Been two years since the release Rawskulled. Six years since The Totemist. (N.B. both on Akuphone). And 13 years since their first tape surfaced from the sand, recordings we unfortunately have never heard. Maybe a year or so since this project broke TikTok.
In that window, we’ve come fans of this mysterious project, purportedly from Texas, though their personas suggest our dystopian future fully realized.
Their show at Union Pool on 11.06.25 was genuinely something and conducted in full character, until the very last minute before the applause died down and one of the duo said: “No encores. These costumes are hot as balls.” And this Lp continues to break the fourth wall.
As the elliptical one-sheet describes, “Harvesting the psychic weight of migration, abandonment, and geopolitical limbo. A half-broken oud, double-reed pipes, a battered hurdy-gurdy, and self-built spike fiddles […] strings [were] detuned to unstable microtonal chaos, reeds soaked in questionable desert-sourced liquids, and instruments were kept outdoors to absorb ambient dew, dust, and wild temperature swings, ensuring every take carried an unpredictable, haunted instability. Vintage cassette decks and reel-to-reel units were powered through erratic, low-voltage setups (literally dying generators) which introduced random voltage drops, speed fluctuations, and ghostly dropouts mid-take -- turning tracking into unpredictable spirit interventions.” And this only describes the pre-studio preparations.
After the sessions, the label writes, “Spiritually Unemployed is the resulting artifact -- a sonic border autopsy where enlightenment arrives not as a sealed doctrine but as an open infested wound.”
Meta-Ritual?
Cracked ethnography?
Performance art?
Parody?
Satire of Sun City Girls 30 years after their debut?
Some combination?
You decide b/w Psyched for this release.
Some of our favorite cover art in the business, from Canadian Matt Sidney!!
Been two years since the release Rawskulled. Six years since The Totemist. (N.B. both on Akuphone). And 13 years since their first tape surfaced from the sand, recordings we unfortunately have never heard. Maybe a year or so since this project broke TikTok.
In that window, we’ve come fans of this mysterious project, purportedly from Texas, though their personas suggest our dystopian future fully realized.
Their show at Union Pool on 11.06.25 was genuinely something and conducted in full character, until the very last minute before the applause died down and one of the duo said: “No encores. These costumes are hot as balls.” And this Lp continues to break the fourth wall.
As the elliptical one-sheet describes, “Harvesting the psychic weight of migration, abandonment, and geopolitical limbo. A half-broken oud, double-reed pipes, a battered hurdy-gurdy, and self-built spike fiddles […] strings [were] detuned to unstable microtonal chaos, reeds soaked in questionable desert-sourced liquids, and instruments were kept outdoors to absorb ambient dew, dust, and wild temperature swings, ensuring every take carried an unpredictable, haunted instability. Vintage cassette decks and reel-to-reel units were powered through erratic, low-voltage setups (literally dying generators) which introduced random voltage drops, speed fluctuations, and ghostly dropouts mid-take -- turning tracking into unpredictable spirit interventions.” And this only describes the pre-studio preparations.
After the sessions, the label writes, “Spiritually Unemployed is the resulting artifact -- a sonic border autopsy where enlightenment arrives not as a sealed doctrine but as an open infested wound.”
Meta-Ritual?
Cracked ethnography?
Performance art?
Parody?
Satire of Sun City Girls 30 years after their debut?
Some combination?
You decide b/w Psyched for this release.
Some of our favorite cover art in the business, from Canadian Matt Sidney!!
