Anthem of the Moon

There's an awful lot of "psychedelic" music around these days, mostly of the gentle, sprightly, cosmic nature. It has seemed to Oneida for the past couple years that the world has forgotten a huge part of the critical essence of the psychedelic experience: anxiety, dislocation, alienation, and half-formed terror. With "Anthem of the Moon," they're out to remind the world why psychedelia matters.

Over the course of 13 months, Oneida made repeated journeys to an array of Colonial-era ruins in the woods of western New England, where they set up a small mobile recording unit in the midst of the stones. They recorded each of these trips, ending up with a massive trove of tape reels, from which the bulk of this album was distilled. Sounds of the stones and the night woods saturate the recorded music (including the ghostly screech of a barred owl on "Almagest"), literally and emotionally; the naked, anxious exhaustion, ecstasy, and paranoia that the listener hears are the real thing. "Anthem of the Moon" is a literal and figurative field recording -- of voices: animal and human, real and imagined, whimpers, moans, screams, and incantations. Their trip is no fucking picnic in the meadow -- it's a journey into the stones. "Anthem of the Moon" was recorded in the stones by Oneida; mixing and additional recording by Peter Katis at Tarquin Studios.