release the bats #18 NONHORSE - HARAAM, CIRCLE OF FLAME CD Nonhorse is the solo act of Gabriel Lucas Crane from Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice and this is his debut album. On Haraam, piles of mysterious old cassettes are used as source material to create magic in a stunning way over 42 moody minutes. Different audio fragments on top of each other, over and over again, hand-mixed and orchestrated at what feels like must have been ritualistic tape laborations taken place somewhere where the sun never shines. Various echoes from the past are buried under layers and layers of manipulated voices, train signals, animal sounds and god knows what. Abrupt endings which burns like fire in your head. Churches in flames, the soundtrack to The House With The Laughing Windows played backwards, alien autopsys, cemetery fog, total devestation... Haraam is a beautiful junkyard nightmare, a horrifying and atmospheric album. 13 songs. Mastered by Pete Swanson. Usually, his presence is hard to discern on their records, but G. Lucas Crane can’t be ignored in a live setting as Wooden Wand And The Vanishing Voice’s lurching, cassette-fucking mutant Martin Swope. If their music is as much about God Vs. Satan as their lyrics-about-lyrics-about-God-V-Satan purport, then Crane is the thrashing demon that needed to be exorcised, the “free” (or at the very least free-sounding) part of a band that insists they do very little improvising, the spirit set (sorta) loose to make the gross squelches in the sea of jingling bells and summoning songs. His dark, moody solo squeedle as Nonhorse VsX is avant-garde-from-normal-people. It's the same feeling you get when you learn Animal Collective discovered 20th Century composition by watching horror movies. Translation: the hand-mixed cassettecore of “We See The Signal” only finds its way to Terry Riley and Christian Marclay and Non by means of “Revolution No. 9,” Grandmaster Flash and Sebadoh. Not saying that Crane isn’t a geek of the highest caliber (be sure to watch dude mix two tapedecks like he was DJ TDK-Slay), but this sputtering hissgrind comes from someone with pop ears. Though it sounds like the Conet Project eating a Hershell Gordon Lewis VHS, his rhythms and loops are actual rhythms and loops. Funky in its own twisted way. - CHRISTOPHER R. WEINGARTEN (Feature on the track We See The Signal from Paper Thin Walls.) PRESSING INFO! 500 made. Photo in the insert by Carin Lindberg (Kvibergs graveyard, Göteborg, early 2006). REVIEWS! Aquarius Boomkat Foxy Digitalis Groove.no Hissig Kinda Muzik Mashnote Musique Machine Outer Space Gamelan Paper Thin Walls Ric Royer review Scene Point Blank Semtex Vital Weekly #571 Non-Horse Myspace Wooden Wand & The Vanishing Voice