eyes like saucers
still living in the desert
[Click here for audio sample]
...is the
solo project of jeffrey k., formerly the Farfisa organist for Secret Eye
recording artists urDog. eyes like saucers explores the darker, more
organic regions of inner space via a slightly modified Indian pedal harmonium,
effected voice, percussion and electronics. Drawing inspiration from such
artists as Nico, Robert Wyatt, Popol Vuh, Current 93, and early 20th
century German poet, Georg Trakl, eyes like saucers
channels the incessant and labored breathing of the ancient harmonium to evoke a
mood that is bleak and doom-laden, while reaching for the sublime.
The title still living in the desert (and mostly inside
my own head) is derived from a late journal entry of Nico's. Jeffrey
spent most of the year 2006 living within a Volkswagen van in the northern
Arizona desert, with his dog, his harmonium, and a 4 track cassette recorder,
and much of the material on still living... he recorded during
this period. The music often betrays a childlike simplicity - as though the
artist were completely unaware of what he was doing; yet a close, critical
examination will reveal that certain patterns and structures do emerge, and
perhaps even more. There is undoubtably a cohesiveness, a logic, and, for want
of a better term, an underlying - and unstated and inextricable - "numinosity."
Jeffrey has toured the U.S. and Europe extensively - playing
with his most recent act, urDog, as well as playing as an occasional
member of such acts as Black Forest/Black Sea and A.K.R. and the
Eyesores - and has shared the stage with artists as varied as Sir Richard
Bishop (Sun City Girls), Circle, Boris, Six Organs
of Admittance, Bardo Pond, Sunn O))), Jim O'Rourke,
Acid Mothers Temple, and Merzbow. Eyes like saucers will be
performing throughout the United States during the summer of 2007, and a
European tour will hopefully ensue.
'UrDog is simply the most satisfying prog/psych group to emerge from our
beloved US of A in many moons, ... they conjure a new beast whose howl all dead
souls should heed and maybe a few living ones, too.'
- Lee Jackson, Foxy Digitalis
'Mr. k.'s own group, urDog, provides the Invisible Pyramid's
pinnacle. After a sung hymn to the Falkland Island Wolf that recalls
Tower Recordings at their most reverent, "The Open" forms a dark cloud of
noisy showers, then a bright rainbow of echoing organ recalling Bobby
Beausoleil's score to Kenneth Anger's earth-myth Lucifer Rising.'
- Marc Masters, The Wire