LP Co-Release with Cardinal Fuzz (UK)
Release Date – September 25th, 2026 – $24
Cardinal Fuzz And Feeding Tube records are proud to bring to you ‘Divination’, a medical diary turned psychedelic séance whereJake Blanchard summons the shahi baaja from somewhere beneath the skin. Jake is perhaps best known for his remarkable visual work, having created sleeves and artwork for artists including Pelt, Mike Gangloff and Richard Dawson, with his artwork for Dawson’s The Ruby Cord receiving third place in the 2022 Art Vinyl album-cover awards.
Jake Blanchard plays the electric shahi baaja, that beautiful beast of an instrument sitting somewhere between the Indian bulbul tarang, the Japanese taishōgoto and an electrical nervous system caught in a thunderstorm. Under normal circumstances it already sounds like an object with one foot in this world and another somewhere considerably stranger. In Jake’s hands it becomes something else again, a machine for pulling sounds out of the walls.
Jake has been undergoing complex surgery and the circumstances of that process have inevitably found their way into the music. The titles alone read like fragments from some deranged medieval physician’s notebook: Coffee, Codeine, Turmeric, Turkey Tail. Biomechanical Burden. Scan Divination. Bone Marrow. This is not wellness music. This is ritual music for when the body has become an unruly piece of machinery. The album was shaped around Jake’s routine with the music assembled in the spaces that illness, pain, medication, scans and recovery allowed. What emerges is a strange kind of alchemical diary, part pharmacopoeia, part exorcism, part electrical weather system.
The opening piece, “Coffee, Codeine, Turmeric, Turkey Tail,” immediately establishes the coordinates. Stimulant, painkiller, spice, mushroom. Breakfast as spell-casting. The ordinary and the occult thrown into the same saucepan. Then comes “Biomechanical Burden,” where flesh, machinery and weight seem to start occupying the same physical space. “Scan Divination” takes the medical image and turns it into something older, the body rendered as omen, map and unknowable territory. And then there is Side B, One track, Eighteen minutes. “Bone Marrow.” A nod, a salute, and a very heartfelt thank you to those strange and wonderful human beings who donate their bone marrow, people willing to give a piece of themselves so that somebody else gets to keep going. If Divination is concerned with the body’s mysteries, its machinery and its strange capacity for repair, then there could hardly be a more fitting title.
Here Jake is joined by Dead Sea Apes, and the shahi baaja becomes part of something heavier, deeper and considerably less interested in respecting the boundaries between improvisation, drone, psychedelic rock and free-form sonic excavation.
There is a particularly strange beauty to Divination because Jake’s physical limitations have not resulted in a diminished musical language. If anything, they have forced the music to become more concentrated. The extended improvisational sprawl of earlier work has been replaced by something more deliberate, short bursts, accumulated fragments, pressure building over time until the pieces begin to reveal themselves.
Jake’s work has always existed somewhere between the ancient and the futuristic. The shahi baaja is already a time-travelling instrument, but on Divination it sounds as if it has been dragged through a hospital corridor, plugged into an electrical substation and then handed over to a shaman. Which, conveniently, is pretty much what the sleeve looks like. The artwork by Jake depicts a magnificent psychedelic medicine man surrounded by smoke, strange creatures, eyes, instruments, food, candles, books, potions and enough unexplained symbolism to keep a conspiracy theorist awake for several weeks. It feels less like an album cover than an instruction manual for entering the record. It is the sound of an artist looking directly at the machinery of his own body and deciding to make a record from the noise.
Divination is the answer.
