LP Edition of 200. Numbered. Riso-graph cover and back art Printed at LOOKYHERE.

 $29

Beautiful third LP helmed by multi-instrumentalist/tape manipulator, Brian Lucas. Following up on 2021’s The Incandescent Switch (FTR 606) and 2022’s The Air’s Chrysalis Chime (FTR 675), Quartz Hive is a post-pandemic swirl of cloud sound based on the kind of music that makes all your inner walls melt like wax.

Lucas has a wonderful way of creating clusters of texture that circle the room, slowly accreting bits of lovely ambient sound that transform themselves from vague suggestions into full-blown songs without adhering to any logic other than their own. Some of the players colluding here are Old Million Eye vets, like Steven R. Smith, Sheila Bosco and Kevin Van Yserloo. But there are many new heads on the scene as well, like harpist Ceylan Hay (Bell Lungs) and saxophonist Zekarias Thompson (Agnes Martian), who adds a distinct Canterbury flavor to the tunes on which he plays.

Like Lucas’s other current outfits, like 43 Odes and Dire Wolves, Old Million Eye makes psychedelic music that glides through your head with startling originality. There’s very little here that hews to stereotypical psych formulae, but its tendrils still manage to engage all your dream receptors with delicate power and grace.

Music as deep as any tab in any ocean. Quarts Hive is a sonic delivery vehicle of singular beauty. Gorgeous stuff.

–Byron Coley, 2024