"Like a forgotten Sonic Arts Union-era session heard from the business end of an opiated rabbithole, "Orgone Freakout" is an album-length synthesis of all the most fucked transcendent peaks on the releases (e.g. "Amazing Laws" and "A Beginner's Guide to Hoodotronix") that have formed the apex of the Telecult Powers catalog to date, boiled down to their strangely arching bones. It's a phenomenal codex of resinous creaks, empty cisterns, reflected moonlight, phantom choirs, and tendril-like percussive afterimages from a duo of Cleveland-to-Brooklyn transplants that's spent the past three years becoming one of the best and strangest live acts in the world, establishing a well-deserved reputation as a cornerstone of the contemporary New York underground, issuing a viscous drip of bizarre missives through their unerringly curated Temple of Pei imprint, and cultivating the masterfully honed feedback between their live and studio incarnations that reaches critical velocity with this release.

As ever, Mister Matthews' handcrafted electronics are at the center of the proceedings and measured expansion of a shared timbral vocabulary continues to be a huge part of his and Witchbeam's raison d'etre, while the paranoid opacity and sheer idiosyncracy of their improvising grammar hasn't yielded an inch. This productive tension is at once an indicator of the rewards that await the devoted acolyte and the audible stamp of their rust belt origins. Writing about Telecult Powers back in 2008, I said that "Witchbeam and Mister Matthews lock into their particular skewed orbit, which has something of the unhinged forelornness of Nik Pascal Raicevic’s work, only even more fucked and disturbing, because there’s actually two people giggling at each other out on that ledge. ...one could revisit it a thousand times without ever really getting a handle on it or parsing it successfully. In short, it’s necessary, rewarding, and fantastically heavy work." That still pretty much sums it up, I believe, and it's only gotten more true with time."

-Deception Island

"Lemon Crystal Sunshine” is both the first release by Chicago’s Tiger Hatchery outside the orbit of their in-house imprints and their most coherent, lovingly realized, and hi-fidelity statement to date, with all the makings of a proper public debut. It’s no small thing to say that, in a world of massively hyped ad hoc collabs, Mike Forbes (tenor sax), Andrew Scott Young (double bass), and Ben Billington (drums) are a genuine, dedicated, and hard-touring ensemble, and a stunningly matched one at that; while all three players have turned in head-spinning cult sessions in the past few years (Forbes with J. Guy Laughlin, Forbes and Young as a duo and with Weasel Walter on 2009’s skullsplitting “American Free” lp, and Billington solo and in duos with Jason Soliday and Brett Naucke), I knew from the first seconds of their set at Champagne of Fests III last year that this was something special, and the performances of theirs that I’ve caught since then, at Voice of the Valley, Philly’s Danger Danger, and Cleveland’s The Cool Ranch have only reinforced that notion.
At once too formalist, too perversely ludic, and too explicitly conscious of all the resonant objects they’re wrangling to tolerate an easy lumping-in with the neo-fire music camp and too focused on actual asskicking and immersive sheets of lusciously corroded timbral wonder to permit their reduction to ego-fodder for the plausibly bed-wetting highbrow improv set, Tiger Hatchery got those legs underneath ‘em amid a grueling mise en abime of basement fistpumpers, and it shows. Refreshingly indifferent to any/all tired, eyeball-glazing handwringing over the moral hazards of idiom, as only a band too adept and committed to bother with such rhetorical crutches can afford to be, they are, quite simply, one of the best free jazz outfits operating today. Forbes’ bloody, eviscerating tone and Evan Parker-level circular breathing chops are already the talk of the proverbial town, but what’s most impressive is the integration of these traits into a complete and highly personal style characterized by flinty reserve, strikingly antihuman phrasing, obsessively Slonimskyian cellular/permutational construction, and the occasional, tantalizing glimpse of a bent, neomodern lyrical sensibility, evidenced at the start of side two as he comes on like Ornette Coleman disintegrating in a hail of cough syrup. What glues this all together is Young and Billington’s strikingly congruent rhythmic vocabularies, the sum of which is often rich in loose-limbed, muppety thwack, though “Lemon Crystal Sunshine” offers each of them ample opportunity to stretch out into more nuanced territory as well. Midway through side one, Billington takes his finest recorded solo to date, a nearly whisper-quiet manifesto of gradually ratcheted-up tension that deftly sidesteps the cliches of contemporary free drumming, drawing to a close as Young picks up the bow for a spiraling, kaleidoscopic duet with Forbes, showing off a gently weathered approach to the higher partials that’s both commendably focused and almost shockingly lovely. I promised myself that I’d never end a writeup with the phrase “must grip,” but seriously."

-Deception Island

"As proof that some small amount of justice lingers in the world, Cleveland veteran Wyatt Howland is finally getting his dues, having spent the past several years amassing a discography studded with many of the all-time classics of fucked rust belt electronics (”Soft Police Murder,” “Drug Addict,” “You Deserve Nothing,” and the watershed “Blackout” lp on Tusco Embassy, to name but a handful), collabbing tirelessly with the likes of Ryan Kuehn, David Russell, Emeralds, and Aaron Dilloway, and turning in an endless stream of punishingly focused, concise, and pissed-off performances that simply must be witnessed to be believed.
“Brick in the Mouth of a Corpse” is both a fitting introduction to Skin Graft and a bar-raiser for those already initiated, on which Howland continues to wax subtle, detailed, and glowering, as though drawing cross-sections of harsh noise with a drafting pencil, allowing us to view the creaking, dripping, and hissing armature under its skin. This is a strategy that could never be sustained without the patience and technique that are present in spades across the six tracks that make up “Brick,” meticulously crafted vignettes that range from the principled scraping of bones and bodyslamming of trashcans to waking up brutally hung over beside a rustily copulating heap of sonar equipment. Essential filth."

-Deception Island

"Those of you who’ve spent any serious time in Cleveland know that it’s barely possible to leave your house without getting pancaked by some anvil or other of phenomenally damaged tapes. Jeff Hatfield and Zach Troxell, aka Fragments, were responsible for the last such anvil to have my name on it before I split for Philly last year, and their self-titled debut left me scratching my head at the point of impact for months, trying to fathom what the hell they could possibly be THINKING. Then again, as Hatfield confided in me at the bar after Fragments turned in a tense and gnarled basement set at the Champagne of Fests III this past March, “I’m not even really sure that I have a head right now,” so perhaps I’m overanalyzing it and the crux of the project is in fact the very billion-yard stare amply documented on the “Synthetic Spremulli” dvdr and made more than audible on a slew of subsequent releases for Hanson, Pizza Night, A Sounddesign, and Tusco Embassy.
Regardless, I can think of few contemporary synth projects as genuinely weird as this one, and “Kinetic Sphere” is incredibly gnarled stuff, kicking off like a steel door opening onto the gentle throb of miniature worlds under glass and staging it’s first crescendo as the inhabitants discover space travel, summoning a great purring of afterburners and flashing of lasers, then hanging out around the rafters in a cloud of acrid smoke. Side two begins with a wonderful settled/unsettled “Drift Studies”-esque detuned test tone that gradually accumulates filigree before blindsiding the listener with a split-second glimpse into the abyss, a pendulum that only swings farther and farther, and an ending reminiscent of the coda of Schnitzler’s “Meditation,” in which dub space, once appropriated, becomes literal, carceral, and oppressive, and our heroes keep on throttling the cosmic slot machine amid a beery haze, in a vain attempt to escape the tape itself."

-Deception Island