Attentive readers may recognise the name Slenko from a review we wrote back in February. We described C.M. Slenko’s Royal Blue Days as “long and shape-shifting, sometimes sad and sometimes sure and always ready to surprise…ebbing and flowing with mood and the moon, settling on no firm conclusion beyond the steady flow of time and our uncertain position within it”. The eponymous Charlie Slenko runs Sioux Trails Records, who have put out music by Francis McKeys and the pair have also been known to team up under the name Slenko & McKeys, giving us twice the strange and experimental band for our buck.
Two Channels and a Choir of Angels is one of two lost albums that were released by Sioux Trails Records for Net Label Day, and finds the pair making music that is noisy and lo-fi and wonderfully their own. Opener ‘I’ is a blown-out speaker jam, buried at the bottom of a murky barrel of lo-fi distortion. The track breaks the eight minute barrier, eventually gathering into a rollicking rock & roll song, smudged beyond recognition.
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Five seconds into ‘II’ it becomes apparent that the whole album is going to follow a similar pattern, music intended to destroy your eardrums or your neighbours’ mental health. Fittingly, the Sioux Trails Records Bandcamp page recommends you “listen loud for best results”, and it’s clear that the sheer physical nature of its vibrations is almost as important as how your brain makes sense of them as sound.
And there really is no let-up. The album rumbles and clatters, occasionally ripping with these big bluesy guitar licks. The discordant squall of ‘IV’ coughs and splutters and rattles across its six minute run-time, before the fifth and final track (which is actually the most reserved cut on the album) brings ramshackle percussion and reverberating guitar. The final 15 seconds lurch in a completely different direction, a choir of perhaps-heavenly voices, but after the bruising that you ears have been through, and with the creepy sepia-tinged gazes on the album art, it sounds as ominous as a 3am phonecall.
You can get Two Channels and a Choir of Angels on a name-your-price from the Sioux Trails Records Bandcamp page. Be sure to check out the other Slenko & McKeys album, the perfectly titled Apparitions (Louder Than Whatever Shit You Listen To) on Bandcamp too!