Zzyzx, by Low Hums

Las Days Of The Summer

Zzyzx

by Low Hums

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Low Hums FIFTH banger is here on fabulous CASSETTE. Pink CASSETTE with freak-out outsider ARTWORK by Sonny Santos aka Trans Van Santos. HI-RES and sounds AMAZING and includes a digital download card. Released on our own Tape Label** - Baby Lemonade
This release is 001.

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Zzyzx CD
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Zzyzx Vinyl ( Splatter )
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Zzyzx Deluxe Vinyl ( Red/Blue Splatter )
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Plated & pressed on high performance vinyl by Pallas Group in Germany
Deluxe 300gsm gatefold cover
Deluxe Heavy Vinyl LP

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Zzyzx Vinyl ( Orange )
Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Zzyzx Deluxe Vinyl ( Orange )
Super high quality orange vinyl pressing in Germany via Kozmik Artifactz.
Plated & pressed on high performance vinyl by Pallas Group in Germany
Deluxe 300gsm gatefold cover
Deluxe Orange Heavy Vinyl LP

LP will include a digital download card !

Includes unlimited streaming of Zzyzx via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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1.	Cosmic Fruit 02:49 video		buy track
2.	Three Stones In The Night 02:15		buy track
3.	Ghost Babe 01:54		buy track
4.	Supernova 04:18		buy track
5.	The Heat 01:31		buy track
6.	All The Brave Fuzzy Cousins 03:40		buy track
7.	Last Days Of The Summer 03:29 video		buy track
8.	Neo Spiritual 04:09		buy track
9.	Son Of A Slave 03:41	info	buy track
10.	Tunnel Of Light 02:53		buy track
11.	Spaced Out Mind 04:10		buy track

about

Imagine an album made by a truly loving cult with a sweetly groovy leader, created back in the day of golden LPs you could play forever (despite having to flip over every twenty minutes). There’s mystery, killer hooks, an alien allure to the fuzzy, good-time danceable vibes, and a lot of fun insights and midnight confessions found in the layers of lyrics beneath the astral energy of each song. This is Zzyzx, the latest full-length from Seattle’s cabal of inspired music-nauts, delivering another platter of liberation to the rock-hungry droves of timeless rock lovers.

The name for the Seattle-based Low Hums came from a dream that band-guru Jonas Haskins (vocals/guitar/bass) had. “I heard wolves howling in a canyon in my head when I woke up one morning,” he explains. “I had gotten lost in the desert and been surrounded by wolves, so I climbed a tree, which is odd to find in the desert, but there they were. A small grove of pine trees. I waited it out till the sun came up and then I woke up.”

Those low murmuring growls from a slinky nocturnal pack seem to be sending signals through Haskins on Low Hum’s fifth full-length release. The eleven songs on Zzyzx are just as ontologically inspiring, warmly human, and deeply comforting as a force of nature reaching out to us in a divine slumber. This is exquisitely made Pacific Northwest bomp, envisioned by someone who grew up on San Juan Island, coming by way of college town Ellensburg, and finding his tribe of collaborators in the esoteric Emerald City.

Haskins is joined again by Miles Panto (guitar) and Mike Bayer (drums/vocals/percussion) adding John Faryar (“our new official bass player!”), along with Crystal Perez (additional bass), David Davila (keyboards/combo organs), and Trevor Spencer (percussion/keys/effects). The perfect summer hang feel of Zzyzx was helped captured by Spencer, who recorded and produced (though the band takes production credits too) at Way Out! Studios in Woodinville, Washington.

Spencer had also worked on records by Father John Misty, Jonathan Wilson, and Jackson Browne. “I met him on tour with the Fleet Foxes in 2011,” Jonas says. “We did a EP with him a long time ago in Anacortes at the Unknown and it was a really good time. He was by far the obvious choice and our first choice to work with.”

Zzyzx gets its title from an area in California where Panto’s Space Cruiser ( an 80's Japanese prototype van of that name ) broke down. He brought the name in Haskins, who christened the LP after it because “because it makes me think of like a planet in some kind of outer space science fiction movie, perhaps some kinda far away utopia.” he says. “Like planet ‘Zzyzx’ — and the record has a lot of ‘space’ themes.” It’s more like Golden Age era Sci-Fi though, or as Haskins puts it, ’Retro-Futuristic’ — memory-haunted classics like Metropolis,for example, that seem alien in themselves now. It is also a desert reference, which is a running theme in the record as well — like Neil Young’s On The Beach; it evokes dune buggy desert living and mystical inner visions. “I love the Southwest, it’s a magical place, especially being from Washington state and all the forests,” Haskins says. “I love rocks and sand and the desert colors and the dry heat — it’s very spacey in those places, , deserted, quite, looking like the moon.”

For a blissful, timeless garage-beat experience, there are a few heavy and fantastic themes making up the gas-soaked substrate of songs on Zzyzx. The major themes are “Destruction and the resurrection, Division and Unity, the crumble of society, and the peaceful bliss before the end. Gypsy space travelers caught in the in-between with celestial themes of some far away utopic place, along with the sand and spice of Southwestern U.S. deserts. I watched a lot of vintage German sci-fi moves and toured a bunch in the South West US. I think it’s a magical place,” he says. Sometimes he puts on a cowboy hat to think in Country & Western, “because their songs tell good stories and I think storytelling is important. A story that everyone can relate with is essential.”

The first single, the elegiac, carefree “Last Days of the Summer” was a lost anthem that Haskins found on an old 4 track in his set-up. “I wrote it in my old backyard in Wallingford many years ago while I was drinking beer and sitting in the backyard. It felt like it was the day that summer was over and I was watching the flowers getting blown around in the wind … slowly dying. One of those days when you just know you’ve crossed over into the next season. Everyone knows when that day comes in Seattle, because we break out our sweaters!”

The ragged and pure Cult Rock-like sing-a-long “‘Tunnel of Light’ was inspired from a campout during a festival in the woods up in Darrington, Washington. It was raining for most of the festival weekend and the first day we had eaten some mushrooms, which had helped us enjoy the weather. My van had broken down en route to the show and I had to leave most of my extra clothes in my van. The second day Miles remembered he had a little tiny bit of Psilocybin powder in a small baggie. It was a tiny amount, and the two of us along with our buddy Mike G mixed it into a shot of tequila. Three of us each took a tiny sip. Well … wow, man was that some powerful stuff! Like a psychedelic rocket to the moon. Whew! As it got dark we wandered over to see where the bands were playing in the woods, there were liquid lights all around and the raindrops were turning rainbows in the light show. It was pretty much a perfect situation and then at a critical moment of escapism, we found a trail through the heavy brambles … it was like a tunnel that was lined with bright white Christmas lights. So we took it and at the end was a perfect bonfire with nobody around. It looked like Jesus had built us a fire and left it for us. A perfectly freshly stoked and wood burning fire. We sat down and some folks appeared out of the woods with a bottle of Jim Beam and offered us some. And then, things were alright! And that’s the song!”

A relaxed joyful shuffle, “’Neo Spiritual’ was written about my wife,” Haskins says. “She asked me why I had never written a song for her and I said, ‘Well, hard order to fill, and difficult to do because I usually write kind of fast crazy songs. So, I did want to write a song that was more true to her spirit. I had been playing some Jerry Garcia-like melodies and playing around with some Mixolydian scales and that song just presented itself. We’re both fans of the Grateful Dead and she use to listen to the Dead Air show when she was in high school which is pretty great, so that was the entrance to the song. She loves the Cascades and being up in the mountains so she’s my ‘mountain girl,’ who is of course Jerry’s first wife’s name so it came together like of like that.”

Nearing halfway through the album, an urgent snap in tone occurs with an almost post-punk beat called “The Heat” roars up. “I wrote that during a time when the whole North Korea and White House thing was getting really intense and I was thinking about being nuked in Seattle and how shitty that would be. I had to go watch the Cold War-era documentary Atomic Café again and then I wrote it. It’s basically about the atom bomb, all the deaths that would happen in its wake. I watched a lot of interviews with survivors of Hiroshima. Folks that saw the bomb falling from the plane, and the blast. I can’t think of anything more horrific.”

Another freak standout ‘“All The Brave Fuzzy Cousins” is a song I wrote after reading Lou Reed’s biography by Anthony DeCurtis. He says, ‘I wanted to write a song for all the junkies in NYC because they all deserve a song.’ So I thought, well, I’m going to write a song for all the homeless folks in Seattle. They deserve a song too. They are the ‘brave fuzzy cousins.’ There a couple themes in there but that’s pretty much the main one. Society crumbling and all these broken people scattered about.” Happens all over the world, even in these rich cities.

Other songs capture Haskins feelings on the cosmos (“Supernova”), about where gold comes from and how we are all stardust; and “Three Stones in The Night” describing Mercury and Jupiter rising in the night as seen “from the southern beach of Kauai, standing on the third stone earth watching them.” Haskins initially wrote all at home, except two: Bayer and Faryar wrote “Son Of A Slave” together, and “Cosmic Fruit” wrote itself in the studio.

Haskins asserts, “I think this one is definitely our best record so far. It’s the most fully realized. We were able to get into the studio we wanted to use with the engineer / producer Trevor Spencer who we really wanted to work with. And, we took our time recording it and using the studio versus just recording live. We were able to tour the songs prior to recording them so we had a good road test too.” Shared in demos with friends and loved ones, a unique vision as well as communal love went into crafting it.

credits

released November 8, 2019

Jonas Haskins : Guitar/Vocals/Bass ( 1/2/3/5/6 )
Mike Bayer : Drums/Percussion/Vocals
Miles Panto: Guitar
John Faryar: Bass ( 4//7/8/9/10 )
Crystal Perez: Bass ( 11 )
David Davila: Keys
Trevor Spencer: Triangle, Effects
Veronica Dye: Flute

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about

Low Hums Seattle, Washington

Low Hums ARE:

Sanoj Sniksah
Erik Irving,
Alan Tarentino

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h20melonman@gmail.com

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