Live Edits: Natoma

"Local ambient drone rockers Tarentel have kept a pretty low profile as of late. Jefre Cantu has focused on his solo recordings as well as running the amazing Root Strata label, while the other members have had their fingers in all sorts of Bay Area exploits. But it seems like maybe Tarentel is starting to gain momentum again, a recent tour with Pelican, a flurry of upcoming releases as well as this here live cd (a cd, NOT a cd-r, although still limited to 500 copies). Recorded last year, this 40 minute set displays some new facets of Tarentel's sound. The opening track is a dense collage of aggressively strummed acoustic guitar amidst swirls of feedback, guitar grit and what sounds like chantlike vocals. A thick cloud of tribal skree that sounds like it could be some lost NNCK track or a Sunburned Hand jam. The next track, the disc's 15 minute long centerpiece, is a murky drift of abstract percussion, haunting horns, muted melodies all in a cloud of room sound and natural reverb. Pretty and space-y and dreamily delicate. The last two tracks, each about nine minutes, find Tarentel dabbling again in New Weird America, albeit offering their own slant. Random percussion, shakers and bells, moaning horns and bits of clatter and clank, cloudy ambience, a muted scrape and scrabble, adding a drone like background texture, peals of feedback drift through a whirring sheet of amp hum and staticky FX, whistles send squiggly little melodies fluttering into the ether, the whole thing a deliriously laidback jam, free and unmoored, a deliriously druggy drift. So nice." - Aquarius Records