Horaflora & Secret Boyfriend - (2010) Split LP

"I met Raub of Horaflora during his tour down from New England when he had his entire set-up on a bicycle. Using a clever and economical system that included a hand drum, trumpet mouth piece, balloon, computer sub-woofer, transducers, hand-held tape recorders and various found objects, he created an immersive shuddering meadow mecha-organic sound environment. Empty cans and scrap metal rattled to the same pulse, balloons exhaled lost-in-the-fog tones on the taut drum skin, tapes whirred weird in their lascivious carriage in the front and back : the sum being a barnyard of coldly throbbing sounds from all angles harmonizing with the resident frogs and insects. Two years later we have this, the vinyl debut of both Horaflora and Secret Boyfriend. On his side, Raub wrings pleasingly alien sounds from his systems - taken in this instance from a live session with Andrea Williams on KALX. The electro-acoustic room-rattling is crisply recorded but still very inscrutable ... strange sounds mingling spatially guided by unseen hands of a restless poltergiest . . . The Secret Boyfriend side begins stunned in the still room where Horaflora left us, oozes and flirts with a baroque chamber mentality giving away to exquisite / blown speaker melodies and drooling song-form, morbid and tender. A sense of calm and peripheral melancholy is held, abrasion dialed back. One quarter alive in a cold apartment for twenty years. The windows are open.