Friday Five: Bunkerman, Head Full of Ghosts, Molly Jones/Hunter Brown/Ishmael Ali, Acid Lab, Anteomedroma

MUSIC FRIDAY FIVE

Cover art for the albums and singles featured in the Friday Five.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features spacey grooves by Bunkerman, alt-rock grunge by Head Full of Ghosts, improvisations by Molly Jones/Hunter Brown/Ishmael Ali, drum 'n' bass by Acid Lab, and black metal by Anteomedroma and Gnosis.

 

Bunkerman, Limes EP
This excellent debut EP by the Washtenaw County duo Bunkerman is a little bit of Zombi's monster soundtracks, 1970s Herbie Hancock fusion-funk jams, and the open-ended, post-jazz, ambient grooves of The Necks. Galen Bundy (Rhodes electric piano and synthesizers) and Travis Aukerman (drums) say Limes is a "collection of music inspired by, created for, and made with" the fruit, but I like to think the slow-burner "Pulp" was influenced by this website—so it shall therefore be a2pulp.org's unofficial theme song until further notice.

 

Head Full of Ghosts, 10.23
If your favorite station on Sirius XM is the Lithium channel, you will adore Ypsilanti's Head Full of Ghosts. The quartet has honed in the 1990s as a key sonic decade, and Head Full Ghosts' third album, 10.23, nails the aesthetics. Vocalist-guitarist James Henes has the soulful but slightly pinched wail common in the era's singers, and the nine songs on 10.23 evoke the biggest alt-grunge hits from the likes of Live, Matchbox Twenty, Gin Blossoms, Candlebox, Better Than Ezra, Collective Soul, Eve 6, and numerous others. This edition of the band—Henes, Bryan King (drums), Geoff Loebe (bass), and Ken Ball (lead guitar, synths)—has been playing together for a few years now, which is obvious on the tight and clean 10.23.

 

Molly Jones, Hunter Brown, Ishmael Ali, Phosphenes
Molly Jones (saxophone, flutes, percussion) and Hunter Brown expand on their 2022 collaborative album, Massage Music, with the addition of Ishmael Ali (cello, electronics, percussion) for Phosphenes, the latest release on Ann Arbor's 1473 label. If your brain only processes tonal music, Phosphenes might fry your gray matter. But if you can get down with timbral experiments, the cacophony of sounds on this album evokes something akin to a pond at night: chirps and croaks and whirls and wheezes all talking to one another across the water, all singing the universe. 1473 label runner Chien-an Yuan wrote an effusive Instagram post about Phosphenes that captures its playful spirit of sound discovery and manipulation.

 

Acid Lab, Higher EP
Germany's Daniel Schwerdel, aka Acid Lab, returns to Ypsilanti's AGN7 label for a four-song EP of drum 'n' bass that sounds like it could have come out in 1995. I say something like this about all of AGN7's releases but—my limited vocabulary aside—it's really an amazing run of great releases by a tiny label that consistently highlights talented modern artists who evoke and build on the golden era of this genre. 

 

Gnosis and Anteomedroma, split EP
Anteomedroma is a one-person black-metal project from Ypsi, and Mystic Conquest is the lo-fi tape label he co-runs. This is the third Anteomedroma split EP of 2024, and this time he's teamed with Amherst, Massachusetts noisenik Gnosis, another one-man band, and the five songs here sound like a vacuum cleaner on LSD. 


Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.