Percussionist Mike Weis makes a very strong impression with this killer solo outing. Mike's best known as the drummer with Zelionople, besides his contributions to records by The North Sea, Xela and Scott Tuma, but on 'Loop Current' his steady, layered drumming is the central feature amidst hypnotic, spaciously diffuse clouds of field recordings and short-wave radio tones. There's a potent and wholly enveloping atmosphere to the record, thanks in no small part to the sense of meditative restraint with which he conducts his kit, dividing himself between a vast array of gongs, temple block, claves, dholak, doumbeks, thunder tube, rattles and mbira, to name a few. The strange, hypnotic tension between tangibly synthetic electro-acoustic drone clouds and his undulating tribal rhythms at once suck us into his core pulse and inflate our sense of space to the peripheries of perception, ultimately leaving us unsettled and almost uncomfortably at his mercy. Obvious comparisons can be made with Jon Mueller and Chris Corsano, but it's the electro-acoustic magick and sense of synthesized space which gives this record an unheimlich, voodoo charge maybe more comparable to Cut Hands or The Haxan Cloak. Highly recommended.
1 Loop Current, Part 1 8:48
2 Loop Current, Part 2 6:32
3 Loop Current, Part 3 7:13
4 Raft, Part 1 3:08
5 Raft, Part 2 8:22
6 Raft, Part 3 5:34
