BUCKETHEAD — Pike 134 - Digging Under The Basement (review)

BUCKETHEAD — Pike 134 - Digging Under The Basement album cover

Album · 2015 · Non-Metal

4/5 · 2015-11-08
siLLy puPPy

PIKE 134 - DIGGING UNDER THE BASEMENT is the 33rd album released by BUCKETHEAD in 2015.

It is the following:

All instrumental

Exclusively played by BUCKETHEAD

Near the half hour mark at 30:29

A seven track creation

WEIRD!!!

This is the PIKE stuff i love from best from the chicken lover. This is where he doesn’t hold back and just let’s all the musical mojo channel itself wherever it wants to go into the strangest and most psychedelic of chicken coops.

This is one of those releases where you simply have to hear it yourself because it is so experimental that no words can convey my mental inventory upon listening.

It basically has six tracks that count up from “First Dig” to “Sixth Dig” and then a finale “Oh No!” Just the track names alone tell me this is one weird one. And so it is.

This starts out with a guitar or something that is a few notes that are bent and then starts a riff of some sort that is out of tune and actually sounds like a horror film soundtrack of some sort.

All the tracks kinda blend together and since this is purely experimental music i can’t really tell the difference anyways.

There is no traditional song structure of any sort, just melodies, rhythms, tones, tempos and other musical elements that are randomly thrown together like musical legos.

However, this is an extremely well-seasoned musician who can make the avant-garde work. Like many of his way out there releases, this has no rock, no metal, no funk.

This is more like a progressive electronic album that is free to go wherever it wants around the musical universe.

Some of the reverb effect melodies do remind me slightly of other tracks in the BUCKETHEAD universe but they are faint and this is another stellar space feeling menagerie of sounds.

This is a perfect testament to how a gifted musician thinks in music. This is like playing Tetris in music. Random ideas fall into place in relationship to other ideas that have cemented their position.

Does it work? If you have an adventurous taste for notes, tones, tempos and ideas juxtaposed in the most unorthodox of ways, yeah. If you are not into a sonic maelstrom that boldly goes where no sonicity has gone before then you will probably hate this.

This is not just random noise though. While most popular music is algebra, this is advanced calculus that takes the extremely long road to reach the ultimate answer of 3 instead of the usual 1 + 2 or x + 10 = 13.

If you like progressive electronic sensations like Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream and the like with a totally unearthly detached feel of Krautrock, then check this out.

There is just a bit of distorted rock guitar on the finale “Oh no!” but it is incorporated into the manic nature of the other tracks. This is brilliant stuff.

If you are not tempted by the extreme wild side of musical exploration then you should definitely give this a miss.