EH46 – A God With Horns

The new spring batch from Bridgetown has a pronounced vein of 2010 nostalgia: Weed Diamond and Media Jeweler guitarist JT Schweitzer has turned tone-wrangler as EH46 for a magnificent new ambient outing, A God With Horns, while Ancient Crux, aka Travis Von Sydow, returns to performance and music for the first time in four years with his new tape. Both older projects have adjacent slots in Bridgetown’s early catalog circa five years ago, shortly after Weed Diamond had finished making the rounds of a still rapidly unfolding “blog scene” and Ancient Crux had been busy following up their incredible debut Interracial Coupling for Family Time. The two projects even did a split 7-inch together for the exotic garage hunters at Half Machine Records — after that imprint had firmly come into its own early prominence.

Both new tapes are inescapably and beautifully “Bridgetown” releases… the label’s long-standing seasonal cycles make such new growth feel even more suited to the season, but while Sydow picks up in some ways where he left off, A God With Horns is much more than just the implied yearning for a guy like Satan (or some other earthy divinity). For those who know Schweitzer just by the character of his other bands, you may not have predicted a turn toward bliss but you should certainly welcome its addition to the repertoire. Sometimes dry or with a waver, and elsewhere in confident, fluid motion, Bridgetown calls it a “a somber counterpoint” to his other projects, all resonant echo and drone colored periodically by the addition of smaller, intermittent sounds. The result is a beautiful collection of soundscapes and despite what I said about Satan, I can’t help gravitate towards tracks that allude in that direction, like the relatively wide-eyed and anxious strokes of “Six Seal Sun” or the enigmatic and rarefied “Del Rey House.”

If you’ll be in Pomona, CA on April 18th, catch Schweitzer’s debut performance as EH46 alongside our friends Kevin Greenspon, Brown Bread, The Lowered, and a fourth, Brent Mitzner, who we don’t know yet but will probably appreciate just as much when we’ve crossed that threshold. If you can’t make it, consider picking up the new album on tape from Bridgetown.