Azusa Plane / Roy Montgomery split (Colorful Clouds for Acoustics)

The Azusa Plane tune is titled 'Volume IV: She Was Into S&M and Bible Studies, Not Everyone's Cup of Tea She Would Admit to Me, Her Cup of Tea She Would Admit to No One' and it's a 33 1/3 slice of slowly pulsing drone. The cover art is apt and this is one that you feel more than you hear, know what I mean? Roy Montgomery's side, 'Cumulus and Fugue', is similar stylistically to the guitar/delay strum heard on Temple IV. There's a more tonal center than the Azusa side, though it's still barely recognizable as guitar, and like the best kinda of these things it works well either really quiet or really loud. Thin, translucent blue vinyl ties this all together conceptually and if you get your kicks doing as little as possible, this is your soundtrack.

Azucar / Noggin split (Sweet Baboo)

Almost four months of limbo while we waited for LPs and CDs to catch up, but welcome back! I'm not sure how this ended up in my 7" accumulation, but it's a fun little treasure. The side which is Azucar (I THINK - they are unlabeled) is a meandering instrumental gem of piano, guitar and violin. It's tender and melodic but continually falling apart and picking itself back up. It's kinda in the vein of one of those indie-classical groups like Rachel's, only if they were afflicted by Parkinson's disease. Whoever they were, they came from Brunswick, NJ, always a home of anti-aesthetic weirdos. Could today's gang of BoneToothHorn rascals be somehow affiliated? But from the West coast, Noggin take a different approach to the violin: manic and lo-fi, dancing around the perimeter of utter beauty but also falling away from it. It's like Malcolm Goldstein put through the laundry machine a few times - on the cold/cold cycle. This was 1996; I can only think about how this would have been received ten years earlier or ten years later. Records like this make me love the 7" format - a slice of visionary weirdness, eternally reproducible in a way the CD-R won't be. Will tomorrow's centurions of the obscure dedicate their bandwidth to finding out just who (or what) Azucar were (or was)?