Label: Beta-Lactam Ring Records Format: CD, Limited LP
Argentinian three piece Reynols have been walking their own particularly strange path for nearly a decade, droning and chugging on a collection of home-made and improvised instruments and guitars, with everything underpinned by the percussive and vocal drive of Miguel Tomasín. Their sound is at first chaotic and then enveloping, with walls of distortion and other effects piled on the basic groundwork of the electric guitars of Roberto Conlazo and Anla Courtis; and then matters proceed to get weirder.
With added tape loops and a plethora of mysterious-sounding, self-designed instruments including Snofer Pinchers, Heavy Cabras and Roto Chivas, their sound is densely packed into outrépieces which creep, crawl, writhe and occasionally explode with an improvisational murkiness which can also suddenly shine brightly at moments of clarity. Above everything is Tomasín’s extraordinary voice of streamed-consciousness, wailing, declaiming and vocalising in Spanish or an equally self-maintained language. Sometimes the yelps and shouts he utters can be disturbing; jarring from the sinuously-blasted noisescapes onto more acoustic passages of strummed guitars and shaken rhythms in a fashion similar to the folkish meanders of Ghost or Amon Düül, or painting a vividly unusual sound picture to the scrape and drone of a motley collection of tonalities.
Whether extemporising to a clattery trip through spacious halls of echo, gurgling in liquid reflection while decidedly electric humming wafts along, or peppering a surging Psychedelic outpuring with pointillist utterances, Tomas� provides both a focus and a distraction for Reynols’ entirely unique sound. The group stutter and waver in anti-grooves of Outsider music which can be both refreshing and disturbing at the same time. Too much of this stuff can have a seriously warping effect on perceptions of musical reality, even to the point of aggravation – and then perhaps beyond into an ear-opening transcendent state of acceptance of their genuine alternative to the norm. Pacalirte Sorban Cumanos is an odd-shaped peg even among the myriad experimental/avant/lo-fi/post-something mavericks determined not to conform to Platonic geometries, and as such should be cherished.
-Linus Tossio-
