Numero Group – psychotropic wonderland

August 4 2026

lovesliescrushing, “xuvetyn” (Projekt 1996/Numero Group 2026)

Tony D'Amico The New Backwards Lovesliescrushing, Numero Group, Projekt, Scott Cortez

Originally released on Projekt back in 1996, the newly reissued xuvetyn was the second album from the (then) Arizona-based duo of visionary guitar sorcerer Scott Cortez and vocalist Melissa Arpin-Duimstra. Notably, lovesliescrushing’s debut album bloweyelashwish completely blew me away when it came out and still remains one of my favorite albums to this day.

Consequently, I had extremely high hopes for its follow up, yet xuvetyn felt like a bit of an overlong, amorphous, and comparatively regressive misstep to me when it was first released. Notably, however, Cortez has since revealed that 90% of xuvetyn was actually recorded before bloweyelashwish and that he worked on both albums concurrently. He simply chose to release bloweyelashwish first because xuvetyn was too “strange” for a debut album.

I personally think that both albums are pretty damn far out, but I cannot fault his logic, as bloweyelashwish is an album that instantly makes a deep impression (and comes closest to Projekt’s goth-centric aesthetic) while xuvetyn is more of a vaporous and understated mood piece. Also, the ambient music landscape of the early ‘90s was admittedly pretty shit until albums like Selected Ambient Works II finally steered everyone away from churning out lame-ass chillout albums.

Significantly, however, xuvetyn was clearly the album closer to Cortez’s heart, as even to this day he remains fascinated with cheap and broken gear and the weird and the unintended sounds that it can produce. While bloweyelashwish was all about vividly shimmering and roaring blossoms of guitar noise, xuvetyn sounds like those sounds played on slowed tapes, submerged in tape noise, or willfully EQed into a murky rumble.

If lovesliescrushing primary inspirations are beauty and decay, this is the album in which Cortez most enthusiastically celebrates the latter, as every sound is gleefully blurred, stretched, and submerged in some way. That is certainly a laudable objective, as much of my favorite music these days is hiss-soaked and static-veiled and Cortez himself probably inspired a decent amount of it. However, the catch is that the patina of sonic ruin buries and blunts all of this album’s hooks and melodies, so there is not much to grasp onto here other than the narcotic nocturnal atmosphere.

As it turns out, however, quite a few fans have seen things differently over the ensuing three decades and xuvetyn has gradually come to be hailed as a shoegaze masterpiece in its own right. In fact, many even believe that it surpasses bloweyelashwish. Revisiting it now, I still find myself a bit underwhelmed, but I am considerably more appreciative of Cortez’s efforts to transcend his earlier My Bloody Valentine worship inspirations to forge a more unique path. And while I still think the more MBV-indebted bloweyelashwish remains his creative zenith, xuvetyn certainly has some real allure of its own and the gift of hindsight reveals that it turned out to be an unexpectedly prophetic and influential release.

The biggest difference between xuvetyn and lovesliescrushing’s debut is, of course, that Cortez stepped away from prominent melodies and song-like structures and into a more “ambient” vision, but he also took a sizable step away from rapturous and shimmering bliss-outs and warped music box motifs to plunge into more submerged, smudged, and blown-out abstraction. Weirdly, xuvetyn also feels conspicuously lo-fi by comparison despite the fact that Cortez purportedly used roughly the same gear for both albums: a 12-string guitar, a 4-track cassette recorder, an E-Bow, a looping pedal, and an Alesis Midiverb II rack unit.

However, that does not quite tell the whole story, as John Cage’s prepared piano work seems to have been a major inspiration as well, as Cortez inventively wielded a host of eclectic tools to wrest unfamiliar new sounds from his long-suffering axe. That list impressively includes everything from paint scrapers, cutlery, and nails to a vibrator, but it also seems like Cortez became less fascinated with making crazy guitar sounds and more fascinated by the textural properties of similarly abused tapes. In that sense, he was very much ahead of the curve, as it would be another six years before The Disintegration Loops kicked off the “distressed tape loop” vogue and at least three years before laptop artists like Peter Rehberg, Jim O’Rourke, and Fennesz began warping guitars themselves with more technologically advanced means. And the hypnagogic pop boom of the early aughts was even further away still.

The allure of this album is insightfully summarized by fellow dreampop-inspired guitar visionary Jefre Cantu-Ledesma as “a disorientingly beautiful cloud of neon drones and voices from the other side.” While it is absolutely impossible for me to avoid noting that Cantu-Ledesma’s own masterpiece (Love Is A Stream) feels far more directly inspired by bloweyelashwish, his quote does get at both why I find this album exasperating and why others find it so revelatory. While there are ostensibly eighteen songs here, very few of them actually stand out much and there is nothing at all that could reasonably be described as a single, as Arpin-Duimstra’s glossolalia (purportedly sung in Elvish, yet helpfully translated) often feels like just another layer of bleary dream mist rather than a focal point or a melodic hook. Consequently, the album’s most striking moments tend to be the noisier interludes like “Monar” or the xylophone-like tuned drum machine reverie of “Virgin Blue-Eyed.”

That said, xuvetyn genuinely does sound like “voices from the other side” in that it feels like a lush swirl of shoegaze guitars blunted and obscured by a veil of hiss and a fog of murk. While I personally prefer to be fully enveloped in the ecstatic and delirious eruption of guitar noise, the pleasures of xuvetyn are admittedly no less unique, as it feels like a formless, submerged, seething, and ethereal dreamscape transmitted to earth through blown speakers. In fact, it frequently reminds me of the television scene from Poltergeist, albeit considerably less demonic.

Instead of being tormented by a malevolent supernatural entity, I am instead transported into a mid-’80s cold medicine-fueled 3am fever dream and the voice of a Siren has begun to beckon me towards the smeared and flickering abstraction of a badly worn VHS tape playing on a shitty TV. In short, this album has big I Saw the TV Glow vibes. I still think it is the lesser of lovesliescrushing’s two ‘90s Projekt releases by a wide margin, of course, but it is nevertheless still an interesting and ambitiously experimental release. More importantly, I can think of few guitarists besides Kevin Shields who can claim to have made more transcendent and visionary guitar advances in the ‘90s than Scott Cortez and absolutely none who managed to do so with just a bedroom four-track, some borrowed gear, and a vibrator.

Listen here.

February 26 2023

Laraaji, “Segue To Infinity” (Numero Group, 2023)

Tony D'Amico archived brainwashed reviews Laraaji, Numero Group

This quadruple LP boxed set is likely to be an absolute revelation for Laraaji fans, as Numero Group has combined his landmark 1978 debut (Celestial Vibration) with the equivalent of three lost albums recorded around the same time. The albums in question surfaced in 2021 when some acetates from an abandoned storage locker were auctioned off and passed through a flea market and Ebay before being spotted by eagle-eyed college student Jake Fischer, who snapped them up for $114 after recognizing Laraaji’s given name (Edward Larry Gordon, the name he was still using at the time of Celestial Vibration‘s release). Amusingly, even Laraaji himself is a bit mystified by the provenance of these recordings, as the documentation states that they were recorded at a studio in Long Island 200 miles from where the Celestial Vibration sessions took place (ZBS in Fort Edward). While it remains unclear whether the Fort Edward tapes were merely transferred in Long Island or whether these recordings actually originate from a different session altogether in Queens, they are unmistakably Laraaji and they are frequently as good or better than the album that actually got released. Finds like this are exactly why there are Discogs fiends hunting for lost private press New Age music, as the late ’70s and early ’80s were a golden age for bedroom visionaries who thanklessly explored the cosmos with little hope of ever reaching an audience. Laraaji deserves a particularly special place in that pantheon, as he may have been the most forward-thinking visionary of them all and also took his autoharp to the goddamn streets to expand the consciousness of unwitting strangers.

The story of how former Baptist/Apollo Theater comedian/cult film actor/Marvin Gaye collaborator/street musician/West Village folk scenester Ed “Flash” Gordon eventually transformed into Laraaji is far too lengthy for me to do it any justice here, but one especially significant event was that Gordon became very interested in Eastern spirituality after his role in Putney Swope stirred up doubts about the righteousness of the path he was on. A “paranormal sound-hearing experience” and a fateful decision to trade his guitar in for an autoharp at a pawnshop soon followed, as well as the similarly fateful purchase of a contact pickup and some effects pedals. While the autoharp was an entirely new instrument for Gordon, he dove wholeheartedly into exploring open tunings and effects and quickly arrived at a new sound he dubbed “Celestial Vibration.” Having reached that point, I suspect Laraaji would have been totally content to play in parks, dance/yoga studios, and holistic centers around his community forever, as getting a record deal probably does not seem all that important once you have already figured out how to channel celestial vibrations. Exterior forces intervened, however, and Gordon met a lawyer named Stuart White who was absolutely enthralled with his music and eager to start up an independent record label (SWN). That resulted in the release of Celestial Vibration (now regarded as a classic), but not many people noticed and the label soon folded. Thankfully, Laraaji met another motivated fan soon after (Brian Eno) and the two eventually collaborated on 1980’s Ambient 3 (Day Of Radiance). I am tempted to say that the rest is history, but Laraaji’s work only started getting regularly anthologized and reissued in the last decade.

Given the volume of material and the sprawling, improvisatory nature of the performances (each piece spans an entire side of vinyl), Segue To Infinity defies any easy generalizations, but Celestial Vibration‘s “Bethlehem” provides the best condensed tour of the Laraaji aesthetic that one could reasonably expect. The heart of Laraaji’s “Celestial Vibration” vision, of course, are the dreamily shimmering waves that radiate outward from his chord sweeps. In fact, I half-expected that this collection would mostly be four hours of that (which would have been fine). Instead, however, those admittedly gorgeous New Age/ambient passages are regularly interspersed with forays into wilder, more avant-garde territory. In just “Bethlehem” alone, for example, there is a section that sounds like John Cage violently attacking a prepared piano’s innards (as well as another interlude that feels like Steve Reich on a tropical vacation). Elsewhere, there are passages that almost feel like free jazz, some kind of Ellen Fullman creation, wind chimes, water dripping onto a pan, or a psychotropic jaw harp hoedown (the final minutes of “Pervading”). The one consistent theme seems to be that nearly every sound that Laraaji produces feels resonant or visceral in all the right ways. Beyond that, the other big revelation is the strength of the six previously unheard pieces. In fact, I suspect Celestial Vibration would still be considered a classic even if it had been replaced in its entirety with any of the other pieces here (none were intended for release, by the way, as studio banter is included). Hell, Celestial Vibration might even have become more of a classic if “Koto” or any of the “Kalimba” pieces had made the cut. This feels like it could have been a goddamn greatest hits retrospective. And maybe it is, albeit only accidentally. Given that this is a characteristically lavish Numero Group set with all the usual accouterments (photos, insightful liner notes, etc.), I expect every serious Laraaji fan is already snapping up the vinyl, but the digital version would probably be an excellent entry point for the curious. While I already enjoyed Laraaji beforehand and recognized him as the most unique and fascinating figure to emerge from the New Age underground, I definitely needed Segue To Infinity to show me that I was still not appreciating him nearly enough.

Listen here.