State Laughter

EXEK are one of my favorite current projects, Can't give them enough praise. They've had a great run of releasing music over the last couple years and all i can think each time is that if this is what they are releasing, they must already have another record written and i know its going to just as good if not better. "SBSL" is a little more subdued (which is a funny thing to say with the lads)...it feels more like some of my mushroom trips, in a sense of its psychedelia...but not musically psych....honestly this is making me smile, because the last time i tripped was seeing them in Memphis last year around this time...and it was a kind of overwhelming experience. This is psychedelic in the sense of the reality of the world and work. It's not Summer Of Love and smiles. It's being in darkness and being moved around by machine like tentacles. Occasionally windows burst open and alien light seeps into your mind. A memory of something happening outside the building? Flashes of imagery. It's one note. It drones...i'm creating a line with the SPF record i just wrote about (also on Digital Regress) and my mind working Tony Conrad/The Dream Syndicates music into the narrative. One pulsing idea with numerous realities unfurling and recoiling back into itself. Driving nowhere in particuliar, but finding yourself in an unexplored neighborhood that fills your day up with bizarre food, junk shops, new people. Like i kind of think they wrote a masterpiece with "Ahead of Two Thoughts"...and this is for sure a continuation, but there is something else going on, for me that is difficult to verbalize. It feels like a very psychological album. Sort of taking the otherworldly narrative of "A Casual Assembly" and waking it from its dream state, only to rematerialize in a new world. Back to the darkness of the factory....shooting whatever detritus out of our hands at the windows, eyes grasping blindly at some kind of image. The song before last "Unetiquetted" is the pinnacle of the album....coming out of the trip, through the roof into oncoming dusk. back to some reality. Such a beautiful song. In a marketplace full of products referencing their endless neighbors, it's hearing one that rattles away in its own package.