Residual Echoes – A Far Out Mixt Ape
9.29.16 by J Moss

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Residual Echoes is a long-running California drone/jam/psych band known for excellent, far-out live performances and their ability to throw down a truly lysergic guitar pedal freakout on top of motorik kraut-rock rhythms. “A Far Out Mixt Ape”, their new cassette on Winnipeg label Dub Ditch Picnic, collects 4 previously unreleased songs/jams from their archive of recordings.

The opening track “We Aren’t Here” begins with a lone guitar with a distant, crunchy, lofi feel playing the song’s groovy central riff, indicating the outtake nature of the release. The rest of the band kicks in after a few seconds, with a locked in rhythm section and a catchy, reverb drenched vocal melody in a windows-down kind of Sunday weed drive package. This musical dose of sunshine acid does not last, the song swerves quickly from it’s beachy hooks to guitar explorations and mind-bending breakdowns driven by stacks of effects and heavy drumming. The second half of side A, comprised of the suite “California Pipeline/Gungru Tarang”, shows a more contemplative side of Residual Echoes, starting with a solo guitar space-race of looped tones and riffs with oceans of reverb and canyons of echo. This bleeds into “Gungru Tarang”, a pulsing raga that builds it’s atmosphere with swirling eastern-style violins in step with toms while the guitar takes more of a back seat drone role.

Side B kicks off with “A Marriage (orange ufo mix)”, another more traditional psych rock song with an excellent slow building melody that goes long, pushing eleven minutes into deep NEU! territory. The final track, “Khar Shabi”, is a more subdued, slow and mysterious raga with hypnotic female vocals, my favorite jam. Being that these tunes are selected from old recordings, the mix shows off the versatility of Residual Echoes as a recording project. The imprint of kraut-rock kings like Agitation Free, Can, and the previously mentioned NEU! can be felt heavily across this tape, and the rhythm section has the skill to invoke those vibrations.

You can also hear the care-free looseness and stoned out oblivion of classic California psych. It’s a heady hybrid. Get the tape here.