King Blood :: Eye I Aye Ivy
“King Blood came out of a fascination with the riff. I was interested in distilling a song to its base element, seeing if it could be whittled down to a nugget that would then expand to fill the field of vision. For a while, I had been making my own edits of hard rock/blues/boogie songs, just to listen to them. King Blood was a natural progression. I had reached a point where I just wanted to make the type of jams that I wanted to listen to.”
As students rush to the nearby eye bath station, shoved in the corner of the classroom, the sink is covered in a blanket of vintage cobwebs, the sonic sounds pouring from the overhead intercom quickly turn violent as the textured tones from the staticky soundscapes inflict pure melodic mayhem on the floor like a scene out of a deranged 1980s B-movie. As the students return to their seats, the teacher walks in and notices the remnants of a scene that was suspected of chaos, and immediately notices this holy hum coming from the speakers glued to the ceiling. As the students and their teacher settle into the melodic morning, one child in the very back raises their hand and asks, “What was that noise?” The teacher leans forward and calmly replies, “King Blood.” After relocating out West some years ago to pursue a new identity in music and life, Ryland Wharton (Skulltones/Twonicorn) quickly began unleashing a cosmic collection of dormant riffs and instrumental ideas under the atmospheric alias King Blood to further his radical reach on the sonic subconscious of society after stepping away from Providence, Rhode Island-based noise outfit Snake Apartment. Having first come onto the scene with 2010’s “Eyewash Silver”, King Blood quickly became a prophetic phenomenon after releasing albums at random in the 2010s, while simultaneously paying attention to the details brought on by sheer volume, and the visceral voyage into the unknown that can sometimes only be achieved by instrumental intensity.
With a three-volume cassette series released in March of last year, Wharton followed 2019’s “Hocus Focus” with perhaps his most compelling work to date, “Eye I Aye Ivy.”A fuzzed-out salute to the legends of the late 1960s and early 1970s, King Blood’s maxed-out material is exactly what the private press community will be looking for thirty years from now, just as they had with the acid-soaked scholars from a distant psychedelic past. Released on the Philly-based label Petty Bunco, “Eye I Aye Ivy” swings a blazing battle axe right out the gate like a sonic storm heading straight for the listeners wherever they drop the needle. Capturing that critical climate necessary for a doomsday party, King Blood cauterizes the melodramatic mystery between the creator and their content by providing a spiritual service for anyone who dares to reach the harmonious heights.
