Back in stock!
Talk of this project has been floating around for a few years now, with rumours of a little plug pulling from various invested parties along the way partly stymying its progress, so it's great to finally see House Rules make good on their efforts and finally get this collection of outsider sounds out into the wider world. And the wider world is not something this music was always going to find. We're very much in private press and/or universe territory, ten tracks from ten different artists sourced from mostly unconventional places that might all be broadly categorised as 'new age' but stylistically diverge, ranging from mystical folk through ambient bliss to transcendent experimental electronics and beyond. If the music is disparate, and we can almost certainly guarantee that few if none of these artists would have been aware of the other, then it's clearly something else outside of geographic synchronicity (itself not insignificant of course) that connects them. House Rules astutely, and perhaps even with tongue-in-cheek, labels it the 'metaphysical underground', a very uniquely West Coast notion that, if you're willing to overlook the ghoulish L. Ron Hubbard undertones, speaks to the free thinking, freewheeling, freakily inclined type of individual that might be impelled to spend a good portion of their waking hours recording odd, distinctly uncommercial sounds destined to live on a cassette tape (edition of one) left on a forgotten shelf for the rest of its existence. Forgotten, that is, until someone with a particularly heated interest in the arcane turns up to bring it back towards the light. More importantly, Lost Coast is no meagre exercise in obscuro-fetishism - there are enough NTS shows and YouTube channels that seek to satisfy that particular desire. Instead, these songs feel uniquely connected, and in that connection expressive of a particular space, time and sensibility that foregrounded the Weirdo Impulse. Whether that same impulse truly persists now I do not know. That it might have once deserves some kind of celebration and Lost Cause does as good a job as any in filling that role.
FFO: Steve Roach, Laraaji, Jon Hassell, Iasos, Gigi Masin
