psychic viewfinder by the telescopes

The Telescopes have been mining a unique anti-myopian seam of drone/dream psych for 20 years. Expertly bolting gritty blocks of noise, rich with fossil and sediment, onto minimal songs and melodies which are miles apart and miles beyond the reams of drone/ambience out there.

On 'Psychic Viewfinder' Stephen Lawrie & Bridget Hayden harness a primeval drone, rich in texture, and build it beautifully in unison with soaring feedback, guitar manipulation & viola which forever spiral outward, fractal and hypnotic - a bed of noise percolating at the edges of audition.

Originally released as a clear vinyl 7" lathe cut on Trensmat records.
(every noise has a note) http://www.trensmat.com/index1.html

REVIEWS...
Itchy, scratchy nails down a blackboard angst-noise-drone made up from guitar and viola. Ltd & numbered...need we say more about this group with much pedigree.
Norman Records

Nice package....the Telescopes at their most abstract. It's a great wash of drones from a guitar and a voila, which power their way through your head and eventually start to sound like they're parallel transmissions being beamed into your skull from somewhere in deepest space. A great feedback symphony vibe is at work here. Very cool.
The Wire

This is the Telescopes at their most abstract and minimal, emitting a gorgeous multi-layered high end squall, very much like Sunroof! or Vibracathedral Orchestra. Sheets of wail and skree, keening streaks of feedback and wavering shimmering washes of glimmer and glisten. Two tracks, both barely shifting high end drones, and both quite lovely.
The cool thing about this single is, that it comes with a cd-r containing the same tracks that are on the 7", so since it's a lathe cut, and lathe cuts lose a little on every play, you can play it like crazy, letting it degrade slightly with each listen, enjoying the every changing sound quality, allowing for more crackle and hiss and distortion, probably getting more and more beautiful, without sacrificing the original tunes. ...Awesome.
Aquarius Records

The Telescopes return to the fray with another slice of squall laden sonic heraldry and head tripping bliss out interference from the ether. Those who found the ensembles last outing - the superb 'Night Terrors' set a little - shall we say - on the edge of insanity and happily peering into the deep may well look upon this slice of grating mind melting pyrotechnics a little out and beyond the normal map annotations of pop's safer cosmos and to the extreme edges of the aural spectrum.
Psychic Viewfinder is a full on 10 minute head drilling collage of droning feedback split into two suites no doubt deliberately done so for fear of your mind turning to mush. This detached and unsettling display is abstractly conceived, an impenetrable (musique) concrete wall of oscillating feedback shrieks and fractured manipulations that finds Telescopers Stephen and Bridget formulating a sinister and unnerving hypnotic groove that instantly recalls some of the more acutely extreme textures applied by Dreams of Tall Buildings as though found rummaging amid the unhinged psyche of Sonic Boom’s early career EAR outings being overseen and tweaked by Merzbow. Disturbed, eerie, esoteric and wilfully un-playful it may be, 'Psychic Viewfinder' does at times sounds like magnified slabs of unearthly binary transmissions from the far reaches of the cosmos or then again music for hiding behind the sofa routines though if you ask us we'd say it's a playground full of rusty swings in serious need of oiling ominously swaying in the death grip of the bleak night air - thoroughly recommended if only to scare the bejeezus out of the neighbours. Somehow I think they are playing with us.
Losing Today

beyond the realm of natural vision.

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