Spiral Wave Nomads “The Weightless Sea” LP (Twin Lakes/Cardinal Fuzz)

Spiral Wave Nomads are Eric Hardiman (guitarist, psychic detonator, veteran of Albany’s colossal noise-tribe Burnt Hills, bassman of the lit-punk jammers Sky Furrows, and one half of the spectral duo Century Plants) and Michael Kiefer (drummer, rhythm exorcist, tempo-smasher of the free-rock duo Rivener and survivor of Myty Konkeror and its glorious progeny, the ecstatic psych-trio More Klementines). Together they don’t so much “play songs” as they drag sound through wormholes, melt it down to plasma, and spray it back into your synapses like an unholy baptism of feedback and thunder.

“The Weightless Sea” is exactly what it says: an ocean without gravity, where riffs flicker like dying stars and percussion ricochets like rusted satellites gone feral. It’s heavy without being sludge, it’s free without being chaos, it’s the ecstatic howl of two lifers chasing something bigger than language. It’s a transmission from a parallel dimension where Hendrix never died, Can never stopped, and Sun Ra actually did get picked up by aliens and returned with a rhythm section made out of asteroids.
Play it and you’ll either ascend to another plane or drive straight into a glowing portal where the air shimmers with an alien heat, and the colors bleed into one another like an oil slick on a distant sun. It’s a slow burn, a simmering groove that feels like a forgotten ritual being performed in the heart of a dead star.

The sea is weightless. The waves don’t end. The Nomads have no map, no compass, no tethers.