Bardo Pond

Not quite a Bardo Pond album as such, but hard to tag as anything else, Sublimation was released in a limited edition for sale at the sixth Terrastock festival, held in 2006 in Providence, Rhode Island. Rather than being one of the series of CDRs the band has put out over time, Sublimation is not only a �real' CD but actually a compilation, featuring solo or side projects of all the band members with the exception of drummer Ed Farnsworth, plus a track from the full group itself. Dechemia, featuring Isobel Sollenberger on violin and John Gibbons on everything else, starts with the briefest song, "Velum," a more overtly Indian music-influenced take on drone than the full band has often done -- it feels more like a meditative sunset than a howling black storm. Hints of the latter first appear courtesy of Michael Gibbons's full solo guise, 500mg. "Descent" is a collage of everything from thin, scraggly feedback to overloaded samples of TV or radio broadcast voices pumped through an absolute mess of static to soft acoustic melodies, not to mention the expected slow and stoned-out-of-its-mind guitar soloing. Bardo Pond's full contribution, "Dual States (For HST)," is a good midrange number by the band, neither entirely smothering doom nor chilly contemplation but an agreeable balance between the states, the Gibbons' guitars ranging similarly from crushing overdive to dank, echoed riffs, while Sollenberger's flute softly plays through the building chaos -- if no surprise per se, it's still them showing what they collectively do best. Clint Takeda concludes the disc with his own solo turn, "Hope Street," starting with a sharp sample of a cultivated British voice discussing how "if you want to destroy someone you start by defining them as unpeople" -- and with that cheery beginning he whips up an ever mutating solo that rises, falls and roars, a narcotic rampage. ~ Ned Raggett, All Music Guide