Idea Fire Company - Hot Enough For You?

The wonderfully oneiric and bewitched world of Idea Fire Company opens its doors once again with another long-player of off-world/odd-dimension exploration. Founding members Karla Borecky and Scott Foust have been at this particular rock face for close to four decades now, and there remains something resolutely alien and insular about their style of debased explorations of improvised electronics and avant composition that appears to only ossify further over time. Still, if they are persistently singular, they're also not alone on Hot Enough For You?, joined by the varyingly familiar presences of Robert Beerman, Matt Kreftling, Mike Popovich and Timothy Shortell. Recorded over four years between 2019-2023, together they make a kind of freak-flag kraut-exotica that plays with all our favourite buzzwords of time-dilation, disassociation and liminal space yet sounds stretched far beyond such academic qualifiers. Hearing such sounds from one or two people isn't entirely uncommon, but to emerge from the group efforts of five people feels somehow more inviting, that sense of a gathering of minds and shared sensibilities you spend, well, 40 years in pursuit of. The results are syrupy, languid and softly degraded in a way listeners might connect with label mates Eyes of the Amaryllis, former collaborators Kye Records and any number of lost lathe-cut/CD-r underground recordings (Thuja, Entlang, Lovely Midget and so forth). Ultimately however, it's not really possibly to contextualise IFCo outside of their own doggedly pursued universe, and with it they remain true bastions of DIY practice. 
 
FFO: Eyes of the Amaryllis, Thuja, Entlang, Lovely Midget, late period Shadow Ring