Bleep

For over three decades, Simon Price has delivered slabs of spaced out psych as a founding member of beloved act The Heads, but his solo work in kandodo is where Price truly goes astral.

Across a trio of albums starting with 2012’s kandodo, Price lets his kandodo tracks bloom more methodically than with his main gig, fusing field recordings across extended jams that are heavy with walls of guitar fuzz. Burning The (Kandl) could be seen as an unofficial celebration of the project’s decade of activity, but kandodo’s fourth release came about as a result of a Heads milestone: a residency at the 2015 Roadburn Festival. The Heads naturally invited friends and members’ other projects to open for them, which meant a rare kandodo set from Price. Considering the wealth of psych-rock greats on the festival lineup, Price decided to make his set even more of a one-off event by enlisting Robert Hampson of Loop and Main along with Heads members Wayne Maskell and Hugo Owen Morgan.

Documenting the practices leading up to the residency set as well as the Roadburn performance itself, Burning The (Kandl) fully captures the rarity of the moment across two LPs of surging space rock. Advance single ‘kandy rock mountain’ is an ominous introduction to the one-off lineup as organ squalls compete with a guitar freakout from Price, while ‘dawn harmonix’ settles into more straightforward riffage. With the promise of “a total immersive trip through a psychedelic vortex”, Burning The (Kandl) is not a journey for the faint of heart, but a worthwhile one for psych-rock historians and Heads heads alike.