Spiral Joy Band

Psychedelic / Experimental / Acoustic

Blacksburg, VA / Madison, WI

You do not have the current Adobe Flash Player

To listen to this audio clip you will need to upgrade Adobe Flash Player

You do not have Adobe Flash Player

To listen to this audio clip you will need to install Adobe Flash Player

About

Discography: Lullabies for Jeff Dean CD (VHF Records 2005); Searing Float CDR of 50 (Klang Industries 2005); Floating Seer CDR of 50 or so (Klang Industries 2006); with John Fail: Pores in The Porch and Puddles Beneath CD of 300 (Soopa 2006); Wake of The Dying Sun King CD (VHF Records September 2007); Dreams of David Crosby Tape of 150 (Now available from Sloow Tapes 2007); Pleasure is the Headlight LP (Forthcoming on UZU sometime soon, in process); Open, Mother, and Let Me In, The Town is Burning CDR of 30 or so (Ark Majesties 2008); Little Sparrow (VHF Records 2009); Tilling the Soil CDR of 50 or so (Ark Majesties 2009); Black Earth Hymns Tape of 98ish (Earjerk)
***********************************************************************
Review of Little Sparrow from Dusted, by Adam Strohm: Like the slow tearing of sinew from bone, Little Sparrow, the latest offering from the Virginian outfit Spiral Joy Band, is a product of a delicate savagery. The album makes a largely sonorous sound, but the individual voices are often full of grit and gristle, true to the rather rustic aesthetic mined by this band and their musical kin. Recorded with “no overdubs, no amplification, no effects” (Spiral Joy Band’s standard manifesto), Little Sparrow is a hypnotically woven document of quiet clamor in which the beauty of the drone is almost secondary to the activity that takes place underneath. Mikel Dimmick, Amy Shea, Nathan Bowles and Mike Gangloff make use of an assortment of instruments on The Little Sparrow. The fiddles and harmonium are perhaps the album’s most preeminent ingredients, but the key to the tone of the music often lies in the interaction of these more commandeering sounds with those that roil underneath. Shimmering cymbal rolls, the plink and patter of banjosticks, and some disguised elicitation of avian sounds (perhaps the bird who lent the disc its name?) all flit or flow underneath the drone, which isn’t so opaque as to overwhelm. The marriage of bow, rosin and string gives the music its most palpable texture; when the harmonium or sruti are added, they act as eggs in baking, binding the sounds into a denser whole. There are certainly other groups making a similar sound to that of Spiral Joy Band (including Pelt, with whom Dimmick and Gangloff have played), but what sets Spiral Joy Band apart from the masses is the direction of their music. The sounds of the strings tilt and sway, and the percussion, bells, and whistles might meander in the background, but even at its most unhinged, Little Sparrow retains a focused feel, largely avoiding the feelings of aimless rambling that can mar music of this sort. “Tolling over the Rocks” is an anomaly on the disc, a sparse series of gentle ringing and clanging over the waves of the Atlantic. The track is minimalism of a different sort, though even here, Spiral Joy Band manages to convey a purposeful tone. It might not be the disc’s most memorable (or characteristic) track, but it’s an exemplar of the secret to Little Sparrow’s success. /// From Melody Bar on The Dreams of David Crosby: Appropriately enough "The Dreams of David Crosby" opens up with the ululations of a myriad of pipes! These, along with the hand-drums, establish a suitably dosed atmosphere to fill the dreams of the Great Ego. These tracks are all live recordings: the first side is filled with mostly hand percussion jams. Side B finds SJB in full-on cosmic drone mode with fiddle and harmonium.///// From Dusted on Wake of the Dying Sun King: A great thing about Jack Rose, Pelt and sister group Spiral Joy Band is the almost total lack of studied art "seriousness" that they bring to their recordings. Though the product of the latter two is admittedly esoteric, it's easy to imagine this being the music your friends make, albeit friends seriously into Tibetan trance and the Alga Marghen catalog. Formed in 2001, Spiral Joy Band played live for years before putting out their first album, Lullabies for Jeff Dean. Rather than opt for studio experimentation, the group basically lay down their tracks in lengthy recording sessions without overdubs - Wake of the Dying Sun King was recorded in three sessions, one of them, according to the liner notes, an "all-night flight at Glade Baptist Church" in Blacksburg, Virginia. More than an immediacy, there's an honesty in this approach, as if a different tack would dilute the interplay and ring false. Core members Mikel Dimmick and Mike Gangloff return on Wake, with Nathan Bowles and Amy Shea completing the quartet. The addition of Shea on fiddle in particular is a revelation, making the Americana links between Pelt, Rose and Spiral Joy Band much more explicit. It's absolutely gorgeous work that, when not obtaining Tony Conrad-levels of hypnosis, easily blends into the rustic atmosphere. Imagine if Ben Vida brought the bulk of his Appalachian influences to Pillow, rather than Town and Country, and you'll have a sense of the dynamics at play here. All four tracks are top-notch, but "Long Shadows Beneath the Moon" showcases what the band does best. Amidst simple pump organ, fiddle and who knows what percussion, the band captures the cover's outstretched hand in sound. Much improvised music is based around the idea of the musicians playing off each other, batting ideas back and forth. On this track, Spiral Joy Band demonstrate that the most affecting strain of improv is that where the players play with each other and unite individual ideas into a cohesive whole, to the point where everything seems not spontaneous, but inevitable.By Brad LaBonte////From apexonline on Wake of the Dying Sun King:The 2nd album from various Pelt members is another fantastic voyage into tranced drone and spacious cosmic textures with the emphasis heavily on percussion this time with gongs, cymbals and singing bowls bowed and clashed into a frenzy of singing metal. Sruti box and fiddle pair up on the final track to create a hypnotic earthy drone that seems as rooted in Appalachian tradition as it is in Eastern meditation. ////From From Rough Trade, on Wake of The Dying Sun King: this second album from the droning string ensemble comes as a real treat, sharing members - and a darkly meditative sonic ethos - with pelt, the group use a variety of bowed instruments (not all string-based) to concoct a liberated psychedelic chamber music, finely detailed with singing tibetan bowls, gongs and other unusual musical ephemera. there's a increased percussive presence to their last long-player, lullabies for jeff dean, largely thanks to nathan bowles' wily contributions on the drums. despite often sounding extremely abstract, the album does venture into almost folksy terrain, especially on the unhinged clatter and soaring fiddle of the title track. there's no shortage of psych-drone albums nowadays, but wake of the dying sun king is far, far more interesting than most.//// From Foxy Digitalis, on Pores in The Porch and Puddles Beneath:"What a monumentally trance-inducing disc Spiral Joy Band and John W. Fail have produced. This is quite a unique experience, somehow comparable to a cross between Dirty Three and Growing. If you need a label then maybe something like "ecstatic minimal bluegrass drone" would fit (as completely ridiculous as that sounds). With the sheer amount of bowed strings and drones on "Pores in the Porch and Puddles Beneath", one would expect an experience more akin to a Tony Conrad performance, and while I would still consider this to fit into Conrad's idea of eternal music, Spiral Joy Band have created a more fleshed out dream world of their own. To put it another way, the music here gives off an impression of a physical place. The disc's title and nature-themed artwork echo this impression. Still, the main focus here is the drone, and Sprial Joy Band get really deep. Lots of bowed strings and odd resonance coming from what sounds like an assortment of acoustic instruments all bleeding into one another abound. A surprising amount of controlled chaos and the aforementioned bluegrass fiddle twang mixed with touches of Indian raga are the most welcomed surprises, and make the disc stand out in the vast sea of drones- a great soundtrack for summertime mystical journeys beneath your porch. 9/10 -- Charles Franklin (24 July, 2007)" spiral joy band with john w. fail: on "pores in the porch and puddles beneath", dimmick and gangloff are joined by glasgow-based american expatriate john w. fail for three lenghty excursions into dynamic drone structures, with thick layers of violin, esraj and sruti box interspersed with occasional punctuations on prayer bowl and electronics.the opener, "elegy for wooden ladders", is the most dissonant piece of the three, with apparently random flashes of esraj and violin which gradually evolve and interlock, bringing the track to an agitated outcome. "down from the skies" clocks in at almost 40 minutes, and is a perfect combination of the twin guidelines of spiral joy band's music: a long hillbilly fiddle intro by gangloff is gradually overridden by dissonant drones from dimmick and fail on electronics, prayer bowl and esraj, until the americana elements that originated the track are all but submerged in a wave of asian-sounding drone and clattering esraj, with a majestic sruti box drone-chord rounding off the track. the final track, "impercetible, unwavering" is the most static of the three, a thick sruti box drone supporting the strings, who constantly go in and out of phase with each other; about a minute from the end, the drone bedrock is suddenly removed, leaving only the throbbing strings, which eventually fall into silence.///ADDITIONAL REVIEW OF PORES IN THE PORCH: three extended "armchair ethnomusicology" studies from pelt members mike gangloff and mikel dimmick, with cenotaph boss john w. fail; each contribute a wealth of stasis-heavy droning acoustic string timbres - surreal cosmic emanations; definitely something you'll want to soak in... - REVIEW FROM:mimaroglu music sales////// Mikel Dimmick Spiral Joy Band - Floating Seer - Cdr from Pelt-associated Spiral Joy Band. Featuring Mikel Dimmick, Mike Gangloff, Amy Shea and Nathan Bowles joined by John Fail on one track. There are some home-recorded solo and duo tracks on here and a couple of live outings. The wheezy buzz of the opening drone piece is sure to burn a hole straight through your head. Elsewhere there's a cacophony of string-sawing, hypnotic drum-beating and a beautiful piece of organ / bowed string drone with the subdued weight of winter fog. Lovely. (gayle -i think- apex online.com) /// The Spiral Joy Band was formed in 2001 as a hook up between Pelt members Mikel Dimmick and Mike Gangloff, and Karl Precoda (Last Days of May, The Dream Syndicate). Until now they have privileged live performances over recorded works, and these performances have typically featured extended drone works for acoustic instruments much like Pelt's recent work on '(Untitled)' and 'Pearls from the River', also both on VHF. Instruments used and abused include tibetan singing bowls, gongs, sruti box, esraj, tanpura, shenai, and tongue drum, as well as a range of more conventional western paraphernalia.'Lullaby 1' concentrates on the metal, placing the listener inside a Golden Triangle hilltop temple filled with bells and gongs being struck and bowed in ever more skull melting ways until consciousness gives way leaving a single sonorous chord ringing in its place. 'Lullaby 2' is insanely long at nearly 42 minutes, evolving from the deep listening trance space created by Gangloff's esraj, to some Last Chord at the End of the Universe action as furious percussion and shrieking shenais push the track over the edge of sanity, and an infinite number of howler monkeys toss their typewriters out of their trees in admiration and sympathy. By its conclusion, most listeners' nerve endings are quite possibly going to be arcing like downed power lines. 'Lullaby 3' thrums with expectancy in the early stages of its 26 minute duration, deeply placed bells and whistles giving way to circulating tampura drones and stately piano figures as if to overwrite the jarring electrical storm of 'Lullaby 2' with a heady tropical sea breeze, though it too gets frenetic in its latter stages. Although the entirety of the release is some kind of high-water mark for Eastern-influenced acoustic drone, this final track points the way towards some promising new avenues for exploration. (Tony Dale) ///Avid readers of the Broken Face should know how highly I rank the work of Virginian Pelt, so its with great excitement that I see two thirds of the current Pelt line-up appearing in a new (at least on record) ensemble. Spiral Joy Band is the combined efforts of Mike Gangloff, Mikel Dimmick and Karl Precoda (Last Days of May, The Dream Syndicate) and like one would imagine they conjure a pretty dark and fucked up drone racket thats not too far off the Pelt experience. Well, thats not entirely true but they do find their base in the same sort of ghostly, whirring metallic noises and bowed metals that the mothership from time to time examines more closely. Besides the ample use of gently struck metal percussion we get a myriad of barely distinguishable (and pronounceable) acoustic instruments such as Tibetan singing bowl, gong, sruti, bells, flute, esraj, tanpuram, shenai, tongue drum, dumbek and shakers. This is probably one of the reasons why theres such a great sense of detail amid the random arrangements of drifting and screeching tones.- Mats Gustafsson ///Hi, boys and girls! Do you like long, deep, heavy-duty instrumental jams? I know I do. I know that after a long, hard day of doing whatever it is I do that makes my days long and hard, I like to turn down the lights, turn off all other forms of technology, and listen to some really, really heady, mind-bendingly beautiful music. Thats why, then, I am really fond of Lullabies for Jeff Dean, the proper debut by Spiral Joy Band. Though theyve been around for years (as a side project for experimental band Pelts Mikel Dimmick and Mike Gangloff), this is their very first official release. I love it when a band simply doesnt bother to name their songs. Of course, who needs names when your music consists of grand, heady epic instrumental passages, much like the three found on this record. After all, whats the point of naming songs when all you do is jam? This troupe of musical experimenters has a slight Eastern fetish, as youll find sitars and gongs and other sorts of odd musical things from Asian lands. No matter, though, they blend in well with pianos and guitars and other things that go bump in the night. Drones blended with melody and a definite dollop of dark atmospherewhat more could a boy want? Dig the forty-minute Lullaby 2, which starts off all nice and then just gets progressively mind-blowing, and the beauty of the piano-laden Lullaby 3 cannot be denied, either. The three long jams found here, they wont overwhelm you, as much as they will overtake you. The music is slow, the music is pretty, and the music is something that must be experienced in just the right way. By the right way, we mean candles and darkness and a little bit of fear. Lullabies for Jeff Dean is deep, its dark, its scaryand its also damn near brilliant. I have no idea who Jeff Dean is, but I hope he enjoys these lullabies. I know I did.--Joseph Kyle///By now, avid AQ list readers should know just how much we love the drone, and how much we love dark swirling stretched out ambient music. And just how much of our favorite drone music comes from the always impeccable VHF record label: Sunroof!, Total, Skullflower, Vibracathedral Orchestra, Flying Saucer Attack, Pelt and many more. And now you can add Spiral Joy Band to the list. A long running Pelt offshoot, this is the first official release from the SJB after having formed almost 5 years ago. The Spiral Joy Band focuses on just one element of Pelt's sound, bowed and struck metal, and makes that their sonic focal point, stretching the sound of reverberating metal into massive trance like drones. Singing bowls, gonga, sruti box, bells, flute, esraj, tanpuram, shenai, tongue drum, dumbek, shakers and electronics all contribute to the drone, or add subtle melodies and simple rhythms, each subtle layer and woven into a slow burning, dreamily hypnotic thrum. The final track adds some unlikely piano, that gives it a very laid back seventies hippy space psych prog vibe, with tinkling chimes, huge washes of gong and strange atonal melodies, all hovering above a distant rumbling Tony Conrad-like drone. Nice.