Matt LaJoie “Stonehouse” cassette (Flower Room)

The sixth album from Maine guitarist Matt LaJoie breaks the boundaries established on his element-themed quintet of ambient/new age-inspired records released between 2019 and 2023. With its electronic drum programming, heavy use of fuzz and wah-wah, and double-LP-length runtime, Stonehouse incorporates a love for heavy psychedelic rock and shoegaze, 70’s jazz-funk fusion, and sample-based hip-hop production to wed his dormant Herbcraft project to Flower Room’s stargazing meditations.

“A few years ago, my friend Shon Ua Mahoney gifted me a piece of his art — a trio of mystical, floral line drawings surrounded by two brief phrases: ‘The world is a flower in space / its bloom + decay are illusions’. This touched me deeply at a very particular moment in my life, a message articulated in just the way I needed to receive it. I framed the piece and hung it in my new studio in Rockland, ME, and its words became guidance for Flower Room 2.0.

It was in the background as I recorded my rehearsal for a New Year’s Eve show in December 2024, improvising electric guitar over two prerecorded electronic beats that I’d programmed into an RD-8 analog drum machine years earlier. I plugged the RD-8 into the right input of my Zoom field recorder and my effects-and-loops laden guitar into the left, setting the recording to mono. With the electronic drums galloping along a predestined course, I attempted a futile sync with the loop function of the DL4; as the layers of electric guitar fell out of rhythm with the beats, I silenced the drums until the decay of guitar loops was flipped into a fresh bloom, bringing the rhythm back into an newly fecund aural space. There was something invigorating about allowing these improvisations to spring to life, dissolve into the primordial ooze of musical compost, and reemerge in a new, living form. After a couple rounds of edits, those rehearsal jams became the nearly proggy, space-rock suites “A Flower in Space” and “Bloom + Decay”.

When I returned to the same setup to rehearse for a show in March, utilizing one new motorik-inspired beat (“Die Wand”) and repurposing an older one (“Stonehouse”), I found there was more in this well. Envisioning a hybrid of Cluster’s Zuckerzeit and Craig Leon’s Nommos, “Die Wand”‘s tinny take on Jaki’s trailblazing rhythm propels a solo psych behemoth: guitars layered architecturally to build a wall of pulsing tones—first clean, then increasingly more wailing and fuzzed out—leaving the drums behind until a dramatic loop flip halfway through the track puts everything in place for an inspired shredded cheese finale. The title track and lead single, meanwhile, miraculously sticks the drum-and-loop groove out the gate, glassy harmonics and Crybaby funk leads greeting a shuffling beat from the RD-8 and riding off into the sunset. When the single-chord guitar strums lock in toward the end, a fever dream of amalgamated 70’s Dead bootlegs tickles my memory.

Listening back to these rehearsal sessions, an extended solo album began to take form, and I decided to bolster the runtime with a couple shorter pieces that felt spiritually aligned with these beat-driven experiments. The first of these is “Ghost Pipe”, a splicing of two alien-funk improv jams with the RD-8 recorded in 2021 as part of my Colander series. Though inspired by Missy Elliott and Timbaland’s beat construction, upon playback I realized how indebted the groove and guitar textures are to early Sun Araw — a sort of homage that envisions an entire genre blossoming out of Boat Trip’s sonics. The final piece, “Moss on an ancient road”, was recorded live at Feeding Tube Records, the conclusion of a 28-minute solo set played on a blistering Sunday summer afternoon. This track ends with a guitar loop inspired by Jake Meginsky’s modular synth set earlier that day, and explores the possibilities for rhythmic abstraction and games of chance within the realm of ambient guitar improvisation.

As I was putting this collection of recordings together, I decided to investigate the source of the phrases featured on Shon’s artwork. This search led me to the Mountain Poems of 14th century Chinese Zen hermit-poet Stonehouse, a name that pealed a belltone of significance: Stonehouse was an incantation of sorts for me, years ago—a spell cast, perhaps—naming the aspirational vision I had for a future home in rural Midcoast Maine where I would be endlessly inspired by the natural world around me. And I discovered: before I had eyes to see it, I was already in Stonehouse.” – ML