R. MILLIS

Harmony Hollywood

(Chocolate Monk - choc.602) Cassette $10.00 (Out-of-stock)

He of Climax Golden Twins, Idol Ko Si, Sublime Frequencies etc., comes good with a beautiful tape to soothe and confuse. “All sounds created [were] with or recorded through a 1960 Harmony Hollywood H39 arch top hollow body electric guitar in improvisational bursts throughout 2022,” explains Millis. “More than 20 years ago, I traded my first ever acoustic guitar to Patric Barber from the band Blowhole for this Harmony guitar and a copy of the Sun City Girls Grotto of Miracles LP. Not sure who got the better end of the deal. I love playing that Harmony. I even like listening to Grotto of Miracles. So I guess it was me.” Uncle Jim, on the other hand, “was groping for a little more rhumba and calypso from this goblin smirker with his Lomax-molded spin pipe-drool but I suppose a Truman Capote underwater soundtrack’ll have to do, although I’m not sure how many seahorses he can stuff in his Honduran fishbowl.” So now you know.

R. MILLIS

Relief

(Helen Scarsdale - HMS025) LP $15.00 (Out-of-stock)

Uncommon solo work by a Climax Golden Twin and noted globe-trotting, time-traveling curator of esoterica. Millis's fever dream of blurred harmonics and ethnomusicological spelunking repeatedly returns to variations on a peculiar yet beautifully serpentine drone, whose twinkling acoustic properties meld the hallucinatory mouth-music of the Bangladeshi Murung people and the curved air hypnosis of Terry Riley. Millis bookends and interrupts his mysterious miasma with comedic interludes snatched from antique 78s, maudlin piano tone-clusters, and teleported crescendos of spectral ballroom waltzes. This polyglot raga-drone of daytime somnambulism and psychedelic slipperiness speaks to the uneasy borders at psychological, cultural, and geophysical states of being. Oh, to be a human on this planet. Includes digital download card. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2013