- On the eve of their debut LP, The Crystal Ark (Gavin Russom and Viva Ruiz) strip down the album cut "We Came To," a gooey, psychedelic Afro-Latin number soaked in organs and his/her vocals, to the bare essentials. With a lot of this kind of deeply analog, do-or-die live-in-the-studio stuff, it's one idea beaten over and over—not necessarily a bad thing, mind, if that one idea is strong enough. But Russom has a way of cutting up long, hypnotic jams into passages that don't seem to have anything to do with each other and without losing any sense of continuity.
Underpinning the nearly nine-minute-long "We Came To (House Mix)" is a single, monotonic bassline—not even a line, just one note—threaded through a bumptious 707 drum pattern; the foundation doesn't change much, but the floor plan has all the twists and turns of the Winchester Mystery House. There are hissed and muttered glossolalic outbursts, LCD Soundsystem yelps and weirdly panned cooing choruses; the organs feel like they've been thrown at the wall like big chunks of meat and left to slide down in bloody streaks. The dub mix puts the emphasis back on the bass and organ interplay, with the vocals (mostly) erased and the muted drums as cool and damp as a dewy lawn at six in the morning.
Tracklist A We Came To (House Mix)
B We Came To (Dub Mix)