A new collaboration has formed between Sean Lennon and Deerhoof’s drummer, Greg Saunier, called Mystical Weapons, and you should absolutely give it a listen. The son of Beatles legend John Lennon, and Yoko Ono, Sean was born into music royalty (his godfather is even Sir Elton John), but it isn’t about some kind of legacy; he’s been making his own tunes since the mid-90′s, experimenting with alternative rock and folk sounds in quite a few releases over the years, and collaborating with the likes of Albert Hammond, Jr. (The Strokes), Cibbo Matto, and more.
This new project is probably best described as “hallucinogenic“. The majority of the tracks on the album are short, 2-minute swells of noisy guitar and keyboards, psychedelic sounds and a pandemonium of percussion that nearly overwhelms the rest of the instrumentals. The range of the dynamic of the songs varies quite a bit, but in short, it’s a lot of really great psychedelic rock.
“All the music is improvised, which is one of the guidelines,” Lennon says. “Then there would be verbal guidelines, which were sometimes based around instrumentation or a key signature or a concept or mood…It’s really liberating because I do tend to do more structured music, [and] Greg is the perfect partner in crime when it comes to improvising because he has a really great spontaneity and is very original so he’s not just blurting out clichés like most of us are.” You’ve got to admit, this is a pretty fresh way of pooling musical resources.
If you’re looking for some psychedelic noise rock to space out to, check out “Colony Collapse Disorder” from Mystical Weapons.