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I don’t know what Bouts-Rimйs means. I don’t know where Kabyzdoh Obtruhamchi is from, and can only guess that he is male. I do know Michael Jantz and that both artists have excellent releases on Stunned Records. I know that this is the first recording of Jantz’s where he uses his name rather than the monikers Black Eagle Child or W.A. Munson. I know that this CD-R is fucking sick.

I imagine that both Obtruhamchi and Jantz were imagining themselves in a bar as their imagined bar-selves were imagining being on a hot Mediterranean beach. For whatever reason, I can’t shake the feeling that Rimns is about a conflict in Saudi Arabia or Greece or Egypt. It's as if the dudes in Apocalypse Now were thinking up this soundtrack while scurrying down Vietnamese rivers on acid and Jantz and Kabyzdoh somehow got a hold of it while caravanning camels. This is an hour of meandering psychedelia about tequila, Playboy pinups, and Rocket Propelled Grenades.

The process according to Jantz was as such: one artist recorded around ten minutes of music and sent it to the other, adding layers and personal touches, and repeating the process until they made an album. They could have fooled anyone. I suspected that the recording was one live jam session given how tight and fluid it remains from start to finish. The constants are Latin American percussion and some heavily distorted electric guitars. A bass piece drones along the background but please, please, please don’t think this is another 'drone' album. It is one continuous song and it is the product of two artists that specialize in gradually built up triumphs, but there is way too much variety over the course of Bouts-Rimйs for it to be considered anything but free-psych. At around a half-hour in this shit turns noisy. Distortion takes precedence over everything and resonates in alto. The volume bumps up several notches and Rimns becomes a 21st Century European ritual freak-out. That modern take on a tribal-vibe continues for a good 15 minutes before morphing in to heavily industrial percussion with buried, mutilated steel guitars. Things calm down a little by the end with reverberating “oms” and tons of weirdo percussive bangs.

If you’re at all down with the DIY scene, pick this sucker up. It starts off sounding like a much more complex and interesting Sun Araw. But don’t be alarmed—wait maybe 6 minutes and breath in the psyched-out newness. It saddens me to think that this is a limited run CD-R on a largely unknown label because Michael Jantz and Kabyzdoh Obtruhamchi are on to something big.

—Joseph Hydoski for Electronic Voice Phenomenon