Description
This is a pre-order. It will ship on or around 12/4/26
Cardinal Fuzz and Feeding Tube records bring you Divination, a medical diary turned psychedelic séance where Jake Blanchard summons the shahi baaja from somewhere beneath the skin. Jake is perhaps best known for his remarkable visual work, having created sleeves and artwork for artists including Pelt, Mike Gangloff, and Richard Dawson, with his artwork for Dawson's The Ruby Cord receiving third place in the 2022 Art Vinyl album-cover awards. Jake Blanchard plays the electric shahi baaja, that beautiful beast of an instrument sitting somewhere between the Indian bulbul tarang, the Japanese taishōgoto and an electrical nervous system caught in a thunderstorm. Under normal circumstances it already sounds like an object with one foot in this world and another somewhere considerably stranger. In Jake's hands it becomes something else again, a machine for pulling sounds out of the walls. This is not wellness music. This is ritual music for when the body has become an unruly piece of machinery. The album was shaped around Jake's routine with the music assembled in the spaces that illness, pain, medication, scans and recovery allowed. What emerges is a strange kind of alchemical diary, part pharmacopoeia, part exorcism, part electrical weather system. A nod, a salute, and a very heartfelt thank you to those strange and wonderful human beings who donate their bone marrow, people willing to give a piece of themselves so that somebody else gets to keep going. If Divination is concerned with the body's mysteries, its machinery and its strange capacity for repair, then there could hardly be a more fitting title. Here Jake is joined by Dead Sea Apes, and the shahi baaja becomes part of something heavier, deeper and considerably less interested in respecting the boundaries between improvisation, drone, psychedelic rock and free-form sonic excavation. There is a particularly strange beauty to Divination because Jake's physical limitations have not resulted in a diminished musical language. If anything, they have forced the music to become more concentrated. The extended improvisational sprawl of earlier work has been replaced by something more deliberate, short bursts, accumulated fragments, pressure building over time until the pieces begin to reveal themselves. Jake's work has always existed somewhere between the ancient and the futuristic. The shahi baaja is already a time-travelling instrument, but on Divination it sounds as if it has been dragged through a hospital corridor, plugged into an electrical substation and then handed over to a shaman.
Cancellations:
Because many payment processors no longer return transaction fees to sellers on cancelled orders, any orders or pre-orders that are canceled by the customer before shipment will be assessed a 5% cancellation fee.
Q: How do limited edition and exclusive releases work?
Limited and exclusive items are fulfilled in the order received and may be subject to availability. If we’re unable to fulfill your order, you’ll receive a full refund.
Q: When will my pre-order ship?
Pre-orders ship on or around the official release date. If your order includes both pre-order and in-stock items, everything will ship together once all items are available. All orders are charged at the time of purchase.
