The Octopus Project and Black Moth Super Rainbow - The House Of Apples And Eyeballs (2006)
For this album, BMSR teamed up with Texas indietronica* trio The Octopus Project. I'm not familiar with anything they've done on their own, but here The Octopus Project prove to mesh well with BMSR, while still adding instrumentation that gives this a bit of a different flavor: Electric guitar! Piano! Vibraphone! Banjo! Drums that aren't pretty much indistinguishable from a degraded tape loop!
Some songs do seem to have ended up with much more input from Black Moth Super Rainbow than from The Octopus Project though: "Lollipopsichord" showed up on Dandelion Gum the next year without much change, and tracks like "Lemon Lime Face" and "Helium Tea" sound much like the kind of song sketches that would show up on a BSMR album. These tracks are fine ("Lollipopsichord" is definitely cool enough to carry over to the next record), but the album is just a bit more interesting when it's more apparent that there's seven different people at work here. Particularly cool additions from the Octopus Project camp include math-rock-y drumming on "Spiracle", a combination of clean guitar, slide guitar, and theremin on "Elq Milq", and juxtaposing the lo-fi techno loops of "Beds" with some piano. When things click between these groups, and they usually do, some really interesting music results: While this was undoubtedly a one-off effort, I sort of hope they'll work together again.
Key Tracks: Spiracle, Elq Milq, Runite Castles, Tony Face
