From Aquarius Records:"For whatever reason, we were expecting this to be some sort of fuzzy jangle pop, maybe it was the name? But this is in fact nothing of the sort, instead, Glochids, aka sonic mad scientist James Roemer, conjures up a seriously twisted, and gorgeously noisy collection of field recording driven, 20th century beholden, fractured avant collage soundscapery. The backdrop for most of these tracks do seem to be field recordings, gathered, we discovered via the label, from locales as diverse as South American bus stations, Wisconsin in the winter and the Sonoran desert to name just a few. But those recordings are reworked and reimagined, and while recognizable on some tracks, on others they're transformed into woozy smears, or crumbling, corrosive ambience, over which Roemer plays an assortment of instruments, piano and guitar, but also primitive computers, gamelan, even cactus quills, it could be a case where the making of is much more interesting than the actual music, but thankfully, Roemer weaves all of that random instrumentation, and the various processed field recordings into something quite mysterious and lovely. Some tracks are dark psychedelic blurs, others are chiming bell like melodies, still others seem to be formed from chopped up vocals tangled up with splattery percussion, and still others are murky staticky drones, laced with buried melodies and random rhythms, there are noisy bits for sure, but even then the sound is textured and nuanced.Most of the record seems to exist in some weird faux early music / avant garde soundworld, as if this was some alien Folkways collection, gathered up on various trips, going door to door, or maybe planet to planet, capturing songs on porches and in fields, in spacecraft? And then sending them back via wormhole, where they get garbled and recontextualized, before they emerge here, in this time, gloriously corroded and splintered, doused in all manner of cosmic sonic detritus, the resulting abstract experimental folk music a strange strain of lovely, one that's often difficult, but deep listening is definitely rewarded.We're actually reminded of an old aQ favorite, Brian Harnetty's American Winter, which took snippets of dialogue and oral histories, and wove them into field recordings and radio transmissions, wheezing chords and toy instruments. Glochids sounds a lot like a deconstructed, more Nurse With Wounded version of Harnetty's haunting collages. Which is a very good thing. Wonderfully weird and warped, and in its own twisted way, quite lovely as well."