Bitchin Bajas return on August 26th with a new self-titled album for Drag City! The band finds the Chicago-based musician and analogue recording engineer Cooper Crain, one of the seminal members of the jam-oriented psych band Cave, teamed up with fellow keyboard/synth player Dan Quinlivan, and multi-instrumentalist Rob Frye, as well as a host of visiting musicians for this new record. When asked in a 2013 interview with AdHoc about the sonic differences between Cave and the Bitchin Bajas, Crain spoke about the Bajas being a more open ended project musically, while Cave tends towards the “groove-heavy” end of the psych music spectrum. He also explained that his work with the Bajas sought a more “relaxed” vibe, and spoke of the project’s indebtedness to Alice Coltrane, explaining: “She is an influence not so much in our sound but our spirit.” That really shines thru on a track like “Bueu“, which uses it’s twelve minutes to float thru a varied musical spectrum that includes third eye opening tone drones, horn-driven, jazz inflected passages, as well as maddening synthesizer freakouts!
The visuals for this cut were created by Nick Ciontea, an amazing analogue video designer who also builds his own hardware. His choice to subvert the vertical flow of hard crushed, abstract imagery to begin the first half of this video, instead opting to pull the images horizontally left to right, is the perfect visual accompaniment for “Bueu”‘s initial sonic floating, but by the time the music heats up into wildly reflecting patterns, Ciontea answers with hypnotically blinking, technicolor chaos. Bitchin Bajas have a few shows in August planned, and you can check those dates below…
Bitchin Bajas Live 2014:
August-
24 – Bloomington, IN @ Magnetic South
26 – Louisville, KY @ Dreamland
27 – Boone, NC @ Collective on Depot Street
28 – Asheville, NC @ Transfigurations II Festival (Mothlight)
October = European Tour
November = West Coast USA Tour
December = New Orleans
