(Noise-Rock, Noise, Krautrock, Experimental) Neptune - Silent Partner - 2011, MP3, 320 kbps

Neptune's origins trace to 1994 as a sculpture project by Boston artist/musician Jason Sanford, who forged the band's haphazard guitars and reluctant drums from scrap steel and found objects. Seven lineups, twenty-three releases and hundreds of instruments later, the band continues to wrench its sound spatter on self-built instruments to often confounded audiences around the world. In 2007, they released Gong Lake with avant arbiter Table of the Elements, home to art heroes Tony Conrad, Rhys Chatham and Faust. Neptune has shared the stage with a variety of influential artists such as The Ex, Mission of Burma, Ut, Oneida, Lightning Bolt, The Flaming Lips, Blonde Redhead, Melt-Banana, Charles Hayward, Liars, Black Dice, James Chance & the Contortions, Gang Gang Dance, The Dresden Dolls, Six Finger Satellite, and Wolf Eyes. Sanford and longtime Neptune collaborator Mark Pearson are currently joined by musicians/instrument inventors Kevin Micka and Farhad Ebrahimi, redefining their music and creating new sounds from scratch. Propulsive percussion and sonorous electronics tangle with Sanford's microtonal string creations with a refined minimalism, adding a new chapter to the band's ever-evolving story.

There’s probably not much to say about punk’s continued existence. Like jazz or sitcoms or party politics, it just carries on eating and breathing and shitting and propogating. It’s only interesting when someone comes along trying to advance the form. Like “Arrested Development” or Dennis Kucinich, they’re usually forgotten.
This would all be relevant if Neptune were a punk band, which we’re not at all sure is the case. They create a sense of undermining the status quo, which is pretty punk, but then they screw things up by undermining the punk status quo. They’re not really a guitar band, although they do play guitars of a sort, handcrafted by Boston sculptor and founder Jason Sidney Sanford. But they’ve also covered the Go Go’s, which isn’t punk, not really.
Recorded at Machines With Magnets, the same studio employed by Battles, The Psychic Paramount, and The Skull Defekts, “Silent Partner” pushes Neptune up to two dozen releases over 15 years, and finds them continuing to push their electrified, rhythmic sound while staying true to what has always made them evocative. They’re too musical to be a noise band, and yet the noises they make are never quite recognizable. Having lost drummer Daniel Paul Boucher in 2009, Sanford and Mark William Pearson made the counter-intuitive decision to focus on making an album heavy on drums. With Kevin Emil Micka (Animal Hospital) and Farhad Alexander Ebrahimi (Big Bear), they envisioned a new sort of drum thing for Neptune and devised a new arsenal of instruments – not least of which is feedback machine devised out of a prototyped yoga ball. There’s also amplified bicycle spokes and drum-triggered oscillators.
And yet, it’s a tightly controlled sonic environment. The eight-minute “Cash Mattress” might be a display of sonic creation, but when they come around to the simple rock of “Canine Spaces” the sound is familiar, even if the sounds comprising it aren’t. Neptune is not dealing in willful avant-gardism. They are creating out of necessity. They’re crafting new rock where the old one won’t do. Excitement’s at play.

Jason Sidney Sanford
Mark William Pearson
Kevin Emil Micka
Past members / collaborators:
Gregory Kenney, Darryl Blood, Doug Last, Carl Weiting, Malcolm Felder, Jessica Rylan, Adam Scotto, Joel Hamburger, Chris Huggins, Justin Kaiden, John Manson, Adrianne Jorge, Donna Parker, Ken Linnehan, Daniel Paul Boucher, Farhad Ebrahimi