A Drug Called Tradition
Medicine Music LP Release Show
w/
The Difference Machine
Order of the Owl
Wray
Friday July 28 @ The EARL
$8 / 21+ / 9pm
ADCT
In their debut album, Medicine Music (out July 28), Atlanta trio A Drug Called Tradition fuses shoegaze, krautrock, and psych rock influences with the heavy atmosphere of their southern roots. The eight-minute opening track, “With You Miss You,” bursts onto the scene with brooding vocals and saturated guitar pulses before breaking and leading the listener on a Can-inspired odyssey of layered intensity and release. This journey continues through the rest of the album, each track seemingly standing on its own before revealing its place in the larger whole.
After the dissolution of heavy psych stalwarts Abby Gogo, singer/guitarist Bon Allinson began working on a batch of songs more heavily influenced by his upbringing in Alabama and by the musical traditions of the South. He brought these songs to drummer Pumakawa “Puma” Navarro (Abby Gogo) and bassist Asha Lakra (Tikka) and the trio hit the ground running. They played their first set opening for Matt Hollywood of Brian Jonestown Massacre and soon after recorded a three song demo with Spencer Garn at Diamond Street Studios. The band gained a reputation as one of the most intense acts in Atlanta and around the South playing with acts such as Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires, Holy Wave, Spaceface, White Reaper, and Froth.
Ready to set the songs they’d crafted to two-inch tape, ADCT headed to Water Valley, Mississippi to record Medicine Music with producer Matt Patton (Drive-By Truckers, Dexateens), and engineer Bronson Tew at Dial Back Sound (owned at the time by Bruce Watson of Fat Possum Records). The band stayed in the small apartment adjacent to the studio, working in marathon sessions that ended in all involved crashing wherever was convenient. The tracks were also mixed and mastered at Dial Back Sound and pressed to vinyl at Gotta Groove Records. Now with their debut album in hand, ADCT has teamed up with Psych Army Intergalactic and are ready to conquer the rest of the U. S. and then the world.
The Difference Machine
There are many planes of consciousness, but in the one that we call the here and the now, The Difference Machine are a psychedelic hip-hop group from Atlanta, Georgia. Since 2011, they’ve been at the vanguard of the city’s underground scene, creating gritty, mind-expanding anthems that explore the unifying lines between conscious rap and abstract soundscapes, the dividing wall between the blood-stained realities of twenty-first century urban America and the sublime mysticism of an opaque universe.
The group’s latest sonic attack, The 4th Side of the Eternal Triangle, bumps and soars, breathing additional fire and compositional daring into their already formidable style. Your guide on this stark metaphysical journey is rapper Dustin Teague whose scathing cultural surveys and dimensional truths help give shape to producer Dr. Conspiracy’s warped beats and nuclear mystical trash alchemy. Rounding out the group’s songwriting core is longtime drummer Radley Fricker and DJ Obeah who handles most of the cuts on the record. Meanwhile, Cyrus Shahmir, formerly of psych rock cosmonauts the N.E.C., was recruited to conjure his hallucinogenic atmospheres and shamanistic vibes on guitar and keys. The result of this collaborative effort is a more expansive sound architecture layered in primal energy and head-swimming celestial sophistication.
Having spent the last few years smashing stages all over the U.S. alongside Run the Jewels, Homeboy Sandman, Ghostface Killah & Adrian Younge, Deltron 3030, Shabazz Palaces, Chuck D, and fellow Atlanta rebel rousers the Black Lips, the Difference Machine find themselves well-prepared — mentally, emotionally, spiritually — for this moment. Boasting a dozen genre-bending tracks and a string of guests that includes Homeboy Sandman, Curtis Harding, Stacy Epps, and Paten Locke, this is undoubtedly the group’s defining work to date. Both visceral and cerebral, the album is as much a clenched fist to those who would practice hate and intolerance as it is an outstretched hand to those willing to embrace our universal connectedness and the power of the transcendental. In a music culture dominated and defined by an ever-uniforming sameness, The Difference Machine remains a middle finger to the demons of comfort and complacency. This is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, a dynamic and evolutive vibration drifting through the abyss of space. There are many planes of consciousness, but few that feel this urgent and profoundly radiant. Listen with care.
