Wand

Wand

Help Desk / Goldfish

Drag City

***Picking up the pieces of the picked-up pieces, Wand ride on, baby. It’s only three months since they dropped the incredible mass of Vertigo upon the world—but WHAT!!! Here is more, plating the pre-release single “Help Desk” alongside “Goldfish,” an additional cog from Vertigo’s assembly, and then, in the name of the ever-expanding viewpoint (and the much required dream-extension app!), adding three remixes for good measure. “Help Desk” and “Goldfish” are brethren of the eight epochal vibrations that make up Vertigo—boiled down from a tremendous volume of jams, then squeezed through the pin- prick called automatic writing. Or ‘riding’...as in, the groove / as far as they can see / past the horizon line/Jupiter space/the infinity room/whatever you choose to call it. The remixes delve back into the material, integrating another set of concentric thought-spirals into the radiant action. The unique perspectives of Beat Detectives, Dead Rider and Dean Spunt become one with the Wand material, igniting inevitable further expansions. This EP’s like a handshake promise that’s fulfilled after the action has gone down—the thanks you get for staying open and hanging in there. The present you get for being present! But everything has a price in time. This one might be worth more than $26.98! Forty years from now, write back and tell us. Then all will at last become known...

Wand

In A Capsule Underground

Drag City

***Demos and unreleased songs from Wand’s salad days, the time of the immortal Ganglion Reef. Available for download since 2017, In a Capsule Underground is at last firmly sunk into vinyl grooves that realize its fullest potential in a listener’s ears. These light, fizzy versions have distinctive, gleaming magic energies all of their own and they fly thrillingly through the air. Catch a wave through beautifully-abandoned space on your turntable eternal!

Wand

Vertigo

Drag City

***First new Wand in five years—we almost forgot how it feels! Like sliding between the bodies in the street, cutting across the contrails that bisect our sky, Wand find melody and the anxiety beats as they hum the soundtrack for a new gravitational center. Seeking connections against the plan of niche interest and anonymity, Vertigo is the sound of slippage, rocks of contradiction (in soft focus); feet lost, regained, lost again, a multi-chromatic swaying, more automatic, associative, directed, in time.

Wand

Spiders In The Rain

Drag City

***Since 2014, Wand have made five albums (and an EP) in the studio and a living playing on the road. Business/pleasure: the two sides of their (multiverticed, decagon) coin, flipping in the strobe light of ongoing self actualization. And yet, by doing both at the same time—making a record of them playing live—they’ve now made their best one yet. How do you get Spiders In the Rain? Start by going all the way back to January 2020. Do you remember? Wand do. They’d been touring Laughing Matter for ten months. They’d done the coast, spanned the country, crossed the water twice, came back home and kept on going... driving, flying, occasionally floating (or maybe just thinking they were?), always on to the next town. They did all kinds of shows—clubs, ballrooms, festival gigs with no roof overhead—the songs expanding and contracting according to the dimensions of each day. Seventy-nine shows, and everything that was involved—the miles that ran beneath them, the different places and people everywhere, the music as it reathed, making everyone change every night—alchemized the band, and they drove deeper into their far horizon than they’d ever previously gone. The essential truth of the live vibe—that it’s always better when everybody’s here—was clear, so they booked a few shows more in Cali, from L.A. up to Marin. They brought along light and projections from The Mad Alchemist Liquid Light Show and Mike Kreibel and Zac Hernandez too, to tape everything—to get the big-deck energy out of performances in...

Wand

Laughing Matter

Drag City

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Received a 7.5 rating from Pitchfork.  Almost two years on from 2017’s Plum, Californian scrap polymorphs WAND are prepared to launch their fifth, and newest long-playing record, Laughing Matter. By now, Wand is the shifting but unmistakable collaboration between SOFIA ARREGUIN (keys, vocals), CORY HANSON (guitar, vocals), ROBERT CODY (guitar), LEE LANDEY (bass) and EVAN BURROWS (drums). Laughing Matter is marked by the confidence and exuberance of a band that has lived, feuded, thrived and grown together through years of dedicated jamming, touring and recording, across western and eastern states, continents and mind-sets. In this world that insists we must increasingly rely upon ourselves, Wand listen to each other, and this is the sound. Swerving between out-of-focus parable, travel diary, pep talk, polemic, love song, and lullabye, Laughing Matter is a tough and tender album, its eyes on a lot of prizes. Where Plum held the tension of its five band members getting on their feet, the songs on Laughing Matter are concentrated and relaxed, even as they search for the right accusations to hurl at cynics and megalomaniacs.

Wand

Perfume

Drag City

***If the emblem of WAND's Plum was the stark blue cloud—a condensation, a linking between longing molecules, data hungering for more data, a flotilla of vapor between eye and sky—then Wand’s new EP reeks of something more forceful, more seductive, more intoxicating, more insidious: this is Perfume. Here are seven electric hues, shocks of light that flagrantly provoke the dark, a posy’s clutch of purple, fuchsia, green and snowy white that curl against a stench of plague. Recorded between tours and fire seasons in Grass Valley, California, by TIM GREEN, Perfume’s potent, expansive tunes were mixed in Woodstock, New York by DANIEL JAMES GOODWIN. The band features SOFIA ARREGUIN, EVAN BURROWS, ROBBIE CODY, CORY HANSON and LEE LANDEY. There’s a kind of return here, a haunting, the déjà vu you only take in through a curious nose. Your nose invites the world inside your skull. A familiar fragrance finds you when you thought you’d let a lover go, but it won’t linger like a lover, flickering away with the breeze toward a yawning future.

Wand

Plum

Drag City

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.9 rating from Pitchfork. Plum is WAND's fourth LP since the band formed in late 2013 but their first new album in two years. After a whirlwind initial phase of writing, recording, and touring at a frenetic clip, their newest document marks a period of relative patience; a refocusing and a push toward a new democratization of both process and musical surface. In late winter of 2016, the band expanded their core membership of EVAN BURROWS, CORY HANSON and LEE LANDEY to include two new members—ROBBIE CODY on guitar and SOFIA ARREGUIN on keys and vocals. From the outset, the new ensemble moved naturally toward a changed working method, as they learned how to listen to each other and trust in this new format. The songwriting process was consciously relocated to the practice space, where for several months, the band spent hours a day freely improvising, while recording as much of the activity as they could manage. This new process demanded more honest communication, more vulnerability, better boundaries, more mercy and persistence during a year that meanwhile delivered a heaping serving of romantic, familial and political heartbreak for everyone involved. They learned more about their instruments and their perceived limitations.

Wand

1000 Days

Drag City

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Received a 7.0 on Pitchfork. The plan, it turns. Some many revolutions in a year, in a life. WAND launch their third album in what can only be called the relative blink of an eye, and it is 1000 Days. This year’s last year: August of 2014 was Ganglion Reef, Wand’s debut album release, on GOD?, reveling in their dark circuits and three-ring modulations. Following that, they ranged from their south-Cali base, towing their sound around this maze of interstates and state routes. Shows of all kinds were playing, plenty of people to meet up with on the way. Hands across the water: Europe got booked. And suddenly, just look over your shoulder—it was March of 2015, with a second album entitled Golem (this time on In the Red) trailing Wand’s sound farther down the road, past the sky, into storm and casino food. No time to spare; more dates to be played across the landmass. And another set of European dates later, 1000 Days. One year in the life of Wand so far: the world—some beyond.

Wand

Machine Man / M.E.

In The Red

Brand new seven inch single from Wand featuring two exclusive tracks. The A side, Machine Man, is a heavy and dark original which would’ve sounded right at home on their Golem LP. The B side, M.E., is a Tubeway Army cover which has been transformed into a heavy riff pummeler here. An essential piece of wax if ever there was one!

Wand

Golem

In The Red

***BACK IN PRINT ON WHITE VINYL!!!   Received a 7.0 rating from Pitchfork.  Following up their debut full-length on Ty Segall’s God? label, Wand presents their second album, Golem, on In The Red. Recording with Chris Woodhouse at his Hanger studio in Sacramento, Wand summons the dark and heavy power of the riff. Back in September 2013, Wand was quietly dismembered and ritually eaten in the hills near Dodger Stadium. Wand was reborn as “Wand”—an obese organ falsely organized as four overjoyous nerds. Four flesh balloons betting on a few aging amplifiers. Rumor has it they listen to Here Come the Warm Jets on loop all day and plot mail fraud. What’s more, they allegedely stole Dale Crover’s car and sacrificed it to the weather near the Los Angeles County Line. A few things, at least, are certain: Wand hears ghosts. Wand prefers serpents. The Sun is the mother of every fiction. All phenomena will be consumed in alphabetical order, but desire will recirculate ad infinitum. If all else fails, Wand will just devour more hands. Wand is coming your way soon.

Wand

Ganglion Reef

God?

***BACK IN PRINT!!! Received a 7.4 rating from Pitchfork. With the release of WAND’s Ganglion Reef , GOD? continues to highlight the expansive sounds of new music currently altering minds from east of west to west of east. Recently, Jack Name, David Novick and White Fence were called upon for long players to travel into the heart of the flaming orb of un-/non/(ultimate)-realities (they’re out there)...and now, from GOD?’s hand-lips to your head-hand, Wand! The fluctuating gravity of their sound achieves total Wand-hood by jamming senses, sounds and vibes through the circuits—and like magic: plays of light and dark (and heavy!) for today’s (and tomorrow’s) mind-ears. From beneath the glassine surface dost emerge: Ganglion Reef.