The Impossible Shapes

The Impossible Shapes have been merrily musickmaking — mostly under the radar — for a decade now. With this release the band has recorded songs which were flushed out over many live performances over many tours all across the globe. This album is their pinnacle song mound that could have been issued by Zapple, if times had been different. At the root these four long-hairs are a pop band — kinda like how Byrds became a meta group — who’ve been strained through British folk as well as the whole post/beat/mystic literate gob. Songwriter Chris Barth translates a cosmological view as psychedelic nursery rhymes or rock n roll cracked into free form strata. These recordings have been through a lot — starts and stops and false starts and falser stops. Eventually the band ended up recording these 11 songs to extra sticky analog tape in their own makeshift warehouse studio on South Walnut street in Bloomington.

The title of this album is a sigil (but you can call it The Impossible Shapes), a potent symbol of desire — the desire to quickly spread a message to all of humanity, as revealed by the various entities encountered in dreams, visions, and astral travel. The message concerns the art of magick and making things happen in conformity with the Will — “Hey! Let’s Make It Happen”. The message concerns mushrooms and gurus and vegetable wisdom — “Let The Mushroom Teach”. The message is hidden in the dirt, the excrement, the unconscious, and written in a secret language — “Dreamspeak”. It is not right out there in the open for all to see, and yet it is. It is in fact a “Secret Operation”, but also a call to humanity to stop consuming art, and just “Make Art” instead. It is simultaneously a celebration of the triumph of virtual technologies, and a wake for the end of our old and sacred biology. In support of this release the band will once again be touring around the United States, releasing various thematic videos, and a Cassette Box Set Compendium which features six hour long tapes of all of the band’s released material, and some unreleased material spanning 1998 — 2007.

Also check out the various other Bloomington based musical projects by members of The Impossible Shapes such as: The Coke Dares, Normanoak, The Horns of Happiness, Magnolia Electric Company, Uno Moss, Wee Giant, Ejaculate, and more!