Black Moth Super Rainbow collaborates on House of Apples & Eyeballs

I know what you're thinking, and no, it's not a split release -- split releases on CD are kinda pointless anyway. The House of Apples & Eyeballs is actually an album-length collaboration between Pittsburgh's Black Moth Super Rainbow and Austin's The Octopus Project. Tracks originally generated by one band would get fed through the other, and so on, until these chunks of music reached the consistency of a fine, unidentifiable puree.

It's heady stuff -- all druggy drones, glitchy lo-fi beats, psychedelic synths and police-siren theremin. New-agey Tangerine Dream moments bloom for fleeting seconds ... before being run over with distorted drum machines. There's a bit of Bowie's Low in there, of course, some Spacemen 3, Spiritualized and a few stray fractured panes of An Albatross.

The track listings pack entertainment value -- what's a "Lollipopsichord"? -- but ultimately seem unnecessary, as the CD follows a fairly consistent trajectory. But if it helps you to know that a 40-second snippet of vocoder and Nintendo music is called "Lemon-Lime Face," you're covered.

In all, this collaboration yields 35 minutes of artlessly lush, beautiful tones that never actually sound pretty. Instead you get plenty of ear candy, delicious grooves, and that kind of veined surface detail you can lose yourself in. House of Apples & Eyeballs seems equally the type of record you could deploy in your bedroom and one to load into your iPod before a consciousness-altering morning run.