Sunwatchers - Illegal Moves - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Sunwatchers - II [COMPACT DISCS] date 02/09/2018

2016 , the proper debut full-length from the New York ensemble featuring former Dark Meat members Jeff Tobias, Jim McHugh and Jason Robira. “Hard to pin down, harder to hold onto; bent circuit board snake charmers unfurl across hexagonal grids. A seemingly familiar sound, but then you realize you have your ear pressed against a reflection. Sunwatchers are a distorted prism to so many past greats reminiscent of Ethiopiques, John Handy Band, Terry Riley, Art Ensemble meets Laddio Bolocko. Forever-swirling saxophone blended belly-to-belly with elastic guitar and tinfoil-thin phin (a Thai instrument not unlike an electrified tenor guitar or sitar); a whirlpool of repetitious interpretations; militaristic marches ascend into meditations. These songs map out great pyramids and deep, buried labyrinths; they are massive, they are leviathans. Amazing cover painting of Handsome Jimmy Valiant by artist Scott Lenhardt—a strange but somehow sensible match made in heaven. Dream machinery, just plain far out. Look for traces of this one in your brain jelly afterwards.” – John Dwyer. Album Tracks 1. Herd of Creeps 2. For Sonny 3. White Woman 4. Eusebius 5. Ape Phases 6. Moroner 7. Moonchanges

In the decade or so that hard-working New York quartet Sunwatchers have operated, the group has steadily & subtly refined their sound - a brain-blasting mixture of jazz, psychedelia, krautrock, punk, noise, & Saharan blues - into something that is avant-leaning enough to appeal to the discerning jazz & experimental music fan & weird & wooly enough to get the true heads' toes tapping. InchMusic Is Victory Over TimeInch is the band's 5th album, and fourth for Chicago-based Trouble In Mind Records, seeing the long-running lineup of Peter Kerlin (bass guitar), Jim McHugh (guitars), Jason Robira (drums), and Jeff Tobias (alto saxophone and keyboards) in prime form.The album's beguiling title stems from a note scrawled in a book about electronic music donated to PITGOOSE Prisoner Books, the grassroots prison literature program run out of The P.I.T. (aka Property Is Theft - McHugh's Anarchist community space, venue and info-shop located in Los Sures, Williamsburg). Scrawled as marginalia modifying a paragraph about durational minimalist composition, the concept illuminates music's material and spiritual power to subdue the sensation of the passage of time, both as an experiential phenomenon and as a creative, communal and socio-political force. McHugh says InchThe notion resonated with the our individual and communal experiences of loss, trauma, stasis and frustration since 2020, our three-year semi-silence as a band relative to our previous characteristic prolificacy, and our progress, projects and evolution since.InchAlbum opener World People is a classic Sunwatchers number whose title expresses their Anarcho-Internationalist ideology (and the atypically multi-culti make up of their crowds), with an underlying melodic resonance to New Orleans funeral marches à la Albert Ayler - a triumphant call to arms to all peoples. Live fave Too Gary's gang vocal shout punctuates a mo