• Black Vinyl

  Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

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  The Air’s Chrysalis Chime is the second LP from Old Million Eye, primarily a solo project of Brian Lucas. This beautifully transcendent and deeply explorational album sees Lucas widening his spectral and woozy palette to include musical contributions from Gayle Brogan (Pefkin/Burd Ellen), Steven R. Smith, Sheila Bosco (Dire Wolves), and Jeff Jefferson (3 Moons/The Lodestones). The album’s darker more drifting songs, “Ruby River ” and “Tales from Copperopolis” feature the vibrational voice of Georgia Carbone, erstwhile vocalist of Dire Wolves. Lucas and Carbone’s eerie vocal duet on the lengthy “Ruby River” is stunningly haunting and unexpected.
  
  This mysteriously anomalous album utilizes such elements as tape collage, improv jazz type drumming, clarinet, Brogan’s melodica, intertwining basses, piano, treated violin, and Lucas’s Scenes from the South Island-like plaintive skeletal guitar playing that is sure to tickle the ear into quiet hysterics, if not downright rearranging the ear to accommodate a new form of hearing!
  
  The listener should expect the usually oddly crafted and layered sound combinations as evidenced on previous OME releases. These sonic elements are a vehicle for Lucas’s softly placid tenor, but with added dimensions his purely solo work only alludes to. This album isn’t “psychedelic” in the sense of spacey, wah-wah riffs: it’s far more subtle, detailed, and delicate in terms of its transcendent properties, but the invitation is there to climb into the chrysalis and be transformed.
  
  
  Review of 'The Incandescent Switch'
  
  Psych project helmed by Brian Lucas. Lucas is best known these days for his bass work with Dire Wolves Just Exactly Perfect Sisters Band, but he has a hand in many other California psych outfits. The Wolves have been quiet vis-a-vis new recordings lately, but Old Million Eye has been pretty busy (please check out all releases but also the tape (Set and Drift' via Misophonia Records).
  
  The most basic elements of The Incandescent Switch are swirls of kosmiche keyboard, with vocals buried in the clouds, melodic bass lines moving through like slow-motion lightning, and various instrumental events darting hither and yon. The overall feel is something like a collision between a mid ’70s album on the German Sky label and a ’68 Bay Area acid-flash sensibility. If you could imagine Country Joe and The Fish’s “Section 43” being handled by the likes of Ash Ra Temple, then you might be able to imagine the interstellar heights OME reach
  
  But even when he’s working alone, handling guitars, percussion and who knows what else, Lucas creates fully inhabited dreamscapes of sound. I, for one, cannot wait to trip while spinning Old Million Eye. It seems like a very winning combination.
  
  -Byron Coley
  
  Includes unlimited streaming of Old Million Eye - The Air's Chrysalis Chime via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. ... more

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