Of This Moment - Sapat

In addition to the latest mini-player from Times New Viking, Siltbreeze has doled out a trio of equally damaged albums, by Der Teenage Panzerkorp, Pink Reason, and my favorite of the bunch, Sapat. Mortise and Tenon is one of those rare experiences that only comes along so often. It's reasonable to think that the eight-headed smoke monster, that is Louisville, Kentucky's Sapat, can never harness the same cosmic energy to re-create the grooves found within. Sprouting from a group of like-minded heads known as the Black Velvet Fuckere, Sapat have recorded what is undoubtedly the collective's most grounded release, though grounded is not nearly an apt adjective to use when describing Sapat's backwoods kraut and formless jams. "Dark Silver" and album closer, "Fante," show there is conscious thought in their circular odes to both the blooze and free-jazz sputterings; dark, black, bubbling, slide-guitar and clarinet thoughts, or motorik road maps followed on moonshine logic. Elsewhere they channel Can and Ash Ra Tempel from the basement of some abandoned farmhouse, giving malleable banjo and fiddle strings a new life past the recesses of deep space, all the while crossing paths with German Fairy Tale mythos. Last year's sudden death of spiritual leader/carnival barker David Christopher Sauter (heard prominently on Sapat's 7" debut, Tongue Tied and Staid), may have left the Magic Band without it's Captain, but this recording is a not a testament to a band that plans on ravaging the road or a career, but a transcendent moment of psychedelic synthesis that can be re-lived with each spin.