Abunai!
Round-Wound
THE PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE: \"\'Round-Wound\' has four hearts tuned to the same psychedelic beat throughout...there\'s close to 80 minutes of Abunai in free-flowing psychic flight...Each trip opens new doors; each door leads to a different trip.\"
Reviews of Abunai!\'s \'Round-Wound\':
AMG ALL MUSIC GUIDE
\"...\'Round-Wound\' finds the four-piece still able to kick up a mighty psych/rock/drone storm...Brendan Quinn\'s guitar work hits the star lanes just so, Dan Parmenter and Joe Turner keep the rhythms moving, Kris Thompson tops it off with keyboards, and one couldn\'t ask for anything better.\" (Ned Raggett)
MAGNET
\"It\'s a stupefying, warts-and-all performance, the like of which has sent discerning Terrastock festival crowds staggering into the street mumbling to themselves.\"
(Jud Cost)
THE PTOLEMAIC TERRASCOPE
\"\'Round-Wound\' has four hearts tuned to the same psychedelic beat throughout...there\'s close to 80 minutes of Abunai! in free-flowing psychic flight...Enter through the portals of antiquity and sit in meditation as strange electronic music reverberates through the labyrinth flashing a myriad of fleeting, haunting images as patterns form and trails of colour dissolve. Each trip opens new doors; each door leads to a different trip.\" (Colin Hill)
BOSTON\'S WEEKLY DIG
\"...Clouds of hazy feedback, ringing guitar notes and swirling space-age keyboard atmospherics punctuate the disc; it\'s the kind of music that Terrastock brethren SubArachnoid Space would appreciate, as the two outfits are as close as any to being kindred spirits. The centerpiece of the album, the thirteen-minute epic \'Drowning in Light\' is simply superb, superceding every facet of ordinary and threatening to take on an artificial intelligence of its own...Round Wound is a wondrous excursion through the time-space continuum.\"
(J Bennett)
BOSTON GLOBE
\"You might think that nearly 80 minutes of mostly instrumental jams would be a snore. Think again. For its third album, Boston\'s space-rock excursionists Abunai! (Japanese for \"Look out!\") let loose with a mind-melting dosage of warped sonic explorations, moodily elegant ruminations, and aural ideas that build and shift into
interstellar overdrive.\" (Jonathan Perry)
ALTERNATIVE PRESS
4 (out of 5; \"outstanding\")
PSYCH-PROG BAND GRACEFULLY COME INTO THEIR OWN
\"...they unfurl layers of feedback while playing beautiful, elegant solos of the sort not heard since Crystalized Movements stalked the earth...\'Round Wound\' is one of the most pleasant surprises of 2000. (Bill Cohen)
FAKEJAZZ.COM
\"...Kris Thompson\'s Hawkind-styled synths, Joe Turner\'s driven drumming, Dan Parmenter\'s Funkadelic basslines, and Brendan Quinn\'s impressive assortment of acid-stained, Eastern, and folk-wise guitars are woven into one most excellent whole...Riffs are swallowed and skewed by vortical keyboards and spit out of labyrinthine wormholes...\"Drowning in Light\" pulses and shudders like a dark star collapsing at the album\'s center, issuing a thousand psychotropic variations on a vaguely \"Paint it Black\"-like theme from its black-hole heart...It\'s a wonder that the plastic packaging, cleverly designed to resemble a packet of guitar strings, can hold it all in.\" (Gil Gershman)
AURAL INNOVATIONS
\"We spacerock reviewers often throw phrases like \"mind-melting\" around as casually as job applicants like to put \"works well with others\" on their resumes. But for their third full-length release, Abunai! have released a set of tripped out instrumentals that will melt your mind more thoroughly than water dashed the evil designs of the wicked witch of the west (and more lovingly too)...
In summary, there should be a warning label on this album. The guitars and organ are absolutely searing. The pace can get quite frenzied with mad swirling organ, pulsating and droning guitars, and enough acidic licks to fry your brain into mush.\" (Jerry Kranitz)
and from the home front...
[here\'s the Camera Obscura Records press release]
For their third full-lengther, Boston psych-rockers Abunai! have created something radically different to the well-received \"Universal Mind Decoder\" and its celebrated follow-up \"Mystic River Sound\". \"Round Wound\" takes many hours of instrumental improvisational tapes and uses advanced mastering techniques to weave a seamless and constantly evolving collage out of them. Keyboardist Kris Thompson explains: \"Improvising and jamming has always been a part of our time spent playing together, and we felt like an album made entirely in that spirit would be something that would be satisfying to share with people who have enjoyed those parts of our albums and our live shows. A lot of bands fret about how best to \'capture their sound\', but what I like so much about this album is that during the recording of the various jams that make it up, we weren\'t conscious that we were making an album. We were just recording our improvs casually over several years, on a variety of equipment and configurations in our rehearsal studio, without the mental obstacle of feeling like we were \"posing for the studio camera\".
In its cosmic flow, \"Round Wound\" is the band\'s most \"krautrock\" work to date, although that was as much a surprise to the band as anyone, since they have never specifically set out to capture the sound of prime German psychedelic improvisation circa 1970. Another reference point is the wondrous Flying Saucer Attack live CD on Corpus Hermeticum, although the outcome is entirely different, and this disc is varied enough to warrant indexing into 21 sections.
Much of the credit for the organic flow of \"Round Wound\" must be given to the mastering process between the band and engineer Jeff Lipton. Bassist Dan Parmenter explained it to us thusly: \"We spent a long time on sequencing, and in some cases we layered one jam on top of another, sometimes backwards. Sequencing the album was as much a visual exercise as an auditory one. We color-coded all of our tapes based on the key and took pains to ensure that we didn\'t have too much continuous stuff in \"A\" (or \"E\" or \"D\") and that the layered bits were either harmonious or at least clashed interestingly. The layering originally emerged from the realization that even with vicious pruning, we still had too much stuff, plus the discovery that even when the results of layering were pure cacophony, it was a very appealing kind of cacophony and even when 10-20 pieces were layered, much of the character of the original instrumental sound was still quite apparent. The first track, \"The Sound Museum\" is about 20 tracks playing simultaneously!\"
Rock: Kraut Rock