An anomaly among the slabs of brutalist electronic noise that dominate Handmade Birds' "Yellow Series", Mineral Wicks diverges from the storms of crushing black static to a completely different sort of sonic terrain. As a guitarist myself, I'm fascinated with solo excursions like this that come from people with a punk rock or hardcore punk background. In my opinion, some of the most arresting avant-guitar exploration I’ve ever heard comes out of this exact cohort. And rarely can you predict in any way whyat the sounds of such a solo endeavor will be , based on the previous bands that a guitarist has played with. Don Devore's Mineral Wicks is a perfect demonstration of this. Well-known in hardcore and O.G. "emo" circles for his gutting, often wildly inventive guitar work in some of the most iconic Philly underground bands of all time; the early 90's freneticism of Frail helped lay down the template for what would later on get described as "screamo", following that with the powerhouse "youth crew" revivalism of Rain On The Parade. And the amazing vampyric hardcore of Ink & Dagger fuckin' dominated the Philly HC squat scene for the brief period they were around. I have vivid memories of seeing Devore on stage, corpse paint and slashing at his guitar like a feral animal. Ink & Dagger were astounding, lightning in a bottle. His subsequent work is notable as well, playing in the experimental synth-heavy duo Collapsing Scenery, time spent in the cult post-hardcore unit The Icarus Line...this guy has been at it for awhile. His solo work here, however, is strikingly distinct from anything else I've heard from him.

At an hour long, this is serious questing music. It's a constantly evolving kaleidoscope of sound, most of it zipping and zapping out of Don Devore's guitar. The music is heavily fragmented, but rarely aimless. There are these layered passages of strange, otherworldly psych-folk burbling with distant horns and heavy blots of tripped-out Moog-style synthesizer. Long sprawls of improvised guitar noodling, alive with a cornucopia of effects pedal and heavy on the use of loops and delay. There are so many moments on this tape where Technicolor shafts of light break through grey cloudbanks and illuminate some of the strangest and most playful electric guitar meandering I've ever heard. Then a wicked "Amen" style breakbeat will suddenly drop in, those horns bleating and squalling in the back while Devore's guitar explodes into shrapnel-blasts of violent noise. These shambling, ramshackle handmade Casio-like drum beats and no-fi programmed rhythms are disorienting for a moment after I've just had my brain baked by more than fifteen mintes of delightfully mutated neo-psychedelia. This tape is at once the "lightest" of all of Handmade Birds' Yellow tapes, so full of sun-dappled melody and infectiously upbeat drum-loop grooves, and also the most freaked-out. It's spectacular in his use of layering guitar sound, creating huge pulsating industrial-tinged breakbeats that drive the whole shebang straight off into the horizon, but can also strike out at you with those bursts of chaotic, abrasive skronk and disotrtion. Deeper in, things do take a left turn into brooding, crackling ambient drone, the guitar spiking the mix with brief anxiety. But it always come out of the tunnel into the light.

Devore enlists some pals to create this bleeping, alien jazz techno loopscapes: Matty McDermott (Nymph, Black Acid), Chris Colley (School of Seven Bells), and Jeremy Weiss (CI Records boss) all join into the weirdness. And when the second side starts up, that weirdness really racks up. The whole final third of the album slips into a killer krautrock-esque groove - we're talking deep into the freakiest regions of Can, Agitation Free, Guru Guru and Neu territory - but it's laced with gobs of Devore's lysergic guitar noise and fractalized FX fuckery and dark, droning strings that make everything sound like thr work of machine elves trying to fuse Tropicália with Teutonic psych/prog. And man,when that haunting flute-like bit drifts in towards the end, the effect is sublime. In the end, I don't kow what to make of it. And I love that. Singular and confusional, Devore's Mineral Wicks could possibly be compared to a mass of low-fi Frippery (at times reminiscent of the wild wall-of-psych-guitar that Darsombra does) with hints of Ichiro Agata's solo madness,but fed through an amoebic mass of free jazz and krautrock moving in and out of one another, while Bill Laswell mans the boards and Meat Beat Manifesto is bangin' around. But take that nonsense with a grain of salt. I promise that if you're chasing down these Handmade Birds cassettes, this will be the biggest surprise of 'em all.