On Into An Energy, from which this track is taken, the Starving Weirdos duo of Bryan Pyle and Merrick McKinlay is joined by occasional collaborators Steve Lazar and Greg Devaney, and perhaps their chemistry together accounts for the elusive shift in focus heard on these cuts when compared to previous releases by this Californian drone-psych unit.

Even though Starving Weirdos routinely break out the rain sticks, horns and hand drums, at its core their music is a kind of deep-forest-ghetto-musique-concrète. You can never tell if what you're hearing is a real-time performance or a product of copious editing and overdubbing, whether those sounds emanated from tapes or from live instruments. Most of the time, it's a combination of all these, and the results are transportive, disorienting. Yet while Starving Weirdos' song and album titles suggest an esoteric or occult bent, their music is always reassuringly lucid, even earthy. Theirs is a mysticism grounded in the ordinary sounds of everyday life in their native Humboldt County, California. At their best, Starving Weirdos achieve that high romantic ideal: to make the familiar strange, and the strange familiar.

Starving Weirdos
Bo’ Weavil Recordings
Bo' Weavil on Diogenes