Motorpsycho

Glad to see MP get some appreciation here! I've been a fan since seeing them play for 30 people in a dingy punk rock shoebox on the Demon Box tour. The post-BHBC work never really resonated with me, but this new one sounds interesting, change of drummer might just be the thing they needed.

Anyways here's my quick & dirty POX in no particular order:

Walking on the Water
Psychonaut
Radiance Freq.
Un Chien d'Espace
S'Numbness
Ozone
Serpentine
The Slow Phaseout
Sinful, wind-borne
Starmelt/Lovelight

You can listen to a new song here: http://www.visions.de/news/27250/Motorpsycho-streamen-neuen-Song-A-S-F-E

Rune Grammofon wouldn't give me a promo because it was not officially released yet in North America, hence the pricey $31+ import price on Amazon. I ordered from Stickman which was better, about $23 USD. I won't get the CDs for at least a week but it's just started floating in the c-ether and is on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/album/0BqXam3ZWK3d4h8SIHmxMI

Enjoy!

Reviews:
http://teamrock.com/review/2017-09-06/motorpsycho-the-tower-album-review
http://theobelisk.net/obelisk/2017/08/28/motorpsycho-the-tower-review-premiere/

http://fastnbulbous.com/motorpsycho-the-tower/

Reprtedly their only 2017 UK show (London in October) was pretty sparsely attended. A bit surprising to me and I might have made more of an effort to go if I'd had an inkling it wouldn't be guaranteed busy.

Seems their European popularity doesn't extend across the Channel.

That seems about right. I read a lot about how important they are to the Norwegian scene and how their stuff often ranks amongst Norway's best music, which gives me the impression that they aren't very popular anywhere else. Kind of funny to see discussion threads which are half "just discovered these guys and they're amazing, why aren't they more popular?" and half "what are you talking about, we've loved them for years!"

On the Tower, “In Every Dream” is very good. I couldn’t really get with the slower acoustic stuff on the album. At times the singer just sounds kind of cheesy.

Apparently there's something that isn't working for them beyond Europe. The only lists this album made besides mine was #10 on Prog Magazine's, and The Needledrop's 15 Underrated episode.

http://fastnbulbous.com/lucky-17/#albums
http://teamrock.com/feature/2017-12-20/2017-the-prog-critics-choice

https://youtu.be/T0TP8Ts__sQ?t=10m26s

They're reissuing their Roadwork series of live albums on vinyl (with CDs in the packaging), and adding a new set. Here's the rundown:

Roadwork Vol. 1 (1999) 2LP/1CD
The Other Fool
A K9 Suite
Feel
Super/Wheel
You Lied
Black to Comm
Words of Wisdom
Vortex Surfer

Roadwork Vol. 2 (2000) 2LP/1CD
Olemanns Kornett
Grindstone
The Wheel
Finske Skoger
Dreams
The Golden Core
Limbo
Nå

Roadwork Vol. 3 (2002) 2LP/1CD *originally released as part of the Haircuts DVD*
Stained Glass
Custer's Last Stand (One More Daemon)
Starmelt/Lovelight
577
Little Ricky Massenburg
Hogwash
STG
Neverland

Roadwork Vol. 5 (2018) 3LP/2CD
Ship of Fools
Sleepwalking
Lacuna/Sunrise
Manmower
Köln
Un Chien d'Espace
Taifun

Listened to Roadwork Vol. 5 this morning while doing laundry. It's really nice. Other than a little two-minute interlude, the shortest song is 11 minutes, and the longest is over 30.

oh nice, can't wait to get my hands on it. I only have 1 & 2. 1 is a classic, of course. I kinda love 2 as well though I guess the premise of "three different bands meet each other (presumably) for the first time" may be sort of a turn off. it's pretty wild though.

okay, I've got Vol 3 now and it's great. the "four Norsemen" are presumably the trio + a keyboard player, which does give them the dimension to play something like "Stained Glass", but otherwise they kinda stay away from the folky/rootsy stuff, instead kicking out the jams as they always do. I mean, holy shit, that 20-minute "Hogwash" is something else. And followed up by "STG" ? Wow. Its kinda cool in that there is so much jamming and improvising that a lot of times you forget what song you're listening to. Which is the way I wish more live albums were. Great stuff.

Yeah, I wrote about the whole set at the end of July. I don't think I'm ever gonna dive all the way into their catalog, but there's a lot on these live records that I like a lot.

holy shit this song is good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pi5jvttuWY&list=PLqK4NODjKGfTqpfIqrDlb-x3o08_5Y3Bm&index=12

link is dead

try this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Pi5jvttuWY

those "[Artist Name] - topic" accounts are strange

That is lush, thank you.

nice

^ Good times indeed.

Somehow I've only just seen that a new one was announced. Pre orders already shipping apparently.

These guys and Autechre putting the lie to the idea that Gen X are slackers.

heres another one, I really like this side of the band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1Q6ojc5Wa4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4cFV8z4Yxs

One of their best album openers imo.

I agree, though I think the album itself (It's a Love Cult) is one of their weaker efforts.

I prefer it over Phanerothyme, but there are stronger ones, sure.

one of their best album closers too, I really love this song. it's like some great Nazz outtake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQZCyxIwIYI

another cool thing - "STG" (Sonic Teenage Guinnevere) uses the same tuning as "Guinnevere" by CSN. of course MP's version rocks a lot harder :)

anyone hear the new one yet?

http://motorpsycho.no/2019/09/memo-from-bob/

We went back into Studio Black Box in France (where we did the Ole album in June) for a two week session without any defined idea or clear concept of what we wanted to achieve, and just recorded as many of the songs we have amassed over the last couple of years as possible. It turned out to be quite a lot of music, probably too much for even a double album, so we’ll have to think a bit about how to do this one. It is far too early for us to say anything sensible about it, so we’ll need the winter to sort things out and see what it actually is. Maybe it’s time for another triple LP? We’ll see – it ain’t done til it’s done!

hell yeah it's time

Newish documentary. Interesting interviews with the band intercut with fantastic recent live footage and a bit of history. Woah.

https://vimeo.com/376023605

And an oldish documentary from 2000 for Dutch TV.

https://youtu.be/8YyPsANBwdE

One year ago (11/30/18) I saw these guys at Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo, as part of Rune Grammofon's two-night 20th anniversary show. The set list was mostly songs from The Tower, plus three older ones. It was loud as fuck and pretty glorious.

The live stuff in the new film is recorded off the desk and sounds amazing. I know they've always improvised but Bent isn't kidding when he says they're playing a kind of jazz.

I'm really quite knocked out by Little Lucid Moments. This is the one I'd have started with if I'd known. Still yet to connect in any big way with most of the pre-Kapstad era stuff (not via the medium of Youtube anyway); I can tell it's really vital but too straight 90s indie rock. I dunno.

I also got Still Life With Eggplant recently and while it's not as significant it works well as a mellow companion to LLM. Barleycorn and Afterglow are really nice.

Dare I say I feel I now have a pretty good handle on Motorpsycho 2008-present day.

"she left on the sun ship" is astonishing

― reggie (qualmsley), Wednesday, 18 November 2015 17:09 (four years ago)

LLM is great, all four tunes have one really amazing bit on it

I prefer Heavy Metal Fruit though, not huge on "Starhammer" but I love everything else

next MP album gonna have a 42 minute tune on it god damn

http://motorpsycho.no/2020/06/the-all-is-one/

Hi psychonauts!

Summer is coming on strong and whatever bit of the world that still went to work ….will soon not.
No rest for the wicked though, and both we, our team and our record company friends are busy preparing the next Motorpsycho album for release!

This album is called The All Is One, and will be released on 2xLP, 2xCD as well as digitally through both Stickman Records and Rune Grammofon on August 28, 2020.
The cover art is once again by Håkon Gullvåg, and this time around is art painted esp for us!

It is a long album that features music from two sessions we did last year. The first session included our favourite Stockholmian Norwegian Reine Fiske, and took place in Black Box Studio in France in September. The second, featured two of our favourite Norwegian musicians, Ola Kvernberg and Lars Horntveth, and was a brief three day affair at Ocean Sound Studio on the Norwegian west coast in November.

At the center of this album is a long 5 part piece featuring some of the most radical stuff we’ve done on record in a while, but if the prospect of a 42minute piece for ballet inspired by paintings, alchemy and the tarot seems too daunting, there is also a handful of losely related shorter songs to get into. For us this is obviously just different views and tangents of the one thing, but you will all make of it what you will, and hopefully it will all make some sort of sense to you however deep you choose to go.

We guess the details – cover, song titles and whatnot – will be made public as summer moves along, so watch the various relevant spaces for relevant info and hang loose – it’ll be worth the wait, we promise!

They were framing this as potentially a 3xLP before so this has probably been pared down if anything

are they really doing another record? come on, enough already

http://motorpsycho.no/2021/02/kingdom-of-oblivion

Yeah, I mean, how dare they.

pls no trenchant social commentary on the next one thanks

Sorry, Simon ;-)

The title cut, "Kingdom of Oblivion", is about the opiate epidemic.

Mercy and grace and I
said our sad soft goodbyes
here in the fashion of delusion's reign

Humbug and hogwash both spread
like some cancerous growth
the discourse just felt insane

New borad description. Seriously though, who can deny the sentiment.

these guys really threatening to be my new "don't have time to listen to anything else" sort of band, much like Autechre the last couple of years.

"Munity!" is currently my favorite MP track, the vocals are so damn good. also lol @ the Yes homage

really all of TDDU is astounding, I'm even starting to dig the slow bits on Side 3. absolutely one of those "they don't make 'em like this anymore" sort of albums.

There's the band's dedication to constantly producing new (epic) material, the fans' generosity in sharing good recordings, but more than that just the fact that concerts are happening at all somewhere in the world.

https://www.motorpsychodelicclips.com/node/329

I listened to Roadworks 4 a day after the Can Live in Stuttgart set and it occurred to me that these bands have kind of a similar approach to their shows

listening to BH/BC and LLM right back-to-back is like a masterclass in what you can do once you acquire a great drummer

Funny thing is that bass player Bent played the drums on BH/BC, on that record Motorpsycho consisted of just Bent (vocals, bass, drums) and Snah (guitar, vocals). LLM was Kenneth Kapstadt's debut. Both are phenomenal records.

yea he does a fine job but the songs they wrote were much more straightforward and "on rails" whereas on LLM they could constantly shift tempo and time signature. they also play a lot faster in certain parts. I mean you're right they're both great, but that's MP for you, everything they do works

The Crucible is such a great album. they've morphed into some amalgam of Wetton-era King Crimson and Pawn Hearts-era Van der Graaf Generator. their recent albums rule so much.

wait is "the all is one" about how Motorpsycho is frustrated with The Discourse?

now i'm imagining "the plague of lighthouse keepers" but the lyrics are just jamie hood's "against discourse"

https://www.tsqnow.online/post/against-discourse-the-chaser-myth-the-un-making-of-a-modern-woman-by-jamie-hood

yes, everything i talk about _does_ somehow become trans shit within fifteen seconds

Wasn't sure about more acoustic based Motorpsycho at this point, given how much I've loved their recent records, but Yay! is really good! Didn't realize until after I heard it that Reine Fiske produced it - which explains some Dungen vibes I got (esp on "Hotel Daedalus").