OOIOO / Lightning Bolt "The Horizon Spirals / The Horizon Viral" [Metallic Gold Vinyl]

OOIOO and Lightning Bolt are both bands whose music is wholly unique and whose creators’ influence would be impossible to overstate. 2 Epic OOIOO songs and 5 Blistering Lightning Bolt Songs ! YoshimiO, OOIOO’s founder and bandleader, has been a guiding force in uncompromising art across the continuum of rock and improvised music for four decades, from her work in UFO or Die to The Boredoms to SAICOBAB and beyond. OOIOO serves as a core outlet for melding freeform experimentalism with hypnotic rock pulses, defying boundaries with her acrobatic voice, electronics, trumpet and gamelan. Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale and Brian Gibson have remained unparalleled in their ability to transmute frenetic whirls of percussion, gargantuan fuzz and dizzying melody into monolithic vistas.

The Horizon Spirals / The Horizon Viral is a split that captures the parallels in ethos between these two ensembles, their sense of gleeful abandon and freight train momentum, in inspiring detail. The Horizon Spirals composed of OOIOO’s gamelan-infused sagas “THE HORIZON” and “Gamel BE SURE TO SPIRAL” demonstrates the boundless scope of OOIOO’s music. YoshimiO explains a core contrast between these pieces and 2014’s Gamel lays in the physical materials used: “Back then in Bali, bronze-keyed gamelan were mainstream, and GAMEL uses bronze. The Horizon Spirals gamelan is iron. Black-painted iron. This time, incorporating Koheysai's iron sound (iron gamelan) allowed us to see OOIOO's songs spiralling upward with greater lightness. Lightning Bolt’s The Horizon Viral evokes the limitlessness of their improvisations and distills through more sophisticated home recording techniques. The Horizon Viral reignites the flame of their storied home recordings, capturing the duo in full freeform, bolstered from bassist Brian Gibson’s experiences composing and recording soundtracks for video games he co-designed, Thrasher and Thumper.