Ask any heads you meet laying out oscillators or stringing patch cables in the basement of a house venue what they’re in it for, what drives them to the next gig or the next tape release, and odds are they’ll say “the ritual” of live performance. They’re in it for the chance to lose themselves in the inhuman tones of synthesis, to shepherd the audience along with them across the threshold into another realm where time bends and words have no use. Whether or not they actually take you, the audience member, to this other realm remains to be seen. Some projects do little more than turn off the lights, queue up The Holy Mountain on BluRay, and hope the PA doesn’t give out. The ritual can become a lot less transportive with, say, a small pocket of the audience loudly discussing Game Of Thrones, or an iridescent Apple logo shining from the back of a laptop into the smoke. Of course, one person’s ritual can be another person’s bummer, and vice versa. Who am I to judge what really takes you there?
Enter Telecult Powers. They will take you there. The duo of Mr. Matthews (usually found in Brooklyn) and Witchbeam (usually found in Cleveland) has put in years of textural exploration, synth tinkering, and meditative live performance in the noise/drone underground circuit, and has emerged as one of the most consistently confounding projects that you’ll ever see conjure tones from boxes and buttons before your eyes. Using synths that Mr. Matthews developed himself in his one-man True Color of Venus workshop, the duo sidesteps any semblance of standard tones in their sessions in favor of fine grain whirrings, hissing circuits, and bottomless washes of low end. Above all, the ritual comes first, as Witchbeam’s “hoodootronic” ideologies (see: the shrine depicted on the album sleeve) and both members’ pronounced occult curiosities compound into a very serious desire to cross over way out of the blue and deep into the black — candles lit, walls shaking, eyes closed.
Their upcoming LP, entitled Black Meditations, is available now via Experimedia’s in-house imprint. Check out “A Wish For Ouisch” for a taste of the duo’s symbiotic synthesis, adorned with a hymnal vocal coda by Rachel and Grant Evans (Hooker Vision honchos, a.k.a. Quiet Evenings), and Kate McGuire — along with a splash of zoned guitar work from a certain prodigal son of the Ohio underground, codename: The Road Chief.
• Telecult Powers: http://freemusicarchive.org/music/Telecult_Powers/
• Experimedia: http://experimedia.net/telecultpowers
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