LISTEN to new tracks from Bird By Snow, Mega Bog, and Yurt HERE

This week Big Sur, CA based Gnome Life Records debuts their new cassette tape & Mp3 series called "Echomancy",  with awe inspiring releases by Bird By Snow, Mega Bog, and Yurt. Echomancy means divination through music and the presence of old magic spill out of the tapes and onto the beautifully occult packaging – cardboard tape boxes copper-foil embossed with esoteric symbols. Seeing is believing, take a look...

Now for the tapes...

"SUBTLE BODY" is BIRD BY SNOW's new EP, and their 7th release overall (4 LP's & 3 EP's). On this EP Fletcher Tucker (Bird By Snow's only constant member) takes a breather from the studio and returns to his lo-fi life. With one mic and a cassette multitrack, Tucker sculpts songscapes simultaneously spaced-out and intimate. "Subtle Body" summons songs from the subtle (spiritually energetic) landscape of California and populates them with vision inducing, poly-melodic guitar lines; and trance inducing, minimalistic rhythms. With tunes and lyrics smuggled back from an astral hike through vibrational hills, this album feels like the soundtrack to a lucid dream, one where you fly on and on over an endless ocean.

"Tucker's  work is now something that resists easy summary -- one can hear everything from understated folk antecedents to fraught metal extremes to shadowed goth touches throughout its seven songs, but at no point is it simply one of those approaches, or any other one, for that matter." - All Music Guide

"NATIVE TONGUE" is the 1st release by YURT a new, far-out project by Fletcher Tucker (also of Bird By Snow). "Native Tongue" consists of 12 improvised (in Tucker's words "channeled") Jew's harp recordings, employing 11 different harps from around the world. The Jew's harp is a mystic instrument that sounds like no other. It appears independently in hundreds of regions and cultures throughout the globe, and features largely into a lot of sacred indigenous music. "Native Tongue" is a further testament to the Jew's harp's ability to siphon music into our world from other dimensions. 

"OKAY HUMAN" is Gnome Life's first release by MEGA BOG, yet another new band on the label. Mega Bog is from Seattle and they play a kind of echoey pop music, this sort cold surf music, this groovy golden dawn music. "Okay Human" will transport you to an effortless groove space, a realm inhabited with glorious word forms, turns-of-phrase both alien and familiar, profound and playful – "My board, it crumbles in a heavy ocean weeze. I met my new best friend while crawling to my knees". It's time to let the spring sunshine in with this ultimate road-trip tape.

"The band projects the power of the Northwest and its mysticism. The last time I saw Mega Bog perform, it was in a basement of a house in the U-district and it was one of the most powerful performances I've seen. Also, couple that thought with awesome saxophone solos." - The Stranger