Kangaroo Kourt

condition (record/cover): M / M (still sealed)

Clear vinyl in sleeve with hand-painted title on back.

The second Kangaroo Kourt LP, released by Houston's Castle Records in 1989 and arguably the most immediately gripping of the trio. Dusty Lee and Treva Dea had by this point built a small library of stock techniques (slow Mellotron drift, ghostly female vocal with ritualistic delivery, tape-warped harmonics) and Interstellar Static arranges them into two sides that come closer to coherence than anything on the debut.

The side-long title track sets the centre: a "Strange Play Of The Mouth"-grade exercise in Dea's vocal distention that eventually opens outward into what one commentator usefully called a "beautifully ghostly purgatorial atmosphere." The rest of the record continues in that idiom. If Nurse With Wound, Current 93 at their most pastoral, and the slowest parts of Mars Volta-antecedent Houston psychedelia ever wanted a common grandparent, this is plausibly it.

Kangaroo Kourt was one of a small linked series of Lee / Dea (husband-and-wife) projects that would later include Mauve Sideshow, Mistress of Strands, Torn Curtain, Angel Provocateur, Minus Infinity and Thistle, each exploring slightly different facets of Mellotron-based gothic ambient. Interstellar Static belongs to the earliest phase of that family tree, and remains one of the better points of entry for anyone encountering Lee's catalogue cold.