This is a new release by California's extremely prolific avant-drone duo, Starving Weirdos. These eight new pieces bear all the hallmarks of Starving Weirdos' greatest work: the dizzying mixture of instrumental sounds, electronics, and field recordings, the pointillistic attention to sonic detail, the duo's post-production technique, which achieves something like the aural equivalent of deep-focus photography. On Into An Energy, the duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay is joined by occasional collaborators Steve Lazar and Greg Devaney for the length of the record, and perhaps their chemistry together accounts for the elusive shift in focus heard on these cuts. You see, even though Starving Weirdos routinely break out the rain sticks, the horns, the hand drums, the guitars, or the cup-and-ball, at its core their art is a kind of deep-forest-ghetto-musique concrète. You can never tell if what you're hearing is a real-time performance or a product of copious editing and overdubbing, whether those sounds emanated from tapes or from live instruments, whether it occurred in a tangible three-dimensional space or in a virtual soundcard reality. Most of the time, it's a combination of all these, and the results are profoundly transportive and disorienting. Yet while the Weirdos' song and album titles suggest an esoteric or spiritualist bent, their music is always reassuringly lucid, even earthy. Theirs is a mysticism grounded in the ordinary sounds of everyday life in their native Humboldt County, California. At their best, Starving Weirdos achieve that high romantic ideal: to make the familiar strange, and make the strange familiar.

"Starving Weirdos deal in elemental, longform drone improvisations, soaked in reverb and studded with primitive instrumental gestures, connoting ... a pronounced ritualistic bent." --The Wire