Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Purchasable with gift card
$8USD or more
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
This is the vinyl edition of Rhyton's Krater's Call, a booty shaking affair that will have you wigglin' like a worm. Please note that the image is a mock up, a very fine mock up, but a mock up nonetheless.
Includes unlimited streaming of Krater's Call
via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Centripetal Force (North America), in conjunction with Cardinal Fuzz (UK/Europe), is excited to announce the upcoming vinyl release of Rhyton’s 'Krater's Call'. The album is being presented in a 300 copy vinyl pressing.
By the time Rhyton unveiled Krater’s Call on Bandcamp in June of 2020, against the backdrop of a worldwide pandemic and the George Floyd demonstrations, four years had gone by since their last album, Redshift, had been released. These Krater’s Call sessions were tracked in November of 2017 as mere improvisations. It was simply three guys getting together in the studio and doing what they loved to do - jam.
This collection of songs, while clearly recognizable as Rhyton’s ever evolving brand of psychedelic meanderings mixed with European, Middle Eastern, and other worldly folk leanings, is a version of Rhyton we hadn’t quite heard before. The playing is quite loose and playful. Some of their past dissonance has been exchanged for warmth. Years of experimentation has led to a familiarity that allows each musician to open spaces in their playing and fall into comfortable grooves. They easily and effortlessly feed off each other’s exploratory wanderings in ways that recall Can or even the Grateful Dead. All of this plays out in a very entrancing fashion, and sees the band flirting within the space between blissful heady daydreaming and the desire to, gulp, dance - something they continue to develop and carry over to 2021’s Pharaonic Crosstalk.
From the initial Bandcamp release:
At a certain point in the continuing process of making art, one becomes more greatly oneself and creates work that is truly distinctive. In this vein, Rhyton, a trio consisting of string multi-instrumentalist David Shuford, electric bassist Jimmy SeiTang, and drummer Rob Smith, have carved out a niche in contemporary sound that would best be called Rhyton-music.
Drawing from psychedelic rock, Greek and middle eastern string music, exploratory electric jazz, and American roots music, their instrumental, freely-improvised melanges groove mightily but are not tethered to any one mood or concept. The listener’s attention may drift to Smith’s deft cymbal work or the big, sinewy thwack of SeiTang’s bass and the rhythmic linkages that gradually form, or the fleet needles from Shuford’s mandole (an Algerian cousin of the oud) on “Majesty from Mahrez,” or take it all together as one swirling field of eruptive jams. Despite its complexity, the music is cohesive throughout, and at times even breezy. The title track’s cottony and plaintive guitar lines become spindly with the sun as the rhythm section works time with a supple bellows, while opener “The Art of Tripp” might as well be Hot Tuna covering Can.
It’s also no surprise that, in the recent past, Rhyton released LPs on labels like Thrill Jockey and Three Lobed, their organic/electric improvisations fitting in with both contemporary psych-string wranglers and the historical fringes of “post-rock” (the Brown/Scharin/Warden outfit Directions in Music comes to mind). That said, there really isn’t any precedent for the invention on offer with these six studio improvisations, other than Rhyton’s continued impulse for cleaving new paths. Listen deeply and listen often.
Clifford Allen
Brooklyn, June 2020
credits
released March 3, 2023
Recorded November 2017 by Al Carlson
at Gary's Electric in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Mixed and mastered by Al Carlson
Produced by Jimmy SeiTang with Rhyton
Art by Rob Smith
Design layout by Sierra Starno
David C. Shuford - electric & acoustic guitars, electric mandolin (2 & 6), mandole (4)
Jimmy SeiTang - Alembic bass
Rob Smith - drums, percussion, steel drum (1)
I really liked "Cosmic Cash" a lot but this album is even better. Eight out of twelve tracks are on heavy rotation in my playlists. Papa Jay (Radio Smorgasbord)
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