Podcast 2020.07 The Walls Move In A Little Tighter

Oakacetator – Open Up Your Mind [from Inner Distortions, released April 30, 2020]

Vince Cory – Death Birth of Time [from Sonic Trip Machine Vol. 1, released April 13, 2020]

Kundalini Genie – Can’t Get You Out Of My Mind [from 11:11, released April 10, 2020]

TMODM: First, How are things going for you in this time of COVID-19? Second, what are your plans for the coming days? Do you think life will ever return to normal?
Robbie: I’m not coping particularly well, considering I can’t currently record as the building my studio is in is shut, and I’m just trying to do day by day things to keep my mental health up.
My future plans are just to take it day by day and I don’t know if things will go back to normal or not but I fear a return to normality would not be a good thing.

Psychic Ills – Never Learn Not To Love [from Never Learn Not To Love, released March 31, 2020]

Psychic Ills had planned to record their sixth studio album but Tres Williams died in March, 2020 before they had recorded any of their new material. Psychic Ills had recorded two covers, however, “Never Learn Not to Love” and “Cease to Exist”, that were released as a single after the Williams’s death.

Frozen Planet….1969 – 900 Mile Head Rush [from Cold Hand of a Gambling Man, released April 22, 2020]

TMODM: First, How are things going for you in this time of COVID-19? Second, what are your plans for the coming days? Do you think life will ever return to normal?
Frank FP69: Firstly releasing an album during COVID-19 has been interesting. On one hand we’ve been able to reach people on a larger scale due to them being at home and living a more digital life.  On the other hand we’ve experienced more expensive shipping costs which affects the sales of our records and with people loosing jobs they may not be able to afford to buy music. We’re a band than only does a handful of gigs a year so we’re not too concerned about not being able to play live at this point. 
We plan to keep releasing new music as we already have jams recorded and ready to be mixed.  Life will go back to normal with some slight changes but who really knows what the future will hold?? 

Dark Fog – Revird Ysatnaf Eht/The Fantasy Driver [from Escape Into This, released April 06, 2020]

TMODM: First, How are things going for you in this time of COVID-19? Second, what are your plans for the coming days? Do you think life will ever return to normal?
Ray: 1)The pandemic has definitely created a lot of stress that would otherwise not exist, and going months without a Dark Fog practice is painful. On the other hand, I am lucky in that I host practices and have a home studio here. The fact that we record and archive every time has enabled me to create the ‘Escape Into This’ releases and continue to work on some future projects. Pouring the intensity of the mixture of emotions this pandemic has created into music is a necessary outlet for me right now, and it keeps things going for not only the band itself but for Drew and Yt despite not being able to get together. 2) In the coming days I am looking forward to being able to have the full band here again, as I am really looking to record some new improvisations. Also, working on some future physical releases for those of us who love vinyl records. I do think life will return to some sense of normalcy, although I don’t believe that will look the same as it did before, and it may well be awhile before that happens given the lack of solid leadership many of our countries are experiencing right now.

Heaven’s Gateway Drugs – Sweet ‘N Low (Dub Mix) [from Heaven’s Gateway Dubs, released April 29, 2020]

Long Slow Dissolve – Into Darkness [from Lakeside Drive, released March 13, 2020]

TMODM: How are things going for you in this time of COVID-19?
Rob: Thankfully it’s not full-on in our faces like it is for a whole lot of people. We don’t get out quite so much these days.
TMODM: What are your plans for the coming days?
Rob: We’ve got an animated short being released Friday over at www.facebook.com/tessalationfilms [embedded below]. Filmed and edited on iPad using natural and man made found objects. One part hallucination, one part dream, a floating visual journey… and yeah, vanquishing giant insects. That’s how Brick has been spending lockdown. I’m blown away by how it’s come out and the incredible amount of work and imagination that’s gone into creating the film.
In between times we’re working on edits and mixes for another album which is coming together pretty well so far. We all have other projects on the go as well, musically, so the ones that we can still work on without needing to come together with people and jam are getting some love while the ones that need us to be hell wasted and hell loud are having a bit of a break.
TMODM: Do you think life will ever return to normal?
Rob: Too soon for me to call on that. We’re only a few months in and for a lot of folks it’s already past the point of no return to normality. How many more of us find ourselves in that situation will depend on the length and severity of the pandemic as well as the way that our societies choose to respond to it. For some folks it’s likely that things will get back to normal relatively quickly. For some folks this is just the latest in a fairly regular line of disease outbreaks and life is fairly normal. For some folks there will be psychological and societal scars that will last for generations. To my mind the pandemic responses I’ve seen either firsthand or seen reported have felt fairly consistent with what I’ve known of the overall tone of those societies. Those of us who live in countries where our governments seem to be responding with nothing but lies, incompetence, ignorance and straightup lack of normal human compassion, need to be aware now that even though the people we hang with personally might be cool, that’s likely the overall tone of our society. That is the normal on offer here. This is not the people running our country struggling to cope; this is them operating as they always have and as they always will. This is the normal we allowed to happen. The COVID-19 pandemic is laying bare the hollow inadequacies and contempt for others that are the core principles of nationalists and populists like Johnson, Bolsonaro, Trump, Putin. They are the core principles of those in the media who support them, enable them, and in many cases either directly employ or are employed by them. It seems logical that the longer and more severely a country is impacted by COVID-19 the more folks will finally see these people and institutions for what they are and choose to reject that normal and work towards something better, but somehow I’m not convinced that’ll be the case. The UK currently has the highest 7 day rate of deaths per million in the world and yet beaches are crowded, folks are idling their cars queuing an hour for a McDonalds drive-through and we are bombarded by media casting scorn on teachers’ unions for questioning the wisdom of further opening of schools in a little over a week. Go figure.

TL;DR – I hope not, but I fear so 🙂

oz. – Is Risen [from Is Risen, released April 12, 2020]

TMODM: First, what are your influences? Second, Was Is Risen really recorded four years ago? Why post it now?
Josh: I’m posting a lot of stuff that we recorded but I really never got around to sharing. Our drummer is no longer around and for a while I was just working on other stuff but his passing was a year ago April 2nd and I just wanted to remind people that we had some good times before everything took a dark turn. Our inspiration was always Coltrane and Miles, we just played rock instead of jazz. We developed our improv over 25 years. We loved sabbath and gong, soft machine, Zappa, king crimson and now bands like chon and polyphia. The time thing idk. Ben left for a girl in 2017 and by 2019 she had pretty much mindfucked him and I never saw him alive again. So that’s kinda why it took me a while to release, I have a lot of other stuff that will come out with the timeline being 1996-2017. It’s just a process. But as far as a blurb oz. was a purveyor of free rock from our inception. Our earliest stuff was very composed but after 2003 we began to play every note on instinct. The psyonic link we cultivated created the music that created itself. Our goal was to be a conduit that allowed the music to exist as something larger than the parts of the band.