Stone Academy
- RS-14
- LP
- Edition of 300
- 1. Plaster Dog (7:37)
- 2. Fuck Everything (4:31)
- 3. Elephant (6:05)
- 4. Fire Machine (3:35)
- 5. More Mess (4:01)
- 6. Southside (2:15)
- 7. Pissing (4:02)
- 8. Bird's Face (7:26)
- 9. When You Were 9 (5:06)
Cracked song poems from a basement in Chicago with no lights on. Zelienople create acoustic improvisations that have as much in common with Thuja as they do the late period work of Talk Talk. Slowly drifting guitar tones run head first into blown out harmonium drones and the broken edges of homemade instruments. These songs aren't drifting as much as they are lost at sea. Each cover comes with a real photo by Bay Area photographer Dianne Jones. Six different ones in all. Hand numbered as well.
"Another beautiful sounding and gorgeously packaged super limited release from Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's (Tarentel) Root Strata label. This one, from a mysterious band of noisemakers from Chicago (even though they're named for a city in Pennsylvania), Zelienople. Having lurked on the periphery of the underground drone / noise / free folk scene, releasing a handful of limited cd-r releases on labels like PseudoArcana, 267 Lattajjaa and others, Stone Academy finds the band at their darkest and most expansive, droney and buzzy but still so delicate and beautiful, hopefully this release will be the one to get these guys more widely heard 'cuz they do belong right up there alongside Avarus and Starving Weirdos and Yellow Swans and Birchville and all of those ambientdronefolk household names. Stone Academy, at its core, is basically a stripped down folk record. Simple strummed steel string guitar, wavery plaintive vocals, warm swells of ambience, wrapped in TONS of thick reverb, like it was recorded in a cave or a gymnasium or empty swimming pool, and while each song has this strummy folk center, each track evolves or devolves in a totally unique way, into a barely there minimal crawl, into grinding washes of distorted guitar, into warm thick swirls of My Bloody Valentine like buzz, into weird 20th century abstract clatter, into Murky Dead C like blurry noise rock, and sometimes into nothing at all, just sort of quietly and contemplatively drifting along, shimmering in a druggy haze of warbly ephemeral folk and whirring ambient rumble." - Aquarius Records