Hand-numbered and limited to 100! The original 2011 album, newly remastered and on cassette for the very first time. Home-dubbed Type I Music Grade tape in black shell, with individually typed A-side label and hand-stamped B-side, held in a hand-assembled pro-printed wraparound tip-on polybox case. Includes die-cut holographic sticker featuring the original 2011 poster design drawn by Matt for the album release but never used.
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10th anniversary edition of the second Herbcraft album, available on cassette for the first time! Recorded before the debut LP was released in June 2010, the majority of Ashram to the Stars was initially intended as the debut album for yet another new Matt LaJoie solo project: a Thelema-influenced cult-devotional invention called The Om-Ah-Hum Band (or, alternately, Aumahhum and The Caverns Endless). As noted in interviews at the time, the intent was to deflect from the "good time, blissed out, bonged to the eyeballs"-type press surrounding debut Herbcraft single "Road to Agartha", a reading that ignored the serious and somewhat dark subject matter of the first album. "I wanted to make an album that took the spiritual concepts I was interested in seriously, but in a more-direct way, one that was edge-of-consciousness but couldn’t possibly be considered blissed-out," he said in an interview with Revolt of the Apes upon Ashram's release.
Along with this stated intent, Ashram to the Stars also represented a brand new style of recording and production for Matt, one that relied entirely on stereo speakers (not headphones) for mixing, and a laptop with very basic DAW rather than a multi-track recorder for the entire tracking and mixing process. The session began with Matt recording the two-chord electric guitar strum of opener "Fleet Guru" for minutes on end, imagining the rest of the instrumentation to be filled in later in order to arrive at a suitable ending point for the song. Returning to zero and creating a new track, he then improvised an overdriven fuzz-wah lead guitar in closest approximation possible to what he heard while strumming the chords; as the rhythm guitar faded out, the lead kept flowing across the border, with wild delay-based trickery and abstract noise seemingly creating itself out of nothing - ghosts in the machine. Letting this strange sound continue to emit from the guitar across the next 10+ minutes, he then zeroed the track again to add bass guitar, improvised vocals, and finally percussion to the unbroken piece of music. The entire side of the record was completed in an afternoon. The songs on side two were recorded separately in sessions throughout the following weeks; "Get Esoteric" providing a bit of boogie (with elements borrowed from an unfinished Cursillistas song), "Mass"--especially in its original 17-minute-long form--becoming an abstract devotional centerpiece for the album (an early precursor to the Flower Room sound), and closer "Jupiter Trine Sun" being the door-busting, dervishly cathartic, world-psych climax, featuring a hard-strummed, loosely-tuned 12-string guitar that would regularly be mistaken for a sitar in reviews.
Once primary tracking was finished and the album roughly mixed, Matt utilized a production trick he'd hit upon several weeks earlier while working on the Papers cassette - creating a cassette master of the album, then ripping and loading it back into the digital master file for the two to be mixed together. Inconsistencies in record and playback speed for tape decks ensured that this cassette mix wouldn't line up perfectly with the original digital master, and any attempt to keep the tape synced resulted in a natural flange effect peppered throughout the mix. This unique blend of analog and digital gives the album an out-of-time, out-of-place quality, ancient and futuristic, yet anchored in 21st century experimental lo-fi and underground psych.
Routinely named by fans as a favorite Herbcraft album, Ashram to the Stars was initially released on Woodsist subsidiary Hello Sunshine as a vinyl and digital exclusive in June 2011. We are thrilled upon its 10th anniversary to offer the album on cassette for the first time, with a new remaster specifically for the medium.
credits
released June 18, 2021
Music and production by Matt LaJoie, 2010-2011, at New Wyrd 33 (Portland, ME).
Remastered for this 10th anniversary cassette edition by ML, June 2021.
Original cover photos, layout, and design by Nicholas E. Barker; cassette design and insert illustration by ML.
Originally released June 2011 on Hello Sunshine (HS-005)
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