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Leven Signs, “Hemp is Here” (Cordelia (1985)/Digitalis (2013)/Futura Resistenza (2021))

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Much like Vox Populi!’s Half Dead Ganja Music, Leven Signs’ Hemp is Here first began life as an obscure and deeply weird cassette from the ’80s, but eventually found its way to someone who appreciated its warped and singular vision enough to give it a well-deserved second life. In the case of Leven Signs, that someone was Foxy Digitalis’s Brad Rose, who reissued the album back in 2013. 

At the time, I felt it was more indulgent, rough, and self-consciously bizarre than legitimately good, but now that it has been reissued once again, I realize that I was an absolute fool for sleeping on it before and that I was simply not yet attuned to Leven Sign’s “fourth world post-punk” wavelength. 

Admittedly, a few songs still feel a bit maniacal to me, but the album’s high points truly feel like some of the most inspired, boundary-dissolving, and near-ecstatic music that I have ever heard. I feel like there should probably be a statue of Pete Karkut somewhere, as he was arguably one of the most wonderful DIY visionaries to ever walk the earth, surfacing for just one absolutely mindblowing tape, then riding off into the sunset (leaving the rest of us to spend the next three decades slowly evolving until we could properly appreciate what he had done).

I believe it was the opening “Our Position Vanishes” that threw me back in 2013, as it sounds like a sped-up loop of ‘ethnic music’ accompanied by a howling teakettle, a primitive synth bass line, and male vocals that seem to emanate from the bottom of a well. It calls to mind whirling Sufi dervishes, but hypercaffeinated and in lysergic, Day-Glo color. 

Eight years later, it is still not quite for me, but it is followed by the first of several masterpieces to come, as “Prague Spring” marries a catchy flute hook, chant-like female vocals, and a killer percussion groove that calls to mind a hot dub single recorded by a tropical party band (and one that briefly dissolves into a full-on symphonic mindfuck, no less). 

The next stunner is “Sedes sapientiae,” which sounds a lovely ancient folk song sung over a delirious jam session between a church organist, a funk drummer, and an unusually intense choir of Gregorian monks (and somehow it manages to sound both majestic and vaguely industrial as well). The next flurry of greatness does not come til the end of the album, but the final three pieces are pure outsider-psych nirvana. 

In “Rumi,” Karkut and Maggie Turner conjure up something akin to a ghostly Sybille Baier demo tape and a Middle Eastern-inspired organ jam colliding over a PVC pipe percussion groove, while “Das Seal” sounds like someone threatened to murder a church organist’s entire family if he did not nail his audition for a space rock band. 

The closing “Held in Arms,” on the other hand, initially sounds almost “pop,” as Turner quietly sings a wistful melody over a great clattering, dubby groove. As it unfolds, however, it starts to feel like a snake charmer just joined the jam and that Karkut went on a wild shopping spree at The Psychedelia Store and cleared the damn shelves. 

The rest of the album is a fascinating mix of inspired near-misses (“La Luna” sounds like a tipsy Scott Walker crashing a PIL tribute band rehearsal) and second-tier pleasures, but the whole damn thing is a memorably unique and infectiously groove-driven feast of unfettered originality and go-for-broke adventurousness.

Samples can be found here.

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Motion Sickness of Time Travel, “Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious” (Digitalis, 2010)

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I discovered Rachel Evan’s music in a somewhat roundabout way, as I stumbled into some music videos that she directed while I was searching for something else on Vimeo. As luck would have it, the first one that I watched happened to be one for her own project and I was intrigued enough by her blurred, melancholy multimedia vision to immediately track down this vinyl reissue of a long-unavailable 2010 cassette. Notably, Brad Rose has described that cassette as one of the best demos that Digitalis has ever received. It seems like a lot of people agree with him, as the first printing of this record sold-out before most of us were even aware that it existed (it has since been reprinted though).

One noteworthy aspect of this reissue is that it leaves off one of the six songs from the original cassette: “The Alchemical Dream,” a piece which sounds like the beginnings of a particularly ghostly Aphex Twin remix. While not a bad song, it doesn’t quite match the mood of the rest of the album, so scrapping it was a good idea. Removing an album’s weak spots for a reissue is a much, much better idea than bloating it with bonus tracks that weren’t good enough to be included the first time around—I hope this practice catches on in a big way (even though it was probably motivated solely by time constraints here). Another key aspect about this release is that it has one of the most apt titles ever: music does not get much more soft-focus, drifting, and blissed out than this. This record inarguably seeps.

Surprisingly, Evans originally began her musical career as a singer-songwriter, a vocation that she has successfully eradicated all vestiges of here: her vocals and lyrics are reverb-ed into oblivion and these five pieces are not structured in anything approaching a traditional song-like way (and she certainly never picks up a guitar). Instead, she constructs her soundscapes from her own multi-tracked, heavily processed, and unintelligible vocals. Unintelligible in a good/ASMR way, of course, as they swoop and whisper dreamily over an array of subtle synthesizer pulses and drones. That pairing sounds quite sublime in the twinkling and meditative opener “Clairvoyance,” which is one of the album’s two clear highlights. The other is the breathy and gently throbbing “Telepathy,” which manages to sound both drugged and sexy in all the right ways.

I also enjoyed the lazily burbling “Auto Suggestion,” but the other two songs did not connect with me much at all (particularly the 12-minute pastoral kraut-synth epic “Magnetism”). Also, as much as I enjoyed the bulk of this record, it never truly grabbed me: it feels like there is something important missing. Seeping Through the Veil of the Unconscious is pleasant and inspired, but as not revelatory as the buzz surrounding it suggests. I think that elusive element might be “personality,” but that sounds like a more withering statement than it actually is. Heavy reverb certainly sounds spectral and cool, but it also has a distinct tendency to strip most of the character from vocals: something else needs to fill that void. 

Rachel’s excellent videos certainly solve that problem beautifully, but her music definitely needs something else if it is going to hold up well on its own. Of course, it is possible that she has already figured that bit out, as the one song that I’ve heard from her recent split double-cassette with her husband (Nova Scotian Arms) boasts a pretty great understated hook that weirdly reminds me of Clock DVA. Regardless, Evans definitely has gotten the tough part out of the way: she has forged a very likable aesthetic all her own and made the world notice. Now she just needs to finish perfecting it.

Listen here.