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Perhaps the most exciting thing about Instagon is the group’s unpredictability. You may get spacerock, you may get noise or you may get really strange jazz-fusion, but you’ll never know until you listen to the release. This time around, Lob Instagon and company deliver a mind-boggling 77-and-a-half minutes of bad-trip psychedelia.
On the opening title track, we get a heavy dose of Miles Davis-style darkness. It’s In a Silent Way merged with the sinister affectations of Live-Evil. Instruments weave in and out over the sprawling 35-and-a-half minute epic, which simultaneously also recalls the more recent recordings by Fifty Foot Hose and an ’80s horror movie soundtrack. A quiet opening, with what sounds like a Fender Rhodes piano, builds with percussion, static, bass and something that sound like a trumpet, but could be a noise generator or some type of reed. From there the improvisation rises and falls, waves cascading and receding as instruments collide and dance in an aural orgy of psychosis.
The following two tracks are quite a bit shorter. “Wandering Chaos” is a seven-and-a-half minute nightmarish calliope, while “Thee Sickness” offers a bit of jazz fusion that could be a Return to Forever outtake.
Finally, it all coalesces in the final “Thee Sickness ov Losing Friends Over Stupid Stuff on Facebook.” Here, the sounds turn gray, comprising 30-and-a-half minutes of static and hum with instruments presenting themselves sporadically through a cloudy haze of purgatorial existence. At times, it sounds like a poorly recorded black metal album played at a very slow speed, but then the static and pulsing chirping rises and we’re deep withing the recesses of the blackest nightmare, one from which there is no escape because you can’t wake up even though you struggle with all your might…
While this is certainly Instagon’s darkest release to date, it is also one of their most powerful – a raw, spontaneous outburst of twisted psyche. Delve in, but be prepared for where it will take you as these places can be quite unpleasant.
