Hypnodrome Ensemble
The Problem Is In The Sender - Do Not Tamper With The Receiver

With these characters, the psychedelic underground infiltrates and emerges distinctly with a vital music that connects the paths of cosmic rock, trance, and improvisation. Experimental guitarists Aidan Baker and Eric Quach have scattered their creative energy in bands like Nadja, Caudal, Tavare, and thisquietarmy. Their solo works have been lasting for a decade. Here they represent the cornerstones of the Hypnodrone Ensemble. This Berlin collective boasts a flourishing catalog of post-psych albums and now reaches its tenth endeavor with The Problem Is In The Sender - Do Not Tamper With The Receiver.

Sweeney on bass is the usual essential element of Hypnodrone, with the addition of a drummer trio, consisting of Fiona Mackenzie, Angela Muñoz Martinez, and Sara Neidorf. The new album also sees a new and unusual extension of Hypnodrone’s consolidated instrumental modus, with the experimental singer Lane Shi Otayonii, a Chinese musician and sound performer. Otayonii's Gregorian-based voice unfolds in a bewitching path that moves through vocal vibrations, alongside the deep electric drones and prominent rhythms of the Ensemble. It’s a new element in a well-established and considerably rich canvas.

Otayonii's evocative singing is central in the thundering opening of the album, Transit. It’s a track with a mystical momentum and swirling scales reminiscent of Amon Düül, and among the ingredients, we find a dense, warm, and sustained guitar with the addition of synth trembles q.b. In the rhythmic vortex, the voice bursts and then submerges with a devotional, shamanic tone, in a rich mixture of timbre and dynamics. A majestic track with rhythms that induce trance and wordless laments, almost resembling prayers in an unknown ancestral language.

The second piece, Desdemona, envelops us in eight minutes of slow-burning psych jazz. A rhythmic and hypnotic carpet with Otayonii's voice wanting to lure us like a siren towards enchanted shores. Underdogs starts with spacey electronics and the tinkling of instruments before dissolving into the psychedelic air. The track, nearly fifteen minutes long, is darkly ritualistic, like the hallucinatory mirage of an oasis, which seems to approach but disappears step by step. Alchemia is a shimmering post-rock that stops before its time, to make way for the last live piece, recorded at Punctum in Prague, of kilometer-long duration. All the elements of Hypnodrone are present, with stretching guitars, melodies, locomotive rhythmic gears, tribal and shamanic vocals. Here the Hypnodrone Ensemble launches into a long cosmic/orgiastic sabbath.

Abandon yourselves, let your theta brainwaves float, in an altered state of consciousness, for an emotional journey in a crescendo of sensations now mystical, now shamanic, now devotional. Make them yours and travel through storms in the world of spirits. An astral journey, but with an inevitable, albeit sad, return to this Earth.