This February saw the release of Wymond Miles' Earth Has Doors on Sacred Bones. Miles is the guitarist for the wonderful garage jangle pop-band Fresh & Onlys, but his first solo EP is an entirely different beast. It's meditative and slightly droney, fusing folk, prog, and pop into a hypnotic 4 song masterpiece. The themes and atmosphere call upon hermetic and esoteric themes, but there is also something deeply personal. Miles plays almost all the instruments, and you can hear that there is at something at stake, some inner daemon he is trying to get a hold or make sense of. It is my favorite recording this year, and I am eager to hear the full length album by Miles out in June. Miles was kind enough to answer a few questions over email.
Why do think there is a such a resurgence of occult and esoteric themes in underground music these days?
Really the whole
cultural zeitgeist around us is ripe with occult themes these
days--highest tv ratings for a super bowl and Madonna performs this
(quasi?) Masonic rite before our eyes! The symbols are there, the
fascination is there, we just lack the wisdom to really do much with it.
Our desire for it is emerging from our unconscious, it wants to be
reconciled and integrated. It's all just exploited in the usual
solar-rightbrain-mechanistic-smother-the-puppy sort of way. Perhaps
the underground has developed a better sense of how to treat occult
themes with respect in a more lunar, integrative way that holds the
mystery intact.
I've had the parts sitting around for a bit, but I finally got around to breadboarding the Weird Sound Generator found over the at the Music from Outer Space site. I used this schematic:
I added the filter but have not set up the separate power module.
Here is my first run through:
