Bufo Alvarius

My first impression of the opening guitar notes from "Adhesive", the first track from "Bufo Alvarius" and the first I'd ever heard from Bardo Pond , was that they were searing and yet heavily narcotic all at once; massive, liquid, slowly puddling; heavier and yet with a more expansive tone than a riff with that sort of resonance should have been capable of producing, something akin, finally, to heavy particulates being levitated in a rhythmic interval and stretched out infinitely within a gigantic whirling funnel. It seems impossible to discuss Bardo Pond's music without resorting to language that references mind-altering experiences. Few bands that play guitar-driven psychedelic rock produce music that is truly lysergic in nature; there aren't any questions on that front here. I was hooked from that opening series of notes and brought home "Bufo Alvarius" in November of 1995. There is something truly primeval about the way Isobel Sollenberger's flute sussurates across the roar of the distortion produced by the guitars of the brothers Gibbons, here on this release (and most of those to follow), and the timeless, sustained, saturating, heavily modulated licks that ooze like sand through an hourglass during the 29 + minute-long "Amen" (a motif which will surface again within a faster tempo on "Ganges", the final track from "Dilate", a later release); it is music that is made by people who take drugs to make music to take drugs to, only it has the same effect on people who listen to it without having indulged in any substance at all. And so "Bufo Alvarius" is definitely worth ordering, if only for "Adhesive" and "Amen", the opening and closing tracks, though almost every other cut has some sort of droning, hypnotic wrinkle to it, especially "Absence" and "On A Side Street". No one should live in a universe without more dimensions than we can grasp with only our physical senses; for that reason alone Bardo Pond justifies its existence, because its music is that capable of opening up realms we normally have no access to in consensus reality, and no other route to take to them.

If you ever listen to this record, prepare yourself to dive into a big sonic tunnel where light is always some more miles ahead. Guitars over guitars, almost sludge noise that oils our thoughts. Imagine Galaxy 500 on highly psychedelic drugs. Verrry good indeed!

The intuitive shamans of mellifluous chaos and incorporeal turbulent travelogues open the gates and the Cosmos becomes a wonderful mess. Like doing peyote under an electric storm while a saguaro cactus performs acupuncture on the battered remains of your medulla oblongata, after the merciless, ultra-distorted geetar excursions of the Gibbon brothers move on over your unsuspecting perceptive system like a friendly hurricane across the Bermuda Triangle. Meanwhile, a pack of wild chihuahuas stomps all over your ego at the arrhythmic and ponderous pace set somnambulisticly by Joe Culver, as Isobel Sollenberger mumbles cryptic incantations in what English would sound like if frozen at absolute zero and placed under the Iguazú cataracts for safekeeping. And it's all washed in a golden halo of fuzz. An electrocuted nirvana.

It must be nice to have friends that will say anything, loquacious or not, to make a sonic school-project sound more important than it is... Actually, why am I even wasting my time with th......

With 'Bufo Alvarius' (1995), Philadelphia-based Bardo Pond produced an album that towers over every other space-rock band of the era. The band turned the acid-rock jam into a major art coining a new form of music built around supersonic drones. The average piece was a rainstorm of guitar distortions, strident turbulences and catastrophic drumming, halfway between MC5's heavy blues and Spacemen 3's shoegazing. It was the soundtrack of a cosmic trauma that still haunts the firmament.