Finally, we get some of the finest artistic results of the awful, forced hibernation zones we all were forced to bubble ourselves into during the COVID era. It sounds like the soundtrack to a space desert film you can’t wait to watch. There are so many of the sounds you already like that might come from guitars and drone elements, but it’s subtly put together here in ways that remove all sense of ego. These are sort of slowed-down post-rock songs, but it’s not overly interested in math, and it is way too cosmic to be post-rock. Sorry we even said “post-rock.”

These perfect, first instrumental recordings here were made in a home studio in Birmingham, Michigan by three longtime friends and compatriots who were slowly starting to go nuts as lockdown started. Later, another friend shuttering in place in the U.P. added percussion elements. “All our friends were doing yoga, so we made this yoga music for them,” Gretchen Davidson explains half-seriously. But this music contains multitudes. It exists in a curious space between improvised music and subtle songs that fall apart the closer you get to them. There is a lot of space in between these notes.

No one will call this a “Detroit supergroup,” and we implore you to follow suit. However, the group curiously brings together disparate yet friendly threads of the fertile Detroit underground: garage, weirdo indie, and the noise scene—from its very top practitioners, no less. Gretchen Davidson (Slumber Party, Terror at the Opera, Universal Indians), Warren Defever (ESP Beetles, His Name is Alive), guest drummer Steve Nistor (Sparks, Ural Thomas, Seedsmen to the World), and Joey Mazzola (Detroit Cobras, Sponge, Sugarcoats)—this combination is deeply unfuckwithable.

Davidson is a genius at ephemeral noise guitar. Nistor can make a cymbal sound like the spaceship that killed your grandfather. Defever may pretend otherwise, but he is a spiritual master of multiple drone-based instruments. And Mazzola has mastered the art of fucking with various genres on the guitar, as well as a prolific songwriter. In fact, because of Joey’s involvement, the band has already headed down three separate pathways towards unheard realms of garage-prog and heaviest spacescape music (especially now that monster drummer Nistor is in the same room). You do not want to sleep on this band, even though they are definitely not a Detroit supergroup.

We are so excited to release these recordings. This might be music that exists to bring back the chillout room at serious raves. Whatever its use, we all know that ex-hippies made the best postpunk; do ex-postpunks make the best neo-hippie music? That’s a question perhaps only you can answer.

- Mike McGonigal