choose to categorize it, Bardo Pond and Carlton Melton have made something with genuine scope; a dark, intoxicating slice of mind-altering psychedelia. Enjoy.

Bardo Pond “Bardo Pond”

 

 

 

Just Once

Dont Know About You

Sleeping

Await The Star (The Stars Behind)

Undone

Cracker Wrist

The Stars Behind

Wayne’s Tune

Our Press Release written by the esteemed Mr. Chris Grier…

The first time I saw Bardo Pond, I was, as probably most people are when they first encounter this batch of beatific weirdos, horribly unprepared. To describe the experience as “psychedelic” is an understatement on the order of saying that whacking oneself in the nuts with a ball-peen hammer is “mildly irritating.” Needless to say, priorities were rearranged, etc.

 

Fast-forward 15 yrs, and Bardo Pond have put out many LPs, most of them named after hallucinogens that make you throw up all night and see things – which was kind of them, I always thought. Let ya know what you were in for. All of this recorded output is pretty staggering to me, because, without exception, they seemed able to toss a lasso around some sort of ineffable hoodoo that felt like it was a million yrs old. If Carl Sagan would have 1.) smoked a little more weed and 2.) not croaked, I’m hoping he would have cut a BP track onto that gold LP that they put on the Voyager units. Would’ve been a way better representation of the best parts of the human spirit than Chuck Berry, I say.

 

Anyhoo. One night not long ago in the Bardo Compound in Philly, Michael says in a kinda offhanded way, “Hey man, you wanna hear this? …” And there I was, being bathed in the songs you’ve got in yr grubby little mitts right now.

 

I was, once again, unprepared.

 

This cauldron is a bit of a different brew. It made total sense to me (as it will to you) when he later told me the name of the LP is just “Bardo Pond.” Why? It’s a distillation. Two decades of playing together have sandblasted away everything unessential and left us with what we have here. It was like no one else before them had ever gotten near the plagal cadence, not Lou Reed or the Stooges or 2,000 yrs of church music. They invented it all over again, independent of any of that, after gawd knows how many yrs of flailing away and burning themselves up.

 

I fucking love these songs. And while I hate writing almost as much as I hate third-degree burns, I have to say it is a joy to be able to tell you about this record. I feel like Neil Fucking Armstrong.

 

It took years for them to get here, but this record is the most goddamned beautiful thing they’ve ever done. Sorry for the superlatives. But really, the only thing left for them to do at this point is explode.

 

++cg

nyc 18 oct 2010

Bardo Pond “Bardo Pond” our latest proper Double LP on the wonderful London label Fire Records

 

Review from the folks at Tiny Mix Tapes

Bardo Pond
Bardo Pond

[Fire; 2011]
By IAN LATTA

 

It seems Bardo Pond will always be pigeonholed as a band that makes music to take drugs to. Even though it has been 15 years since they last titled an album with a reference to a drug — Amanita, an obscure psychedelic mushroom — critics continue to claim that most of their LPs are named for hallucinogens. As if in an effort to thwart the drug associations, Bardo Pond have offered their first large-scale release of new music in four years with their own name as the title. Self-titling an album is usually a move of consolidation or redefinition for a band, and indeed, this latest album presents all sides of the Bardo Pond oeuvre in solid, powerful songs while gracefully incorporating more acoustic textures. It distinguishes itself with a greater occurrence of softer moments and a greater presence of acoustic instrumentation, though Bardo Pond have not only been one of the most gentle massive doom-raga bands around, but also one of the most consistent in indie music in general. This album does nothing to disrupt their two-decade streak of psychedelic, cosmic, post-rock transcendence.

 

The reviews of Bardo Pond cited above invariably conclude — generously, they would have us think — that even though the band’s music was likely inspired by, performed under the influence of, and dedicated to a drug, a listener doesn’t have to be high to appreciate it; indeed, the music itself is mind-altering. While it’s a relief to find out that I don’t have to shoot up when Charlie Parker comes on my iPod or drink laudanum when listening to Hector Berlioz, the statement that a piece of music is itself mind-altering is pretty redundant. All music has an effect on our brains, our moods, and our bodies — this is a truth known to any 50s teenager with a transistor radio or any ecstatic church congregation. What is notable about Bardo Pond’s music is not that it is mind-altering, but that it is self-consciously so. This is what makes the music psychedelic, in the sense of Timothy Leary’s The Psychedelic Experience (1964). This manual for the psychedelic voyager outlines a course to and from “ego-death,” based on the Tibetan Bardo Thodol, commonly known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. As far as I can make out, the Bardo, which gave Bardo Pond their name, is a liminal state in between life and death, self and not-self: the space in which it is possible for the soul to observe the death of the body. It is a space where, according to Leary, the “game” of human egos falls away and liberation is experienced. This space gave the band its name because it struck bassist Clint Takedo as “a fine place for a pond, especially for fishing.” This seeming non-sequitur is characteristic of the type of insight Bardo Pond would intend their more mystic listeners to take from this album, one in which the different discourses and perspectives of fishing and high-minded religious philosophy do not disagree, but perceive one another attentively and realize their common unity.

 

Key to the unique mood Bardo Pond achieve is the alchemical dynamic between brothers John and Michael Gibbons’ crushing guitars and Isobel Sollenberger’s wavering vocals and (oft-maligned) flute. Even moving at the same tempo as the band’s punishing rhythm section, Sollenberger’s weightless vocals and contemplative flute induce a double-vision of the ear, in which time is moving at different speeds simultaneously, a disorienting effect of pacing and ambience that induces both head-nodding and eyelid-drooping. This contrast can be heard from the very first song, “Just Once,” in which Sollenberger’s lovely, lilting moan of a vocal melody, backed by acoustic guitars and harmonica, is gradually surrounded by the distorted roar of the group’s massive guitar riffs while still retaining its peculiar lighter-than-air pull. Similarly, the standout track “The Stars Behind” combines melodic, stately guitars and clear, sighing vocals with a massive doom dirge. Sollenberger’s flute and vocals float weightless within the guitar maelstrom just as the soul observes the body from above.

 

The 21-minute epic “Undone” is not the album’s best song or even its centerpiece, but just another track that takes a little bit longer to make its point. In it, consistently interesting, backwards-processed guitar noodling is joined after 10 minutes by some more aggressive rhythm-guitar counterpoint and insistent percussion. Although it builds in intensity, the basic song dynamic — which it shares with the other tracks on this 70-minute album — never changes. What does change is the amount of time we are given in which to stare into the song. Time is important to this band; their first full length, Bufo Alvarius Amen 29:25, included the length in minutes of the epic cut “Amen” right in the album’s title. In these longer tracks, the listener is forced to contemplate the sounds in themselves and the song’s effects on the ever-changing consciousness. Their sheer size chips away at the resistance of the listener, the impulse of the ego to label and withdraw. Time, then, for the psych band, is space for meditation. For Bardo Pond, named after a Tibetan manual for transitioning between death and rebirth, it’s significant that it’s not until the end of life that we can see that death is not the end.