Zach Rowden & Laurenţiu Coţac - Elliptical Gloom (2024, mc)

Full stream: https://stoned-to-death.bandcamp.com/album/elliptical-gloom

OUT NOW!

I have two stories behind this beast of a record. The first one is of course the oldest type of story around, the stranger comes to town. The stranger in this story is Zach Rowden. He shows up in Bucharest, once or twice, with his band (or duo if you want) Tongue Depressor. On one of the occasions he meets one of the locals involved in Bucharest avantgard circuits, Laurenţiu Coţac. And they decide to play together. They jam their double and electric basses. And it gets recorded. 23 minutes long march to hell and back to the grave. That is side A of this audiocasettes. The B side, that is when the stranger gets back home. It’s correspondence music. Distance does not make it more romantic though. It sounds like the soundtrack to Jheronimus Bosch “The Temptation of St. Anthony” and that is still a fairly positive interpretation of the funeral vibes captured on tape.

The other story is a story about human selflessness and about how these 40 minutes landed on this particular label. In April 2024 I spent a couple of days on the road with Dan Michiu (who, amongst his many “functions”, is also the head of Beach Buddies Records). Our second day together finds us in the van heading towards Zurich. We are of course fashionably late (which means couple of hours, over here we would say “we are running a kelt-time”, which means you are running late and you prefer not to inform the other party of “how late”), weather is bad, sun is setting down and we are looking at proposition of arriving to Mr. Buzzi’s apartment in an ungodly hour. To brighten the vibes, Michiu suggested to play new “but unmastered” album by Laurentiu and Zach. First listen, I'm trapped, yet of course the music does not make the trip any smoother. I challenge Michiu to replay and he happily agrees to keep wrecking our van speakers with this bass heavy operation. “Why not,” I think, “he’s proud of his new label acquisition, lets pump it up”. All the loose parts of our van ratless, speakers are shaking, we are sucked deep into the Elliptical Gloom. Shortly after the second round Michiu says “Jakub, i think maybe you should release this on Stoned to Death, it will probably work better this way.” I am of course in a state of sharp shock hearing this ofer, but it takes me no second to take this task upon me and dig my shovel into this fairytale bucket of gold. Cheers to you Michiu, I will always remember and cherish this kind gesture.

Released on tape in edition of 80 copies. Artwork by Alin Cincă.