(To the right - John G. from Bardo Pond models the latest in the Abunai! t-shirt range)

For their third full-lengther, Boston psych-rockers Abunai! have created something radically different to the well received "Universal Mind Decoder" and its celebrated follow-up "Mystic River Sound". "Round Wound" takes many hours of instrumental improvisational tapes and uses advanced mastering techniques to weave a seamless and constantly evolving collage out of them. Keyboardist Kris Thompson explains: "Improvising and jamming has always been a part of our time spent playing together, and we felt like an album made entirely in that spirit would be something that would be satisfying to share with people who have enjoyed those parts of our albums and our live shows. A lot of bands fret about how best to 'capture their sound', but what I like so much about this album is that during the recording of the various jams that make it up, we weren't conscious that we were making an album. We were just recording our improvs casually over several years, on a variety of equipment and configurations in our rehearsal studio, without the mental obstacle of feeling like we were "posing for the studio camera". 

In its cosmic flow, "Round Wound" is the band's most "krautrock" work to date, although that was as much a surprise to the band as anyone, since they have never specifically set out to capture the sound of prime German psychedelic improvisation circa 1970. Another reference point is the wondrous Flying Saucer Attack live CD on Corpus Hermeticum, although the outcome is entirely different, and this disc is varied enough to warrant indexing into 21 sections. 

Much of the credit for the organic flow of "Round Wound" must be given to the mastering process between the band and engineer Jeff Lipton. Bassist Dan Parmenter explained it to us thusly: "We spent a long time on sequencing, and in some cases we layered one jam on top of another, sometimes backwards. Sequencing the album was as much a visual exercise as an auditory one. We color-coded all of our tapes based on the key and took pains to ensure that we didn't have too much continuous stuff in "A" (or "E" or "D") and that the layered bits were either harmonious or at least clashed interestingly. The layering originally emerged from the realization that even with vicious pruning, we still had too much stuff, plus the discovery that even when the results of layering were pure cacophony, it was a very appealing kind of cacophony and even when 10-20 pieces were layered, much of the character of the original instrumental sound was still quite apparent. The first track, "The Sound Museum" is about 20 tracks playing simultaneously!"