2.24.2008

Stunned no. 1



EUREKA Eureka (Stunned no. 1) — out of stock

When guitar player William Giacchi launched his live action vision Magic Lantern a few years ago, an equal and opposite reaction occurred in the form of solo gig EUREKA. But unlike the Lantern's sundazed psychrock, Eureka emits a majestic glacial glow, frozen within you and without you like a grizzly gone into heightened-consciousness hibernation. On Eureka, Giacchi gives birth to a triplet of worlds, each with an atmosphere more dense and intense than the last. Ice floe guitar drones mingle with shivering, distant feedback and frostbitten percussion clatter - all to elating effect. Everything is suspended in minimalist ecstasy, and if it travels, it travels vertically either down into the hard ground or up up into the ether. Purify the royal light dome that is your mind with this stunning inaugural Stunned Records ltd. edition of 25 cdrs in heavy duty psychedelic-woodgrain slipcase.
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reviews:

"Released by the upstart Stunned Records, the album starts with “Finity Inn,” whose spare, raga-fied space rock is suggestive of spiritual awakening and philosophical enlightenment, à la peak-time Popol Vuh and Pelt. Giacchi runs his guitar through some processors (I surmise) to multiply their density, creating the illusion of dozens of Giacchis in a hall of mirrors, letting his six-string frequencies oscillate into infinity and conjuring a stoned bliss. This clocks in at a relatively brief nine minutes, compared to the disc’s other two epics, which total 51 minutes. “The Bright New Year” is a slowly evolving drone in the vein of Spacemen 3/Spectrum/Spiritualized’s more contemplative output, embellished with brisk nipple-gong percussion. This track evokes, in philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s coinage, an “immense intimacy”—and what I like to call “ecstatic stasis.” Eureka climaxes with the 30-minute “The Nine Months of Christmas,” a piercing, solarized drone wreathed with concentric halos of holy electricity, beneath which emanates a motorized hum that could be the universe’s generator—or perhaps the Big Bang’s aftershock." OC Weekly
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"Finally we stumble upon the label’s first release, the brilliant, self-titled drone trilogy by
Eureka (William Giacchi, of Magic Lantern). With growing intensity, the three tracks grow in size – from ten to twenty to thirty minutes – all the while consolidating toward pure sound. Moving from the strum and pang of steel strings in the opening moments of “Finity Inn” – a centerpiece struggling in the midst of so much rumble, clatter, and growing chatter – the coming tide of electric guitar surges upward as a wall, consuming these discrete elements into a choppy whole. So much of the disc’s power is found in its crystalline production, an audible clarity which assures the ear of every move, maintaining a compositional transparency which cannot obscure the delicate events of this music. “The Bright New Year” dispenses with the initial gestures toward melody, instead attempting to form a current from thousands of particles, several veins of which we find flowing in every which direction; the levels raise to emphasize a deep bass-line and the swift clatter of a chime, the surface again raising to drown these elements in a single wash which turns slowly in various stunning tints (ala Menche). Having succeeded these previous approaches, “The Nine Months of Christmas” suspends the agenda of movement for a formal sleight of hand, pressing forth a seamless mass of sound beneath which the ear may or may not find the imprints of a counter-harmony, and given the precision and openness of the preceding tracks, this doubt invites only greater doubt, itself spurring on a micro-tonal symphony of imagined qualities. Like the recently-reviewed ‘Sad Faces of the Moon’ by Alistair Crosby, ‘Eureka’ is a powerful meditation among so many naïve poseurs, an album to keep always in close reach." Animal Psi

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