Neptune
After twelve years of relative quiet, experimental rock band Neptune returns with Play Some Music, their ninth full length album and a return to form from a project spanning over three decades. Play Some Music reunites the band’s most recognizable and widest traveling lineup of Jason Sidney Sanford, Mark William Pearson, and Daniel Paul Boucher, whose 2008 LP Gong Lake (Table of the Elements) and 2006 LP Patterns (Les Potagers Natures) serve as defining releases among the band’s catalog of over thirty recordings. Wielding their distinctive homemade instruments – a melding of hardware store and landfill – Play Some Music features microtonal and macrotonal wire-framed steel guitars as well as amplified drums, amplified circular saw blade percussion, electronics, and feedback organ to produce a suite of songs, improvised and composed, that explore classical mythology and the nebulous realm of memory. Always expanding their sound world, Neptune’s signature frenetic guitars and drums are joined by new gamelan-like amplified percussion and phantasmagoric electronic textures hovering over its ether.
PIPE
In the ‘90s, Pipe burned bright before it burned out. After releasing a sizable catalog (an EP, four singles and three LPs, plus assorted compilation cuts) and touring with the likes of Archers of Loaf and New Bomb Turks, injuries and road fatigue ended the band in 1999, after only seven years.
Then, after a 10-year quiet, Pipe’s original lineup—singer Ron Liberti, guitarist Mike Kenlan, drummer Chuck Garrison and bassist Dave Alworth—reunited in advance of Merge Records’ 20th anniversary festival. And they just keep playing!
