Bitchin Bajas...just like a Rothko painting

I reviewed the new (relatively new) Bitchin Bajas album for Blurt this week...it's up now.


BITCHIN BAJAS – Bitchtronics
Drag City

By JENNIFER KELLY

There’s a Mark Rothko painting I like to look at when I go to the Chicago Art Institute. It’s large canvas, a square of burnt orange sitting atop a square of yellow, simple enough. Yet if you stare at it long enough, you begin to see striations and gradations in the tone, undercurrents of darker and lighter color, subtle shifts in intensity that seem almost musical. “Turiya” from Bitchtronics seems to me like an audible variety of the same experience, a monochrome soundscape that opens up in concentrated listening into dense, woozy variegation, the tones and undertones and ghost echoes filling space from edge to edge. The piece is enveloping, expansive and nowhere near as simple as it first appears.

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