Volcano The Bear - 1999 - The Inhazer Decline

Genre: Avantgarde, Free Folk
Label: United Diaries (UK)

Similar Artists: Nurse With Wound

Krautrock, Freeform Folk, Freaky, Weird...

When Nurse With Wound's "A Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table.." was first released in 1979, the response was one of bafflement. Volcano The Bear's first album for NWW's United Dairies is just as baffling. Ostensibly following the 70s art-rock damage of Faust (especially 'Tapes') and the willfull eccentricity of The Shadow Ring, Volcano The Bear (Byram refuses to call them anything but BJ and the Bear) plods through disjointed percussive riffs with alien droning, incongruous guitar work, and a crystal clear production which wouldn't be out of place on Too Pure. It's not hard to see why Steven Stapleton sought this group out after their Pickled Egg debut for a United Dairies release. 

Tracklisting

1. Planetary Bethlehem 
   
2. Quarterstone 
   
3. Musima 
   
4. Bowl 
   
5. Ruth Da Moose 
   
6. Worse With Noun 
   
7. Giant Angels 
   
8. Vast Blanket 
   
9. Mung 
   
10. The Queen's Teeth 
    
11. Here Are The Bounds 
    
12. Planetary Bethlehem 
    

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Volcano The Bear - 2007 - Amidst The Noise And Twigs

Genre: Psychedelic, Free Folk
Label: Beta Lactam Ring Records (US)

Similar Artists: Grizzly Bear, but on a weird mushroom trip!, Hochenkeit

If all the * Bear bands are cuties and sweeties, this bear will abduct you in a cave inside really deep and dark woods. Volcano the Bear are from Lancaster UK and released on Steve Stapeltons Label United Diaries. That should give you a direction, if not, imagine dark folky soundscapes and surreal ritual music with flutes, horns, percussion and mutiple voices.

The Three Twins close the album and maybe this is your escape from that cave. Play Loud!

Who knew that amidst the noise and the twigs there was music…sweet, sweet music?! This world is Volcano the Bear’s womb. At last, the year that VTB gets a shot at Top Of The Pops, assuming the pops finally snaps out of its vapid trance and embraces the standards of Comus, 3 Hurel, early Residents and 12th century Arabo-Andalusian music. As usual, our heroes are found keeping things stripped to the bone trumpet, but dripping with a juicy, melodic marrow. The record pours slowly and resolutely like a folk-psych dream urn, loaded with full metal banjoes; crumhorns at 12 O’clock; and autoharps at defcon 5. The experimentalism is this time couched in shifting tides of self-spun acidic harvest ballads that noisily well up into proto-Kraut thrums and tribal night trips around the pyre. A rural, squelchy, DIY delicacy which stinks of occidental embouchure so crystal crisp that every skkrrrr, pphaaapph and brrruuuummmm resonates like a small, sound-specific god, intertwined with beautifully skewed notes, voices and rhythms. "Amidst The Noise And Twigs" plays like a recently discovered field recording of some obscured Celtic clan who accidentally stumbled onto psychedelia 600 years ahead of its time. These pipers truly rock the gates of dawn.

Tracklisting

1. The Sting Of Haste 
   
2. Before We Came To This Religion 
   
3. Larslovesnicks Farm 
   
4. Burnt Seer 
   
5. Cassettes Of Berlin 
   
6. Splendid Goose 
   
7. She Vang Moon 
   
8. One Hundred Years Of Infamy 
   
9. The Three Twins 

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